Sharpen your

pencils and keep your calculators handy.

It's budget

time for the Peachtree City Council, which will hold a special meeting

Monday, July 15, at 6 p.m. at City Hall.

Council has

already taken action to try and stave off a millage increase. Earlier

this year, council shrank its requirements for building its cash reserve

fund with the hopes of heading off a millage increase.

But council

will have to get creative with its financing to battle several trends

in the budget. Mayor Steve Brown is particularly worried about the city's

insurance costs, which have risen dramatically in the past few years.

Currently,

the city's medical plan is self-insured, meaning that it sets aside an

amount of money to handle employee claims instead of going through an

insurance company.

Although one

possible solution would be for the city to seek bids from insurance companies,

Brown said he recently learned at a conference that those premiums may

skyrocket as much as 40 percent.

"We've

got to do some serious work and look at the real facts and figures,"

Brown said. "We've got to look at these things in a realistic sense."

This council

is also impaired budget-wise by the previous council's choice to freeze

the millage rate and pass an aggressive pay plan which increased the salaries

of many city employees, Brown noted.

The proposed

extension of TDK Boulevard will also likely be a budget issue since the

Atlanta Regional Commission has indicated there are no funds for the million-plus

dollar project to create a southern thoroughfare into Coweta County.

"There's

no way to fund that out of the general fund," Brown said. "You're

talking millions of dollars."

There are some

projects Brown is interested in getting into the upcoming budget, including

several land purchases to secure land for greenspace and other uses before

it is developed commercially.

Those opportunities

will disappear quickly if not acted on, Brown said, but he indicated he

would like to investigate using a special purpose local option sales tax

or a bond issue to pay for the purchases.

Brown declined

to cite the tracts of land he's interested in because he doesn't want

someone else to purchase the land before the city has the opportunity.

Brown also

wants to find a way to fund some of the projects for the Ga. Highway 54

West corridor that were developed as part of the city's Liveable Centers

Initiative plan. The plan, approved by the ARC, could involve getting

matching funds from the regional planning agency, which is high on the

city's use of the cart path system for alternative transportation.

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