Neighborhood activists who failed in their efforts to block a Piedmont Park parking deck will have to pay legal fees to the Atlanta Botanical Garden after a judge ruled Thursday two claims in the group's lawsuit had no merit.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge T. Jackson Bedford did not set an amount that would be assessed against the Friends of Piedmont Park, their lawyers and Doug Abramson, the Midtown activist who led the effort.

Instead, he gave lawyers for both sides time to work out a deal. The Botanical Garden's lawyers initially wanted $290,000 if the judge found all five claims in the lawsuit groundless.

Any resolution is bound to be expensive for a group whose lawyers said Thursday they dropped any appeal of the dismissal order because they didn't have any money to continue it.

The 800-space parking deck, expected to open in May at a cost of about $25 million, has been one of the city's most contentious issues in recent years.

Opponents ran a citywide, grass-roots campaign in 2005 that ended with most of the city's neighborhood planning units voting against the parking deck proposal. Proponents prevailed at the Atlanta City Council, which voted for the deck, and with Mayor Shirley Franklin, who signed the legislation that November.