On May 5, the Regional School Unit 21 budget for fiscal year 2015 is expected to be adopted by the School Board, encompassing just shy of $39 million in total costs.

That represents an increase of a little less than 5 percent from fiscal year 2014, according to figures provided by the district.

The increase, said Superintendent Andrew Dolloff, is less than originally calculated, due to initial errors in determining the total amount of savings in reduced health care services. Overall, careful analysis of cutbacks to health expenses revealed an extra $160,000 in savings, which Dolloff said will be beneficial to taxpayers in Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Arundel, the communities that comprise the school district.

Indeed, said Dolloff, it was an eye toward mitigating the impact to taxpayers that resulted in a relatively small increase over the current year’s budget. While residents of Kennebunkport will see a tax increase of just over 2 percent, Arundel citizens will pay less than 1 percent more, and those in Kennebunk less than half a percent.

The final figures are the result of a “zero-based” process, avoiding a common practice by which a budget is calculated by adding to or subtracting from line items on the previous year’s budget.

“It’s just a different strategy,” said Dolloff. “I ask my principals to go back to ground zero and build their budgets from scratch, line by line. It forces them to justify every expenditure. What you get is a more accurate budget than you would get otherwise.”

One of the largest increases to the budget is in the area of facilities. Those have garnered attention during the past year, as school officials have highlighted deficiencies in several school buildings in an attempt to get a renovation measure passed. In January, voters soundly rejected a proposal that would have simultaneously renovated Kennebunk High School, the Middle School of the Kennebunks and Mildred L. Day School in Arundel at a cost of about $75 million.

“We got a clear signal that these plans are not palatable for voters,” said School Board Chairman Kevin Knight, earlier this year. For better or worse, that is part of the process.”

Figures provided by the RSU show that the proposed 2015 facilities budget represents about a 19 percent increase over the current year, coming in at roughly $4.1 million of the total budget.

“Our facilities are in rough shape,” said Dolloff. “We have not invested in our infrastructure in this district over the past 30 years as we should have.”

A second reading of the budget will take place Monday, May 5 in Room A102 of Kennebunk Elementary School at 7 p.m.

— Staff Writer Jeff Lagasse can be contacted at 282-1535, ext. 319 or jlagasse@journaltribune.com.