Users of the Gathering Place will have to “pay to play” and development fees and business occupational taxes will increase if a staff recommendation is approved by the Peachtree City Council at its meeting Thursday night.

The recreation fee hike includes a new Gathering Place access fee of $10 per year for city and county residents and $20 per year for out-of-county users starting in January. The fee will not be charged for facility rentals or instructional classes.

A previous plan to increase facility rental fees between $20 and $30 for churches, schools and civic groups has been dropped for further study after residents complained about the proposal. Currently such groups can meet for free, assuming they take up a time when the room isn’t scheduled for use and they don’t use the same meeting date from month to month.

The development fee increases range from $0 to $250 for a number of services currently not charged for, and also a new fee structure for annexation requests that goes from a $600 flat fee plus $25 an acre to a flat $250 per acre with a maximum of $25,000.

The city also plans to start charging fees for various stage reviews of site plans which previously haven’t been charged for.

Council will also vote on a recommendation to increase business taxes from between $5 and $1,000 based on how many employees the business has. It’s a scale-back of a previous proposal that increased the maximum tax $3,000 for the city’s largest employers, up to a total of $8,000 a year.

If approved as proposed by staff, the higher business taxes wouldn’t take effect until the 2009 tax year.

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