The Coweta County School Board voted Monday to hold the millage rate steady at 18.59 mills for the fifth straight year. Board members also voted to keep the school system’s bonded indebtedness tax rate at 0 mills.

The school board in June approved a general fund budget of $172.2 million for the 2009-2010 school year. The budget was approximately $3.7 million less than the school system budget of $175,931,581, adopted in June 2008 before cuts in state funding for school systems were enacted during last school year, said school system Public Information Officer Dean Jackson.

Jackson said the school board’s 2009-2010 budget projected zero percent growth in the Coweta County tax digest during the upcoming fiscal year and anticipated no increase for the 18.59-mill Maintenance & Operations rate on that local tax digest. In July, after the start of the current fiscal year, the 2009-10 budget was affected by approximately $4 million in further funding cuts announced by the state, Jackson said.

The school system should collect approximately $430,000 more in taxes this year though that amount came largely from new commercial growth and not from reassessments, Jackson said.

The school board in its decision Monday maintained the same millage rate that has been in effect since 2004. Similarly, there has been no bond debt millage since 2002, said Jackson. The 2002-2007 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) paid off the bond debt from the 1980s and 1990s. The current SPLOST, passed by voters in 2006 and continued beginning in 2007, is designed to pay off short-term debt from current school construction projects, Jackson said.