By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph city voters will decide whether to extend a Use Tax used primarily for street repair.
City Manager Bryan Carter points out a Use Tax is levied on goods purchased out of state for use in Missouri.
“It’s kind of unique, because it varies some depending on what’s going on in town,” Carter says. “A major construction project that has a significant amount of materials that are coming from out of state into St. Joe can pretty rapidly increase that use tax.”
Carter says the Use Tax comes into play only when a sales tax doesn’t apply. Carter says how much it raises varies, but it brought in about $10 million in the last fiscal year.
“Sales taxes in and of themselves are based on where the goods are sold. Of course, if we’re in Missouri we can’t tax goods that are sold in Nebraska, for instance. So instead of applying a sales tax there’s the use tax that’s applied and then we ultimately collect that use tax when it’s shipped over from Nebraska to Missouri.”
St. Joseph voters approved the current Use Tax in April of 2015 and expires next year. The issue on the ballot in August will ask voters to extend the tax for another 10 years. The amount of money the use tax raises varies. In the current Fiscal Year, the use tax raised $10 million.
The money raised is primarily used for street maintenance. Carter says the city has made progress updating asphalt streets in the past 10 years and will shift its focus to tackling repairs to the city’s concrete streets.
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