For the first time in more than a year, RTD’s sales tax collections within its eight-county metro region increased year-over-year in November, up slightly more than three percent.

For November, RTD collected $31.37 million, compared with $30.48 million in November 2008, according to a monthly financial status report from the transit agency. See page 22 of this document. A year earlier, RTD’s sales tax plummeted 9.6 percent from November 2007. That report set off austerity measures including a salary freeze, service cuts in bus and light rail, and a year of adjusting budget forecasts to find the new bottom of the economic downturn.

RTD might have found it. After its analysts adjusted the sales tax forecasts mid-year, RTD’s year-to-date collections through November were within a percent of the projection. And for the month of November alone, sales tax revenue was 4.9 percent over the budget projection.

Sales taxes are paid in the month after being collected, and RTD typically gets the report in the first week of the succeeding month.

RTD recently changed its methodology for projecting sales tax revenues in response to the recession’s significant impact on RTD’s ability to finance its ambitious FasTracks rapid transit expansion program. A panel of economists and other experts came up with a low, medium and high range of forecasts for annual growth through 2035.

The low range was 2.8 percent. RTD’s revenue in November was slightly higher than that. The mid-range was 3.7 percent, and the high range was 4.4 percent.

The recession, which began in December 2007 and crashed with the market meltdown in September 2008, has hit RTD hard along with every other government agency that relies heavily on sales taxes.

Now, as the calendar turns and more than a year passes since the worst months of the meltdown, the nascent economic recovery is starting to show up in the figures. However, it will take some time for sales tax revenues to recover from the 2008-09 plunge. Just a month earlier, October results continued to show a decline from a year earlier, though not by as much.

“This is a positive move in the right direction,” said RTD spokesman Scott Reed. “We have undertaken many effective budget-cutting and cost-savings steps over the preceding years to avoid wholesale service slashing, but the sales tax revenue side has been slow to show an increase.”

For transit planners, having a reliable revenue forecast is essential in deploying a stable schedule of bus and light rail service. If RTD lays out a budget for the year and revenues come in under forecast, it has to make cuts. But coming in on target gives breathing room to planners and more stability to bus and light rail service.

Sales tax revenue is the lifeblood of the RTD budget, supplying about 60 percent of its total revenue. RTD collects a total one-penny tax on each dollar of applicable retail sales. Of that, six-tenths goes to RTD’s current operations and four-tenths to the FasTracks program. The tax is collected within the district, which covers all or parts of eight counties.