Louisiana’s sales tax revenue has dropped significantly since the last fiscal year.”On a purely cash basis, we are down 20.5 percent,” said Greg Albrecht, chief economist of the Louisiana Legislative Fiscal Office. “That’s a big drop.”The state’s sales tax revenue has been gradually declining since the 2009 fiscal year, which saw a drop of 3 percent from the 2008 fiscal year.Albrecht said the decline is caused by multiple factors, including unemployment.”We are relatively better off than other states, but we’ve had a sharp run-up in unemployment rates during the course of a year,” he said.Because people are worried about their jobs, Albrecht said people are cutting back on spending.Albrecht said businesses are doing the same.”Households and businesses are spending 20 percent less money,” he said. “That’s pretty dramatic.”The revenue could also be down because of recent tax cuts eliminating sales taxes on a variety of business purchases, Albrecht said.He said the forecast predicts the state of the economy will improve by the end of the fiscal year, with only a 15 percent drop.”I don’t see us turning around yet,” he said. “We could end up worse off than we think.”Albrecht said next year could see a “bounce back” when people begin purchasing more.”But the bounce back might only be 5 percent,” he said. “We won’t recover this loss by any stretch of the imagination.”Dek Terrell, economics professor, said Louisiana is weathering the recession better than most other states.”Everyone builds up a budget proportional to their tax base,” Terrell said. “And we have a smaller percentage of people out of work.”Terrell said Louisiana is supposed to see slight improvements in economic growth within the year, but not employment. In East Baton Rouge Parish, sales tax revenues dropped 5.96 percent from the previous year, according to a news release from the Mayor-President’s Office. Despite losing $10.2 million in sales tax revenues in 2009, Mayor-President Kip Holden said the Baton Rouge budget remains balanced with no reduction in services. “As we tracked the downturn in the national economy, we were conservative in our budget estimates and conservative in our spending to make sure that our city-parish budget remained sound,” Holden said in the same release.—-Contact Sarah Eddington at [email protected]