By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer

AUBURN – Taxpayers won’t face new property value increases for a year, councilors agreed Tuesday.

Notices of new property values should begin reaching mailboxes later this month, but the city will give taxpayers a year to get used to new values before they affect individual property tax bills.

Taxpayers get a more modest tax increase now while the city gets a year to come up with some way to keep future increases down.

“We might get some help from economic development projects, things we all know are in the pipeline,” City Manager Pat Finnigan said.

Councilors also agreed to trim $130,000 from the final budget, cutting a new police cruiser, a public works employee, two other unnamed employees, social service spending and a recreation department assistant from the budget.

They’ll take this latest draft budget to a special meeting Monday for a first reading vote. If the budget is approved by a five-vote majority, it will go to the June 20 meeting for a final vote.

Finnigan told councilors it made sense to keep the revaluation separate from the budget.

“I don’t like to give taxpayers a surprise when they open their tax bill, and I think this would be a big surprise for many people,” she said.

The revaluation increases the city’s total worth from $1.26 billion to $1.97 billion while reducing the property tax rate from $29.38 for each $1,000 of value to $18.90.

But even with the cut in the tax rate, taxes would jump for more than half of the city’s 5,167 single-family homes. Those homes would see their property values increase by 75 percent, along with their tax bills. For example, a home currently assessed at $100,000 of value could see taxes jump by $426.03, from $2,773.47 now to $3,199.50 after the revaluation.

Delaying the property values for a year gives taxpayers a chance to understand the numbers, get used to them and budget for them, she said.

Old numbers

But delaying the revaluation means that councilors were back to working from their old tax rate of $29.38 for the 2006 fiscal year.

Finnigan’s original budget, which called for $1.5 million in new spending, would have increased the tax rate to $31.27 under current calculations. Council cuts to her budget so far reduced it to $30.58. That was still too much for councilors, who trimmed another $130,000 from the budget Tuesday. That would set the tax rate at $30.48, $1.10 higher than it is currently.

That budget puts two police officers back in the Auburn schools but didn’t replace a single teacher cut from the schools. Auburn schools lose four teachers in the current budget. One, a middle school technology teacher, is being laid off. The others are retiring teachers who will not be replaced.

Councilors Donna Lyons Rowell and Belinda Gerry both said they couldn’t support the budget with those cuts.

Councilors are facing a budget increase driven by higher salary and benefits costs for both cities and schools, automobile fuel price hikes and more expensive salt and sand for clearing icy roads in the winter.