Many citizens may have heard the slogan, Get local, Buy local often in our area; in fact you may have seen the Get local, Buy local stickers on many of the local businesses doors. Price City Council Member, Amy Knott-Jespersen took time to speak with Castle Country Radio about the local sales tax and how it can benefit our area by buying locally.

“You always hear shop local, buy local, your money stays here and there’s a lot of benefits to shopping local. You know all of our kids are in some kind of organization, some kind of sports and a lot of our businesses donate money back to those teams, and help those teams, sponsor those teams and organizations out but there’s also a sales tax component that is very beneficial to shopping local. Just wanted to talk a little bit about where the sales tax goes and what it funds,” stated Knott-Jespersen. When she is speaking on sales tax she is speaking on the businesses that are located in city limits, and  anything you buy at those businesses, a portion of the sales tax stays in Price City.

There are two important funds that the sale tax money goes into, ZAP Tax (Zoos, Arts & Parks) and Option Tax as Knott-Jespersen explains, “So Zoos, Arts & Parks, if you are in Salt Lake they have a huge fund; they have a huge Zoo, Arts & Parks Tax and it funds a lot of stuff in Salt Lake. We don’t have a zoo, we have a little bit of arts going on, but we have a lot of parks and so that ZAP Tax is used to fund our parks.” A portion of the tennis courts reconstruction was paid for by this tax and will also help when the time comes to complete some renovations of the indoor pool at the Desert Wave Pool complex.

“So the Option Tax goes to our roads. So we get a lot of comments and feed back on ours roads, when are we going to pave this road. Unfortunately, we don’t have money to do it all at once. We would need about $7.5 million to do every city street in one year. So we kind of have to take it in increments every year. We save up some money from the Option Sales Tax and we kind of prioritize each spring for the following year what roads we are going to do. What is the priority? What are the heaviest traveled? Which roads are in the worst shape? Stuff like that and that kind of how we prioritize those,” said Knott-Jespersen. The Option Tax is a small portion of tax earned each year, generally around $200,000.00 which doesn’t put much of a dent in getting all roads repaired. The expense of improving roads is very pricey as on average a road could run around $30,000.00 for just one block depending on the damage to the roads.

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