BANGOR – City councilors this week are wrapping up work on a $78.7 million budget for municipal and school operations in the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1.

If the budget is adopted as proposed, it will result in a tax rate of $19.40 per $1,000 in property valuation, a decrease of $1 per $1,000 from this year.

The actual impact on individual property owners, however, will depend on what happens with their property values. Properties in several parts of the city were revalued this year, city officials noted Monday night during a budget workshop at City Hall.

Another workshop is set for 5 p.m. Thursday to decide several unresolved budget issues. The budget then will go before the full council for a first reading at 7:30 p.m. Monday, June 12, according to Finance Director Debbie Cyr.

If the budget still needs fine-tuning, councilors will conduct an additional workshop or two before the budget comes up for adoption during the council’s June 26 meeting, Cyr said.

As it stood during the workshop, the council was looking at a gross municipal budget of $40.6 million, up 5.8 percent from this year, and an education budget of $38 million, million, up 4.9 percent.

In both cases, increased revenues – tax and nontax revenues – will offset the budget increases, according to city budget documents. As was the case last year, councilors will consider two overrides of state budget caps for municipal and school needs.

Last year, city councilors authorized an additional $416,727 in local funds to cover school extra- and co-curricular activities, including reading and math recovery, Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, staff development, and elementary and middle school gifted and talented programming.

School officials said at the time that the state’s Essential Services and Programs funding formula did not fully cover the cost for providing those services.

This year, school officials are seeking an additional $1,617,071.

“EPS does not cover all costs of public education. It certainly does not cover the kind of education people in Bangor have come to expect,” Superintendent Robert Ervin said during Monday’s budget session.

Of the total request, $415,962 is earmarked for teachers’ salaries, $272,645 for student transportation, $838,464 would go toward extra- and co-curricular programs, and $90,000 toward food services, according to a proposed council order to that end.

On the municipal side, city officials are mulling an override of LD 1, a statewide property tax reform initiative that took effect last year. LD 1 aims to ease the local cost burden on the school side of the ledger by providing more state money while curbing municipalities’ ability to increase taxes.

It also requires municipalities to offset “net new state funding” by reducing the maximum allowable tax levy. The maximum allowable tax levy, however, can be exceeded if approved by a majority vote of city councilors.

Last year, councilors voted to increase the city’s total tax levy by $278,205, or the amount that general assistance reimbursement from the state was projected to receive in excess of the state-mandated growth limit.

Since then, Maine lawmakers have exempted general assistance increases from the equation. This year, the problem has to do with local road assistance.

Bangor is set to receive $60,720 over the growth cap through payments from the Urban-Rural Initiative, a state program formerly known as local road assistance.

While state lawmakers this year voted to exempt that funding from the LD 1 cap for net new revenue, the measure was adopted without an emergency preamble and won’t kick in until September, several months after next year’s budget kicks in, City Manager Edward Barrett said.

Councilors who attended Monday’s workshop forwarded both override requests to the full council for consideration.