Texas $891 Million

Comptroller Glenn Hegar Distributes Nearly $891 Million in Monthly Sales Tax Revenue to Local Governments.

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar announced today he would send cities, counties, transit systems, and special purpose taxing districts $890.5 million in local sales tax allocations for November, 4.8 percent more than in November 2019. These allocations are based on sales made in September by businesses that report tax monthly and on sales made in July, August, and September by quarterly filers.

LOCAL SALES TAX ALLOCATIONS (Nov. 2020)
Recipient	Nov. 2020 Allocations	Change from Nov. 2019	Year-to-date Change
Cities	$583.9M	↑6.1%	↑0.6%
Transit Systems	$186.7M	↑1.9%	↓1.7%
Counties	$52.4M	↑1.5%	↓1.0%
Special Purpose Taxing Districts	$67.5M	↑5.1%	↑5.0%
Total	$890.5M	↑4.8%	↑0.3%

For details on November sales tax allocations to individual cities, counties, transit systems, and special purpose districts visit the Comptroller’s Monthly Sales Tax Allocation Comparison Summary Reports.

 

Texas Comptroller’s Office Highlighted in Pandemic Procurement Conference.

The recent National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) annual conference highlighted the Texas Comptroller’s Statewide Procurement Division (SPD) for its COVID-19 pandemic response.

The conference, held in September, showcased the responses of a dozen states to the pandemic and their procurement offices’ work to meet the needs of their citizens.

“Procurement is complex in the best of times,” Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar said. “We must develop fair and open solicitations and conduct vendor meetings and negotiations while following specific statutes and rules as well as agency-specific procedures. We must ensure compliance and transparency throughout the entire process. Throw in a pandemic, shelter-in-place directives, and the need to overhaul our processes completely in response to these circumstances. One can see how procurement could easily turn into chaos. But I’m delighted to say that our SPD staff met this pandemic head-on with little or no impact on the client agencies we serve daily.”

As it does in other state disasters, SPD assisted the Texas Division of Emergency Management in procuring necessary goods and services to help mitigate the impact of COVID-19. Unlike regular events such as flooding and hurricanes, however, they trusted the division into procuring goods and services with no prior experience, said Bobby Pounds, SPD director.

“We’re used to buying fuel, evacuation buses, portable toilets, and other items needed to respond to natural disasters common to Texas,” Pounds said. “COVID-19 required us to buy things we had never historically purchased, with the added challenge of making these purchases in a telework environment. In a matter of weeks, we not only transitioned to a full-time telework environment, but we also restructured our entire procurement, procurement-approval, and contract management processes. It ensures there was little or no interruption in normal services to our customers.”

SPD is the Texas state government’s central procurement office for non-information technology commodities and services. SPD also functions as a procurement oversight agency, offering technical assistance and training to more than 200 agencies and certifying more than 5,000 procurement and contracting professionals statewide. The honor is on a tribute video highlighting the pandemic effort of each of the state procurement offices available on the NASPO website.