Sales analysis suggests CID tax hasn’t had major impact at Village Shops and Corinth Square

An analysis of sales tax collections at the Village Shops and Corinth Square since the Community Improvement Districts went into effect January 1, 2011, suggests the 1 percent sales tax imposed by the CIDs hasn’t had a major impact on business at the centers.

Overall state sales tax collections — excluding the 1 percent tax collected as part of the CIDs — were up 5.89 percent in 2011 at the Village Shops compared to 2010. During the same time period, state sales tax collections were down 3.86 percent at the Corinth Shops.

Collectively, merchants at the centers paid approximately $35,000 more in state sales tax in 2011 than they did in 2010.

A city ordinance aimed at protecting the privacy of business owners prevents the release of sales tax information about specific businesses, but Prairie Village finance director Lisa Santa Maria said an analysis of taxes collected at all grocery stores in Prairie Village — the Hen Houses at the Village Shops and Corinth as well as the Hy-Vee at the State Line Shopping Center — showed sales were essentially flat between 2010 and 2011. Grocery stores collected approximately $4,000 more in state sales tax last year than they had the year before.

A month-by-month graph of collections by Village Shops merchants show that sales were generally up from January to June 2011 before coming back down to 2010 levels for the final six months of the year. At Corinth Square, a better-than-2010 December couldn’t make up for two notably slow sales months in July and August. The Ward Parkway Trader Joe’s, which attracts a number of the same customers who shop at the Hen House at Corinth Square, opened in July 2011.