By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

AUBURN – The bottom line, showing more than a $2.1 million or a 6.8 percent increase, looks worse than it is.

Deduct $868,000 earmarked for debt service on the city’s new elementary school and the proposed education budget is only up 4.4 percent over this year’s spending.

Ignore more – money intended to pay for a special education assistant director, five foreign language and tech teachers, an additional school nurse and other new initiatives – and the overall increase falls to 3.5 percent.

That’s the way School Superintendent Barbara Eretzian figures it.

Eretzian gave School Committee members their budget workbooks Wednesday night. Opening the book they find a bottom line of more than $33.67 million that their superintendent says is needed to run the city’s schools for the fiscal year that starts July 1.

That bottom line is up $2.1 million over this year’s municipal education budget.

In another year, that would translate to a pretty big property tax rate increase. In 2004, for instance, the school board-approved budget rose about $1.4 million – roughly 5 percent that year – and represented a 91-cent jump in the city’s tax rate. That’s an additional $91 bite on the tax bill for a home valued at $100,000.

But the coming year’s proposed budget isn’t as bad as it sounds, Eretzian says.

The more than $860,000 going for school construction loan interest, for example, is a pass-through. The state will cover that cost in its check for general purpose aid.

And, she points out, the school board doesn’t yet have solid clues as to offsetting revenues. Federal and state aid to education, once it comes in, greatly reduces the amount of local money to be used to pay for school costs.

Another factor delaying any projected tax rate impact is Auburn’s lack of a firm value on all of the property in the city. Right now, property revaluation is under way. Until those property values are fixed finally, the formula used to determine the local tax rate is missing a key number: The total value of Auburn.

Eretzian also pointed out that all of the numbers in the budget workbook are, for now, merely proposals. She and other school administrators draft the proposed budget based on their projections of costs. School board members, however, might differ. They could vote to decrease, or increase, the amounts appearing as various budget line items.

School board members will begin their budget studies with a meeting at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in Auburn Hall. Budget workshops will follow each week into April when they’ll agree on a new bottom line.

Once that agreement is set, the budget goes to the City Council, which has bottom line authority. That means the council can vote to approve the budget as submitted, or vote to increase or decrease the total.

Any changes would have to be ratified by the school board, then put into play by school administrators.

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