Forsyth County and Cumming leaders are set to square off for two days of talks behind closed doors.
At stake is an estimated $300 million over the next 10 years and the water future for some 180,000 residents.
Both sides are at impasse over how to split the county-wide local option sales tax receipts. More pressing still, a contract for the county to buy water from the city has been floating in limbo since May, when the old agreement expired.
“I think that water is the more critical issue,” County Commissioner Patrick Bell said. “In the grand scheme of things, the LOST, to me, is not.”
Former Georgia Chief Justice Norman Fletcher will direct the mediations which both sides agreed to last month.
The water issue has simmered all year. But it came to a boil last month when Cumming Mayor H. Ford Gravitt threatened to stop providing inexpensive raw water to the county. Instead, the city would furnish only treated water, which could end up at least tripling what the county currently pays.
Cumming is one of only four jurisdictions allowed to draw water from Lake Lanier. Despite repeated applications over the years, Forsyth County cannot draw from either Lake Lanier or the Chattahoochee River.
City officials have argued that Cumming has always supplied the county with the cheapest water rates in the region and the county has not reimbursed it for major upgrades to its intake facility at Lake Lanier.
The city has set a deadline of Oct. 31 for a water agreement before the new rates would go into effect.
City Administrator Gerald Blackburn said Friday he hopes to get the two issues resolved this week so each side can return to the business of governing.
Forsyth County Chairman Jim Boff said he’d like the same, but he voiced some reservation.
The county staff has met with city staff twice to discuss the LOST distribution, he said.
“I guess if that was going well, we wouldn’t be going to mediation,” he said.
Last year, the two sides divvied up $29.1 million in local option sales taxes, with Cumming receiving 15 percent. Projections for 2012 are for $30.8 million in total LOST receipts, county finance officials said.
County Manager Doug Derrer said the city has proposed receiving between 15-25 percent of the total under the new 10-year LOST agreement.
But Boff said he thinks that’s too much.
“The county has done some preliminary [studies] and see a number much closer to 4 percent,” he said.
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