The City of Atlanta is suing the Atlanta Public Schools, alleging the school system owes the city $9 million for paying off the system’s debt years ago.
In a lawsuit filed last week, the city says it paid off the school’s bond debt in 2014 and 2016 and that the principal and interest from those payments are more than $9 million.
The city is also seeking attorney fees, along with other litigation costs related to the lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit, the city has requested on numerous occasions that the school district repay the money and provided calculations showing how much was owed.
In a statement Tuesday, the school district acknowledged being in talks with the city but denied seeing any proof that it owed the money.
“But to date the City has provided us no information that shows that APS owes the City for these bonds,” the statement said.
An updated statement from APS said that the school district had gone so far as to serve the city with an open-records request for documents about the bond payments.
Both sides disagreed about the other’s willingness to negotiate.
“We have taken the necessary action to make taxpayers and the City of Atlanta whole,” said a spokesman for Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in a statement.
The lawsuit is the latest volley in ongoing feud between the city and the public school system that serves approximately 50,000 of its children.
For months, Atlanta Public Schools officials has accused the city of failing to live up its end of the bargain in a separate deal.
In January, the city agreed to give APS $10 million to resolve a dispute over the use of future school property taxes to fund development projects, including the massive downtown Gulch project, and restructured the school district's participation in several special taxing districts.
The city has yet to pay APS the money.
