Wednesday, December 19, 2001
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Wednesday, December 19, 2001 |
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Brown: Resurrect jail impact fees By DAVE
HAMRICK
Fayette taxpayers may see some relief early next year if Peachtree City's mayor-elect, Steve Brown, has anything to say about it. "Probably in January we'll put together an impact fee agreement," Brown told The Citizen this week. Impact fees are a way of shifting some of the tax burden from current homeowners to future homeowners. They are charged to developers to help cover the costs of new government facilities and services made necessary by growth. Fayette County commissioners and the local city councils were poised to enact impact fees to help pay for the county's new jail, under construction in Fayetteville, but a sharp difference of opinion over the housing of municipal prisoners scuttled the deal. Commissioners notified the councils last December that they would end a 1994 agreement in which the county houses prisoners sentenced by municipal courts for free, and signaled that they intend to begin charging per diem fees for those prisoners. City officials then declined to sign the impact fee agreement unless language was included that required the county to house municipal prisoners. The commission refused to include that language, and the plan was shelved. But Brown said he has been talking to officials on all sides of the issue, and he believes impact fees can be resurrected. "We ought to be collecting those impact fees," he said this week. "Not collecting them is a lose/lose situation. I'm saying let's try to smooth that bridge, and everybody I've spoken to seems to pretty much agree." City officials, meanwhile, have decided to handle the issue of per diem fees for municipal prisoners as part of a court-mandated mediation of another, broader dispute, tax equity. City leaders have argued that their residents are charged more in taxes than they receive in services from the county. County officials say it's not true. Meetings with the mediator began Monday under a gag order from Stephen Boswell, the judge who ordered the mediation (see related story). Commissioners have said they won't discuss the per diem fees as part of tax equity, and have notified the cities that they intend to start charging per diem fees in January.
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