With the news of a downturn in countywide sales tax receipts in January 2010, the ongoing economic recession continues to take its toll on Tompkins County.

Late last month, Tompkins County Finance Director David Squires announced before the Tompkins County Legislature’s Budget and Capital Committee that sales tax receipts were down more than 3.39 percent countywide in comparison to January 2009.

At the same meeting, Tompkins County Administrator Joe Mareane said this receipt decline is a concern because the overall 2010 county budget was initially based off a net growth.

James Dennis, the chairman of the county’s Budget and Capital Committee, said countywide sales tax receipts have been down every month for more than a year.

“It is such a significant amount of money for us because, like the other 61 counties in the state, we only have two real methods of raising money — sales taxes and property taxes,” Dennis said. “So when we lose that kind of money in sales tax, it has a significant impact to our budget.”

Dennis said the larger brand -name retailers are taking a harder hit than some of the niche-market shops on The Commons.

“What is really significant to the county, when you look at outcome from businesses, are the car dealerships and the big-box stores,” Dennis said.

Dennis said this news is especially bleak for Tompkins County because of the many tax-exempt organizations owning property within the county.

“We already have about 45 percent of the property in the county off the tax roll, so 55 percent of all the property is paying all the taxes in Tompkins County,” he said. “It is not really a positive or a negative, just the reality of the issue.”

Dennis said the original 2010 budget was based on a 3 percent increase because in 2009 Tompkins County began to feel dramatic effects of the economic recession.

“The sales tax numbers in Tompkins County had until 2009 been increasing at a rate of about 6 percent per year,” he said. “And then it just dropped off the edge of the cliff.”

At the county level, Dennis said the legislature has already begun making adjustments to fix already growing budget gaps.

“In the 2010 budget that we just passed a few months back, we had to cut positions and not hire for positions we were going to fill,” he said. “We had some people laid off, while some others retired.”

Though hopeful for better news, Dennis did not make any prediction to when the recession’s effects would cease.

“I do not know that any of us are going to be able to predict what is going to happen,” Dennis said. “The world has changed, and I don’t think we are going to recover to where we were before 2009.”

Seth Cohen, the executive vice president of Honda of Ithaca, said sales are down, but it is not just the state of the economy that is keeping consumers from buying.

“Do I think that sales could be more robust?” he said. “Absolutely. People are taking care of their cars and holding on to them longer, and that is a big component of our business.”

Mary Button, the administrative and development manager of AJ Foreign Auto downtown, said the dealership’s income is below average this year.

“January is usually not an enormous month for us in this business — [profit] usually depends a lot on the weather and what is going on with people’s cars,” she said. “It looks really bad compared to last year’s January because that was one of our biggest months ever, and that is unusual.”

The auto shop, which services vehicles and sells used vehicles, has been trying to avoid becoming lost among financial woes within the market by increasing advertisements.

“We focus on advertising a bit more than some of the other smaller shops,” Button said. “We have radio ads going, some newspaper ads, we have a Web site and try to keep our stuff out there online.”

In addition to car dealerships, larger chain retail stores, including Target, have also seen a decline in sales tax receipts. Jessica Deede, a media representative for Target, said the ongoing recession has changed consumer behavior.

“The past year’s economic conditions created a shift in shopping behavior as consumers seek ways to stretch their dollars and pull back on their purchases of discretionary items,” Deede said.

Deede said that Target, which has a store branch located in Ithaca, did not make any predictions on when the recession would come to an end but did state the company expects to see a gradual increase in business.

“We expect economic recovery to continue in 2010, but we expect progress to remain slow,” Deede said.