Wednesday, April 18, 2001
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Wednesday, April 18, 2001 |
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City-county tax fight goes to court By DAVE HAMRICK
Fayette County will ask the Superior Court not to grant local cities' request for mandatory mediation in a tax equity dispute between the county and Tyrone, Peachtree City and Fayetteville. "The question is going to be: Are they entitled to mediation at this time?" said County Attorney Bill McNally this week. The county's position will be that they are not, he added. The cities Thursday filed a formal request that the court appoint a visiting or senior judge, who would then appoint a mediator within 30 days to try and resolve the disagreement. Answering the petition will be a top priority for the county's legal team, said McNally. "We have 30 days to answer it, but we will be getting to it," he said. "It will be one of our primary targets to get accomplished." McNally said the county's position is that the county and cities already agreed to a service delivery strategy, and there's no need to mediate that now. "That strategy is good until the next event where we have to do it again," he said. Under state law, the governments will have to reconsider how they deliver services if the county's comprehensive plan is rewritten, or a new division of local option sales taxes is devised, or some other event of that type. City officials maintain that if you live in unincorporated Fayette County, you should shoulder more of the county tax burden, while city residents pay less. Their petition asks that the judge assigned to the case order the governing bodies involved to attend an initial mediation meeting. City leaders, with Peachtree City Mayor Bob Lenox and Tyrone Councilman Ronnie Cannon the most vocal, have argued for two years now that their residents pay more in taxes to the Fayette County government than they receive in services. They've also argued that, under a recently enacted state law requiring cooperation between counties and their cities, those alleged inequities must be addressed. According to the cities' petition, filed late last week, the law requires that "the cost of any service which a county provides primarily for the benefit of the unincorporated area of the county be borne by the unincorporated area residents, individuals and propoerty owners who receive this service." It was during discussions of "service delivery strategies" in joint meetings between county and city officials that the tax equity issue first came up, and in the course of those discussions all the entities agreed to fund a study by consultants Governmental Solutions Ltd. The firm was to determine whether tax inequities existed in specified services. GSL's report suggested that there are inequities that city residents pay about $2 million more in taxes than they receive in services. But county commissioners argued that the GSL study didn't include information on sales tax distribution. City residents receive a larger share of those distributions, thus rolling back their property taxes enough to make up the inequity, commissioners said. Late last year the County Commission voted to make that its final answer, that there is no tax inequity and no reason to discuss the matter further. Following a flurry of sometimes angry letters back and forth between Peachtree City Mayor Lenox and commissioners, Commissioner Harold Bost last month conducted a press conference in which he unveiled stacks of money intended to show how much more tax rollback city residents receive. City officials, apparently tipped off by members of the press, showed up at Bost's conference and promised to file a motion for mediation of the dispute as soon as possible. "We owe it to the citizens to do this," said Tyrone's Cannon. Mayors of the three cities wrote to the county last November asking the county to voluntarily submit to mediation, but were rebuffed.
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