This sentence is buried in

the middle of text which suggests that if a city provides water and sewer

service to its residents, the city residents shouldn't be made to pay

county taxes diverted toward providing water and sewer services for residents

of the unincorporated part of the county. That sounds fair enough. When

provided by the government, these services have traditionally been billed

separately, to each taxpayer individually and generally in proportion

to his use, and city residents should not have to subsidize residents

of unincorporated areas of the county. There is no problem with this in

Fayette County.

Seizing upon the sentence I

have quoted, the city governments of Peachtree City, Fayetteville and

Tyrone have been asserting, among other claims, that the "county

share" of expenses for our county courts should be in proportion

to population. The county has replied back that a lot of businesses file

lawsuits, and bring charges for bad checks, and most of these businesses

are located in these cities. The jail might provide another interesting

example. Since there is much more criminal activity in the cities than

in the county, how do you allocate the cost of building and maintaining

the county jail? Who is receiving the service here anyway, the people

on the outside or the people on the inside?

I won't bore the readers with

the many more examples I could bring up, but the cities have engaged in

a huge nitpicking exercise in an effort to squeeze a few more bucks out

of the county. The cities' claim is boring everybody to death, and doing

what the cities want finds its theological equivalent in the age-old question

of how many angels can dance on the point of a pin.

If the cities were really interested

in tax equity, we might look at the number of children in our public schools

who come from the cities, and compare that with the number who come from

the unincorporated part of the county. If the cities are found to have

a greater proportion of children in our schools than their proportion

of the county population, would they be willing to pay more school tax?

This fight is about ego, and

the silliness has gone on long enough. The cities should call off their

dogs. Nobody in the county is ripping off the folks who live in the cities.

Y'all get a life!

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayette County

[email protected]

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