AURORA — Cookie Co. co-owner Frankie Hoff said foot traffic at her Southlands mall shop didn’t seem to increase all that much last year.
So when the owners started doing their taxes for 2010 and found sales had increased compared with the year before by several thousand dollars, it was welcome news.
“We were slightly up in our sales,” Hoff said, which proved a surprise. “It hasn’t felt that way.”
But Hoff isn’t complaining.
And neither is the city of Aurora, which saw a modest increase as well in its sales-tax revenue in 2010 over the previous year.
While the final December numbers are not yet tallied, the city expects a 2.6 percent increase in revenue from sales taxes, or a total of $123.4 million, in 2010 over 2009, said Aurora budget officer Jason Batchelor.
No one at City Hall is doing cartwheels yet. But maybe, just maybe, Aurora has seen the worst of the recession.
For a city that gets about two-thirds of its operating budget from sales-and-use taxes, any improvement is good news.
“We’re glad to see revenues growing in the right direction, but we have a long way to go to get back where we were,” Batchelor said.
In 2008, sales-tax revenue was $125.5 million, but that dropped to $120.2 million the next year, when Aurora and the rest of the country were feeling the full effects of the slumping economy.
There was no major retail project that fueled the sales-tax increase in Aurora in 2010, Batchelor said. Instead, people are adjusting to the economy and starting to spend again — even if not at the rate of five or six years ago.
“We’ve seen the economy stabilize over the last 12 months,” he said.
Kevin Hougen, president of the Aurora Chamber of Commerce, said he talked with retailers large and small in the city who reported increased sales in the last few months of 2010.
Consumers spent more as retailers offered good prices and had aggressive marketing plans, he said.
“I think there were a number of factors for the increase,” Hougen said. “It’s a nice reflection that the economy has hopefully bottomed out.”
Carlos Illescas: 303-954-1175 or cillescas@denverpost.com
