The Village of South Jacksonville is preparing for a hit to local gaming revenue. Village President Harry Jennings says that COVID-19 has really cut into the village’s revenue causing a bit of concern: “Right now we don’t look too bad because a lot of COVID-19 mitigations are hitting [revenues], the two main things that’s hitting is gaming and sales tax revenue. We don’t have a huge amount of sales tax revenue that we’re losing ‘cause our gas stations and everything are still selling a lot of gas and a lot of goods that way. We are going to see some short falls in the gaming revenue. How much we just don’t know yet, so where we see anything there. Will we make that up in a tax levy? No.”
Jennings says that they likely will go up to but won’t exceed their truth-in-taxation limit for the levy. Jennings says that the village’s hotels are performing well despite decreased recreational travel. Jennings says that further discussions about percentages and a budget forecast for next year will take place when Village Treasurer Tiffanee Peters returns from leave.
Jennings says the village’s annual audit went well, but they have a few practices to clean up: “Here are some other recommendations we just want to go over and make sure we do have all our ducks in a row. For the most part, it’s just making sure all of our forms are up to date with things that where our at risk levels are anything where there may be a risk for theft just make sure we do have plans in place and policies in place. For the most part, we have all those policies. We just need to make sure everything is up to date, and then we just have one account that’s not FDAC insured, and we just need to cover that with the auditors and make sure what account that is and see if that’s something we can change.”
Jennings said that he was pleased with the smooth running of the audit with the new firm, Eck, Shafer, and Punke of Springfield.