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.