Forecasting local area sales tax collections is not the easiest. The smaller the area gets the more variables you might leave out, due to lack of data or perhaps the variable did not matter in the past. New businesses, population changes, decisions by people to “shop local” more can all impact local sales tax collections. But does that stop us? No! Why should it?

So with that in mind I offer up my forecast for the next 24 months for Grand Forks sales tax collections. We can see some serious fluctuations from month to month but the monthly growth in sales tax over this 0.9%.

There are some other model versions to test and play around with but this is the better model choice at the time, so I use its predictions. So in terms of the fiscal resources for the city of Grand Forks it seems I can provide a bit of an early holiday gift with a predicted increase over the next 2 years.