BY JIMMY LAWTON
North Country This Week

OGDENSBURG – Using 2019 data from the state comptroller, Ogdensburg officials are hoping to get an estimate on how much sales tax the city will collect when it preempts the St. Lawrence County on collections.

City Manager Stephen Jellie said accountants at Gray and Gray are sifting through 2019 sales tax collections for every business in the county to figure out how much sales tax is generated within the city limits.

Unfortunately, the data available from the state is limited. He says the state does not have any granular data for any level of municipality smaller than county. Additionally, some entities like Walmart and other big box stores report all of their data for their stores as one figure, so specific data on collections of Ogdensburg’s Walmart and Price Chopper would have to be guessed.

He estimated the process would take about two months to complete.

Ogdensburg resident Michael Tooley was critical of the city’s decision to move forward with pre-emption without obtaining the data beforehand, but Jellie said the city had little choice.

He said the sales tax distribution formula proposed by the county would have cut the city sales tax 50 percent, from roughly $4 million to $2 million.

According to Jellie, if pre-emption leads to anything above $2 million, the city is better off.

Jellie admitted that collecting sales tax comes with a host of complications that will need to be sorted. He said how to track which businesses fall within the city limits could be tricky, especially for things like online sales and out of jurisdiction car sales. In both cases sales tax collections for online sales and car sales are supposed to go to the jurisdiction of origin. But Jellie said he has not been able to get a clear answer as to how that is determined.

In St. Lawrence County. for instance, many Lisbon and Oswegatchie residents have an Ogdensburg address and zip code. He raised the question that if zip codes are used to track then where does the money go?

Following Jellie’s presentation about how the city was working to obtain estimates, Tooley said he was a bit more relieved about the situation.

Some questions were raised about whether the move was best for the city since it would need to track and police sales tax collections to ensure businesses were reporting the information accurately.

Jellie acknowledged that the process would be difficult, but reiterated that the city had little choice after negotiations with the county over the sales tax distribution formula failed.

City Councilor Steven Fisher echoed that sentiment saying he did not see another agreement being reached between the city and county.

Jellie said he was frustrated by the fact that the state would not share 2020 sales tax data for the county because it is considered privileged data, but said the city was fortune that it was able to get the 2019 numbers.

He said that he felt it was strange that in the age of technology data like this wasn’t tracked more efficiently.