Modified city, county VGM tax reports released
Pub Date: 5/1/2008
Are video gaming machine (VGM) tax collections up by 22.28 percent in your neck of the woods, as they are in Petroleum County? Or are they down 98.64 percent, as has been reported for Lake County?
Well, you can once again find out.
It has been awhile since anyone has seen VGM tax collection reports broken down by city and county since January 2007, in fact.
Gambling Control Division Administrator Gene Huntington explained that his information technology crew was essentially tied up with designing and implementing the new automated internet reporting system for the state's VGMs.
Implementation of the system is now far enough down the road for staff to turn their attention to posting the latest data once again.
However, Huntington notes, the report formats may be a little different than before. Some of the state's smallest towns only have one licensee, so to report tax collections for that town is to report taxes paid, and machine play, for a single operator, something prohibited under state law.
And even if that locality has just two operators, one of them need only subtract their own numbers from the total to calculate precisely how his competition has performed.
So observers will find the smallest towns now missing from the reports and instead those numbers are rolled into county totals. Only the 13 largest cities will be reported with their specific totals. All others are included in county sums.
The following figures are for the first and second fiscal year quarters (July 1-Dec. 31) for 2007 compared to 2006. Huntington said more current figures will be available soon, but the depicted trends are nevertheless revealing.
Of those 13 largest municipal jurisdictions, all but Havre have recorded increases in tax collections. Havre was down 4.12 percent. The municipal leader was Bozeman with a 12.99 percent uptick from $1.03 million to $1.19 million, followed by Helena posting a 10.98 percent gain $1.58 million to $1.77 million.
Great Falls and Miles City also logged impressive increases in the 9 percent range.
Major cities falling behind the curve were Havre which posted a loss, and Hamilton, Whitefish, Lewistown and Columbia Falls, which showed small gains.
Smaller rural counties, particularly in eastern Montana, have generally been lagging for years. But that has changed, possibly due to widespread activity in the oil fields and record breaking prices for ag commodities such as cattle and wheat.
Counties posting double-digit increases are: Big Horn - 10.92 percent'; Broadwater - 11.93'; Choteau - 23.79'; Custer - 10.47'; Daniels - 17.77'; Deer Lodge - 13.06'; Garfield - 14.29'; Glacier - 17.51'; Golden Valley - 19.45'; Lewis and Clark - 10.53'; Petroleum - 22.28'; Phillips - 14.21'; Roosevelt - 11.04'; Sheridan - 17.39'; Silver Bow - 10.16 and Valley - 15.86.
Several counties saw tax collections fall. Most notably, of course, is Lake County where legal Class III gaming ended in late 2006 when the state and Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes were unable to agree on a new gaming compact. Thus tax revenue fell from $468,113 for the period in 2006 to $14,788 one year later a decline of 96.84 percent.
Others operating in negative territory were Carter, down 3.25 percent'; Granite, off 3.57 percent'; Hill, down 4.18'; Liberty, down 7.52'; Powder River, down 0.13'; Prairie, down 9.62'; Sweet Grass, down 2.69'; Treasure, down 8.02 and Wheatland, down 1.68.
Source: The Montana Tavern Times, May, 2008, published monthly by Continental Communications, 125 W. Granite St., Suite 102, Butte, MT 59701.