 UPDATED:
03/02/2008
Atlanta City Schools
Summary: 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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*The school system also adopted a millage rate
for debt reduction. It is not considered here.
**assessed value. This value does not include exemptions, which may lower your actual tax liability.
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