At Monday’s Perry City Council meeting, Mayor Jay Pattee brought up the topic of the City’s local option sales tax, which sparked a great deal of discussion.

The Council universally agreed that continuing the tax is essential. City Administrator Sven Peterson says the current local option sales tax is scheduled to end on December 31, 2019. However, the Council wants to put a measure in the November general election to continue the tax.

Peterson explains, “What we do when we’re budgeting is, say this year we’re getting a couple plow trucks. We actually go out and do like a five-year loan on that, so that it’s not such a large purchase in one year. We can kind of spread that out. What we’re running into this year, next year, and the year after is we don’t have that guarantee of local option sales tax dollars coming in. So we’re unable to go out and get a loan beyond that point.”

In order to get the measure to continue the local option sales tax on the November ballot, the Council must get around 2,000 signatures on a petition. Peterson expects the City to turn to a citizens group to go out into the community to acquire the signatures.

To hear more about this and other topics from the recent Perry City Council meeting, listen to yesterday’s Perry Fareway Let’s Talk Dallas County program at RaccoonValleyRadio.com.