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.