COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Good news for the city of Colorado Springs. According to the mayor, the economic outlook for the city is positive.

It’s been a year of economic lows for Colorado Springs. Earlier this year the city cut hundreds of jobs, switched off thousands of streetlights and yanked trash cans from public parks. But now, according to Colorado Springs Mayor Lionel Rivera, the city is back on track, thanks to an increase in sales tax revenue.

“It looks like in Colorado Springs' sales tax revenue for the first six months are up significantly,” said Rivera. “Well, if we judge it on sales tax revenue, we’re doing a heck of a lot better than last year. Sales tax revenue for the year are up about 6 percent. We actually projected a decline of about 1 and a half percent in our budget. Really we’re about 7 and a half percent, revenue-wise where we projected where we would be for this time of the year. So we’re up about $3 million dollars more than we projected.”

Some critics have said that Colorado Springs was on the verge of financial crisis, blaming the city’s small government mentality and conservative roots. Mayor Lionel Rivera has a message for those critics:

“I think that Colorado Springs is really the model for the rest of the country. What we’ve been able to do inside our parks and recs department, where our pool operations required $1 million subsidy…Now some of those have been turned over to the private sector and we’ve started running one of our own pools more efficiently. So we don’t need that ($1) million dollar subsidy anymore. The private sector is doing a good job and going to return some money to the general fund. One of our community centers has been contracted with a nonprofit, faith-based organization and they are providing community services in that community center, at no cost to the city for three years. That’s great news. What other city in the country can be that creative? And (at) the rest of our community centers we’ve been able to reduce the cost there by 42 percent. So if the rest of the country looked at Colorado Springs as a model and tried to figure out how to live within their means, I think the nation would be a lot better off.

NEWSCHANNEL 13 also asked the mayor for an update on the street light dilemma. “Well, one of the things we did in Colorado Springs is, and this is something I think the federal government is doing, is figuring a way to live within their means,” said Rivera. “We had to balance a lot of different cutbacks and services so we could maintain public safety, at the highest level possible, so we have cut back on street lights. It's saving the city about $1.2 million, but amazingly our citizens initially were concerned, but now we're not hearing any complaints whatsoever.”

According to Rivera, the city’s efforts to balance the budget continue.