When performing legal work for a municipality, whether it be an in-house attorney or a private firm working under a contract, the ever-lingering threat of citizens and companies that may want to take you to court over a ruling or other controversial municipal decision comes with the territory.

But while some tracts of land in Peachtree City have a long and rich history of litigation, and the City Council has addressed several potentially explosive issues in the past few years, the actual court docket is rather light right now where the city is concerned.

There are currently five lawsuits pending against the city, according to city attorney Rick Lindsey of Webb, Stuckey and Lindsey. All of them concern development-related issues.

The most recent action to make headlines was Pathway Communities' decision to file suit over the city's recently adopted traffic impact ordinance. During council debates late last year, Pathway representatives repeatedly asserted that the move was unconstitutional.

The suit was filed the morning after a vote on the ordinance was taken at a regular Thursday night council meeting.

The city has filed its response as required by law, Lindsey said, but the plaintiffs are not pursuing the case with an extraordinary amount of vigor.

Lindsey said that George Rosenzweig, Pathway's attorney in the case, told him recently the suit was filed mainly because a challenge to an ordinance of this type must be filed within a certain time frame. Rosenzweig also reported that Pathway hopes to resolve the conflict outside the courtroom by working with city staff, Lindsey said.

The same situation essentially exists with Pathway's suit over the city's buffer ordinance, filed a couple of years ago. There has been virtually no action since the action was filed, Lindsey said.

The Black family, who owns property on the southern end of the city on Ga. Highway 74, also filed a lawsuit over the buffer ordinance at about the same time. They are also involved in some of oldest ongoing legal actions in Fayette County, according to Lindsey.

Two other Black property suits involve rezonings, and both of them were filed in the late 1980s. Some extensive discovery took place about 12 years ago, Lindsey said, but the cases have lain dormant most of the time since.

“They may heat up one day,” said Lindsey. “They may never heat up.”

He added that the up side to these suits being dormant is the fact that no expensive legal time is being spent on them, thus saving the city money until they can be resolved.

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