After eight months of haggling and two lawsuits, Forsyth County and Cumming city officials have reached an agreement that should keep millions of dollars in sales tax money flowing into their coffers.

They sealed the deal Thursday, one day before a court-imposed deadline for the two sides to come to terms.

Without the agreement, retired Superior Court Judge Hugh W. Stone was expected to let stand a ruling late last month barring the county from continuing its special purpose local option sales tax (SPLOST) after June 30.

That, according to some estimates, would have cost the county up to $23 million. It also could have forced the county to re-run its February SPLOST referendum and wait several months to resume tax collections.

County Commissioner Jim Harrell said work to ease the county's traffic congestion was at stake. "By making an agreement with the city, we will aggressively be building roads without interruption instead of twiddling our thumbs for nine months," Harrell said.

Cumming Mayor Ford Gravitt, who spearheaded the city's fight for a bigger share of the new SPLOST proceeds, called the agreement a "win-win for the citizens of Cumming and Forsyth County.

"The city made concessions," Gravitt said. "The county made concessions."

Forsyth County has had SPLOSTs for 20 years. Voters overwhelmingly approved a five-year extension of the tax in February, with a commitment from the county commission that a majority of the money would go to road improvements.

But Cumming officials objected to the Forsyth County Commission's plans to divide the proceeds, 95.71 percent for the county and 4.29 percent for the city.

The city filed suit before the February referendum and lost. Stone ruled in the city's favor when the lawsuit was re-filed after the election.

The agreement, which Stone still has to sign off on, was hammered out in a marathon meeting Tuesday that involved the mayor, Commission Chairman Charles Laughinghouse and representatives of the Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce.

The agreement gives the city of Cumming up to $26.2 million, or more than double the $11.7 million that its 4.29 percent share was expected to generate.

Business leaders had been lobbying for a resolution of the city-county dispute, partly because a portion of the SPLOST money is for a road project crucial to plans for a high-end regional mall by the Taubman Centers Inc. off Ga. 400 in south Forsyth.

"The faster we can move forward to help them, the more likely they are to get the commitments from the big retailers to be here," said Chamber of Commerce President James McCoy.

County Commissioner Dave Richard cast the lone vote against the agreement.

"This was a bad agreement from the start," he said. "It will be a bad agreement forever."

Richard objected to one provision that drops plans for a county-run aquatic center and gives $10 million from a $100 million county parks and recreation bond to the city to build a city-owned aquatic center on Pilgrim Mill Road.