PALMYRA – Even as the small grass-roots group, Committee For Reasonable Taxation, prepares to call for a second “no” vote next week on the proposed $17 million SAD 48 budget, its leaders are stating that the problem isn’t a local one.

Hadley Smith, one of CRT’s founders, said Friday afternoon that no effort has been made in Augusta to fix the source of the problem.

“Legislators and candidates blithely wring their hands tirelessly with no help, board members continue to pledge allegiance ‘to the children’ instead of to the voter, and the state Legislature rakes in $289 million more in revenues than last year but is unwilling to allocate more than a 0.4 percent increase in the SAD 48 state subsidy,” Smith said.

“The Department of Education’s school funding formula has been a dismal failure,” he added.

SAD 48 has been undergoing a yearlong tax revolt that caused the 2003-2004 budget to be rejected by voters a record six times. The 2004-2005 budget already has been rejected once. It will be voted on again in the district’s six towns on Thursday, Aug. 5.

Local officials have maintained that the budget is reasonable and is less than a 1-percent increase over last year’s budget. The school board repeatedly has said that to cut the budget any further would decimate educational programming.

Superintendent William Braun did not return telephone calls Friday seeking comment on the issue. Nokomis teacher Brian Hanish, who formed PAK, another grass-roots group that backs the budget, said Friday that he was not working on the referendum vote next week but that he will advocate if the district chooses to go with another town meeting format vote.

“With average tax levels, taxpayers in SAD 48 cannot finance more than 25 percent of the cost of operating the school district,” Smith maintained.

“Since 1988, the local share [of education costs] has risen from 21 percent to 41 percent, which has tripled the dollar amount of school taxes,” Smith, who lives in Palmyra part of each year, said. “Much of the state share has been shifted to local taxpayers in one of the poorest, rural districts in the state, a district which has lost about $50 million annual income from job losses over the last five years.

“As a result, according to the Department of Education, nearly two thirds of towns in Maine have lower school tax rates than SAD 48. The budget increase in the last two budgets has been financed entirely with school taxes. Voters have just cause to be irate.”

Smith maintained that whatever tax reform is considered by the Legislature over the next few months should focus first on relieving the school and municipal bureaucracy’s “stranglehold on the local taxpayer, prevent shifting of state obligations to hapless local taxpayers, and remove administrative abuses written into law which suppress local democracy and give school administrators and boards unjustified dominance in school tax matters.”