HANCEVILLE — Hanceville shoppers will soon join those in a handful of other local municipalities in paying additional sales taxes on retail purchases inside the city limits.

On a 4-2 vote Thursday, the Hanceville City Council approved a new half-cent sales tax increase, making Hanceville the fourth town in Cullman County — along with Fairview, Dodge City, and the City of Cullman — to pass an additional half-cent tax for municipal use.

The tax ordinance will bump Hanceville’s sales tax rate from 8.5 cents to 9 cents per dollar. Mayor Kenneth Nail said the new levy will take effect after the first of the year.

Nail, along with council members Justin Pruett, Sharon Porter and Jimmy Sawyer, voted for the increase. Council members Kim Brown and Charles Wilson voted against.

A first discussion of the tax had been placed on the city council’s agenda for Thursday’s meeting. But, in order to approve the tax that same evening, all six members of the council had to approve holding a vote on the measure — and all six of them did.

Nail said a sales tax increase has been an ongoing topic at Hanceville for several years, and that Thursday’s measure represented the “when” — and not the “if” — of what he described as an inevitable necessity.

“I’m not a fan of it. I live here just like the council members live here; just like all of Hanceville’s citizens, and I don’t like being told I have to pay more taxes,” he said. “But this was something that was going to have to happen.

“We have been living with incremental cost increases in our city budget for a long time, and we’ve held out, while trying pretty diligently to find ways to save money, for several years. but the bottom line is that Hanceville provides a lot of services — services that we have worked really hard to improve, and to provide in a timely manner — and that costs money.”

While the new tax ordinance imposes a half-cent sales tax within the city limits, it also levies a quarter-cent sales tax increase within the police jurisdiction that extends 1.5 miles beyond. The ordinance stipulates that revenue collected from that levy may be used only for services and projects that lie within the outlying jurisdiction area, and not in the city itself.

Other than Cullman, Hanceville is the only city in Cullman County that provides professional fire and police service, while also maintaining personnel and equipment to pave streets, operate city parks, and manage a municipal court, Nail said.

“It has gotten to a point where, if we didn’t go to nine cents, we were going to have to cut back somewhere,” he said. “I don’t know that there’s ever a ‘right’ time to raise fees, but I do know that we have done a lot of good things to improve our city over the past eight years, and I think a lot of people understand that we’ve achieved a level of service that demonstrates that we’re good stewards of our citizens’ money.”

Hanceville operates on an annual municipal budget of just under $3.5 million. The sales tax increase isn’t expected to be a windfall — the council’s last estimate showed the city could expect an additional $100,000 per year from a tax bump — but Nail said it provides funds that, currently, just aren’t there for essential city costs.

“We’ve got $100,000 in our budget this year for roads,” he said. “Well, $100,000 will hardly pave anything. Every year we juggle something so that something else can take priority, and the costs of the things that’ve taken a back seat is catching up to us.”