If it doesn’t raise tuition, the University of Maine System would have to take $9 million from emergency reserves to balance the budget next year, according to the system’s top financial officer.

“This level of deficit spending is not sustainable and is stark evidence that the current operating model is broken,” finance and administration Vice Chancellor Rebecca Wyke wrote in a presentation for the UMS Board of Trustees Finance Committee.

On Monday, the committee will take up the proposed $519 million budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

The trustees could decide to raise tuition, narrowing or closing the budget gap, Wyke said Friday, adding that Monday’s meeting was the beginning of that discussion.

“This is showing them what it looks like if tuition is frozen,” said Wyke, emphasizing that system officials were not advocating for or against raising tuition.

The proposed budget already includes deep cuts, including 206 positions systemwide. The University of Southern Maine cut 50 faculty members and two academic programs late last year.

According to the proposed budget, $2.6 million in emergency and reserve funds would go to UMaine Presque Isle; $1.5 million to UMaine Fort Kent; $1.5 million to USM; $1.3 million to UMaine Machias; $1 million to the system office; $561,000 to UMaine Farmington, and $233,000 to UMaine Augusta.

Only the flagship University of Maine campus in Orono does not have a deficit.

This year’s proposed budget is better than the one approved last May. That $529 million budget required $11.4 million in emergency funds, and cut 157 positions.

“Our universities face an unprecedented combination of economic, demographic and competitive challenges,” Chancellor James Page told a joint legislative session in Augusta this week.

“The most stark representation of these challenges is the approximately $75 million structural budget gap we will accrue between now and (fiscal year 2019) if we make no changes.”

Officials say the years of ongoing budget deficits have been the result of flat state funding, declining enrollment and three years of tuition freezes.

State funding could go up this year. The governor’s proposed budget, which is being debated in Augusta, would increase state funding for the system by 1.7 percent, to $179.2 million, for the fiscal year ending June 2016; and by 1.93 percent, to $182.6 million, for the following fiscal year. That’s about half of what the system requested.

Aside from state allocations, tuition is the other major source of revenue, and the trustees have been clear that they do not want to increase tuition. At the current price, tuition and fees alone already make up 18 percent of Maine’s median household income of $50,487.

Before the freeze, there were years of increases.

At Orono, in-state tuition and fees increased 66 percent in the last decade, from $6,394 in 2005 to $10,606 today.

The emergency funds would come from reserves and a budget stabilization fund created in 2010 for the purpose of offsetting operating shortfalls at the campuses. Last year was the first time the budget stabilization funds were used.

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