In the second year of New York state’s property tax cap, proposed school district budgets for 2013-14 will be subject to an average tax levy increase limit of 4.6 percent. That’s more than double the publicly perceived cap of 2 percent, according to data from the state comptroller’s office.

And that’s well above the 3 percent average limit for budgets in the current 2012-13 school year.

A report by the Empire Center for Public Policy released Tuesday found the increases are driven by a series of exclusions. Among those exclusions are a portion of increased employee pension costs, without which the state average would drop to 2.7 percent, the center’s E.J. McMahon said in the report.

“The pension provision ­— added at the insistence of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver ­— diminishes the protection the law was supposed to provide for some of the state’s poorest taxpayers,” McMahon said in the report.

This year, because school districts have been hit with a particularly large contribution rate increase for the state Teachers Retirement System and Employee Retirement System, the allowable tax levy increase in many districts has gone up, the report said.

The Empire Center’s report broke down tax levy increase limits for 2013-14 by county. The highest average increase in New York was Niagara County with an average increase of 13.7 percent, although that is driven by Barker’s legal cap of 92.7 percent…..

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