Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Westside annexing on PTC Council agenda The hot-button topic of the season in Peachtree City — westside annexation and its potential impact on the city — may threaten to overshadow the City Council’s two-day retreat this weekend. But city officials insist there’s much more pressing business to address beyond whether or not the time is right to consider development plans for hundreds of acres of unincorporated land at the termination of McDuff Parkway. Making sure the city is in the position to negotiate its fair share of any countywide SPLOST funds raised for road improvements or recreation facilities ranks higher, said Mayor Steve Brown, still giddy over last week’s 11th-hour rescue and passage in the legislature of an amendment giving cities more say-so in talks with county governments over SPLOST distribution. “There is going to be some funding equity in the county tax program,” Brown insisted. Restoring discretionary funds to the city’s beleaguered Public Improvement Project budget, which has been ravaged to meet emergency needs and operating costs in other areas of the city, is another chief concern, Brown said, citing delays in maintaining the city’s cart path system as an example. Calling 2005 the “Year of the Senior” in Peachtree City, Brown said the council and staff will focus on whether or not a homestead exemption to property taxes for those ages 65 and over makes sense, and look at funding more senior services throughout the city. Among the golf-cart related issues on the table is annual registration fees for golf cart permits, with the revenue used to maintain the path system, he said. And the city’s public safety departments will present requests this weekend to increase salaries of current employees and hire more than a dozen new ones — requests Brown said would be nearly impossible to grant. Among the requests: Six firefighters/paramedics, three fire captains and one assistant fire marshal, with salary estimates of more than $500,000. Annexation, or talk about lifting the city’s moratorium on annexation, is set for discussion from 2:20 to 3:05 p.m. Friday. A similar ban on multifamily housing as well as the city’s overall comprehensive plan update are lumped into that 45-minute window, too. Brown said that would be time enough to discuss annexation, an issue he campaigned against in 2001 but now comes out in favor of. He defends his position working behind the scenes with John Wieland Homes to come up with what he calls an acceptable project that would benefit the city. In a letter to the editor in today’s Citizen, Brown called efforts by citizen’s activist group Direct PAC to bring the issue out into the open and force a discussion of the project “an attempt by developers to capitalize on the project.” Among the chief issues likely to be up for debate Friday is why Brown and Wieland aren’t considering annexing the entire 900-acres that lie trapped between the city’s boundary on the east, Tyrone to the north and Coweta County to the west. The reason, said Brown, is simple: An extension of McDuff Parkway to a point just beyond the site of the current Comcast Cable facility, paid for by Wieland, would provide traffic relief and give the city much-needed amenities and property tax income, but not overwhelm present services. And with McDuff providing direct access into the now-isolated site, even if several hundred acres of land north of a Wieland annexation remain in the county, the new road will serve the multiple property owners and ultimately make their land more valuable, even if it remains outside the city. “The property Wieland is considering is really what’s most valuable to Peachtree City,” said Brown, again calling the annexation project a “one-shot” opportunity for the city to find a bypass to heavily congested Ga. Highway 54 and Ga. Highway 74. Even so, city officials are expected to have on hand Friday copies of the 2000 annexation study completed by a citizen’s task force that considered the entire unincorporated section. Council members Judi-ann Rutherford, Steve Rapson and Stuart Kourajian specifically requested the report at the last council meeting, when Direct PAC formally asked for the issue to be discussed openly. Rex Green, chairman of the group, told the council that Direct PAC members felt annexation was too big an issue for Brown to pursue alone. “We just feel that if there are going to be discussions about the annexation, the council should be willing to discuss it,” said Green.