Atlanta City Schools to overtax property owners
Atlanta City Schools will operate on a 2005-2006 budget of $526,781,768. Of that amount, $363,400,000 will be funded by property tax dollars and the system will draw $8,094,768 from reserves to balance the budget.
The School Board adopted an operations millage rate of 20.423.
The mathematically-correct millage rate is 19.454, 0.969 mills lower.
The arbitrarily high rate proposed by the School Board will overtax Atlanta city property owners by at least $18 million more than is necessary to fully fund this year’s budget.
The owner of a $150,000 home in the city of Atlanta will pay $1,225.38 in property taxes for schools, about $58.11 more than what would be required under a mathematically-correct millage rate.
Even if the Atlanta school system had fully funded the budget with property tax dollars rather than draw on reserves, the adopted millage would have still been too high. The budget would have required $371,494,768 in tax dollars; a millage rate of 19.888 would have fully funded the budget without a draw on reserves.
In other words, the school system could have preserved its cash and still adopted a millage rate 1/2-mill lower than it did.
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