The City of the Santa Rosa, N.M.’s debt from a gross receipts tax appeal has skyrocketed from $400,000 to an eye-popping $1.21 million, reported today’s print edition of the Guadalupe County Communicator, based in Santa Rosa.
That amount is well over half of the Route 66 town’s general fund budget in a year. Mayor Albert Campos Jr. said the newly estimated amount was an “impossible” burden.
The revelation also greatly increases the likelihood the city will file for bankruptcy.
I’m a subscriber to The Communicator, but the newspaper won’t reach my mailbox until Saturday at the earliest. However, The Communicator posted the front page of its current edition on its Facebook account.
City officials learned of its predicament during a special meeting Monday with the state’s Taxation and Revenue Department in Santa Fe. The state offered few viable options in how to pay the debt back.
Before this week’s revelations, the city would have rebated $10,000 to $17,000 a month over a two-year period to satisfy the debt. The new amount would boost that to $30,000 to $50,000 a month — forcing Santa Rosa to lay off employees, deeply cut services, or file for bankruptcy.
Santa Rosa hoped to renovate its historic Ilfeld Warehouse into a Route 66 museum — the first in New Mexico. However, with the city suddenly becoming cash-strapped, the prospect of the museum happening has undoubtedly dimmed greatly.
Sixty miles to the east, Tucumcari, N.M., also is actively seeking to open a Route 66 museum.
M.E. Sprengelmeyer, publisher of The Communicator, posted this astounding fact on the newspaper’s Facebook page:
The City of Santa Rosa could take all the play money from 58 “Monopoly” game sets and it still wouldn’t have enough to pay off the new and increased gross receipts tax refund that the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department demands that it pay.
Sprengelmeyer also said in a comment on the Facebook page that the identity of the business that appealed the tax would be known “within days.” The identity of the business has been undisclosed to both the city, county, and media.
When I get the print edition of The Communicator, I’ll update this story with any more important information.
This story just gives you a sort of sinking feeling…knowing there’s little hope for this town to avoid bankruptcy now.
By the same token, I hope that the business is not vilified once it is identified. If I understand the story correctly, they have done nothing wrong here. Indeed, they have sought to correct a wrong committed against them?