After two daylong mediation sessions and more than a year of disagreements between the Dalton (Georgia) City Council and the Whitfield County Commission, the two entities have agreed on how to pay for shared services and ensure the county and its taxpayers will continue to receive millions of dollars in state funds.
The service delivery strategy is a state-mandated agreement that lays out how local governments pay for shared services such as public health, sewer, fire, public housing, law enforcement, road work and dozens more things.
Without an agreed-upon strategy, the county could have lost its qualified local government status - a state designation that ensures municipalities don't duplicate services - and potentially missed out on millions in state and federal grant funds.
As part of the resolution, Whitfield County will pay the city of Dalton 20% of its road-paving costs for projects in the county. The total, however, cannot exceed $200,000 a year.
Whitfield County also will put $125,000 for overhead operating costs of the Whitfield County Fire Department into the special tax district for the fire department. Right now, those costs come from the county's general fund.
The city of Dalton has agreed to the proposed special purpose local option sales tax intergovernmental agreement, which the city wanted to overhaul before the two sides were forced to meet in the fall.
Dalton Mayor David Pennington - who won the November election over Dennis Mock by 11 votes - was thrown into the disagreements near the end. Having served as Dalton's mayor before, he knew how important it was for the two sides to reach an agreement, he said.
Pennington wasn't at the first mediation in October 2019, and when he found out that January's mediation would be behind closed doors, he figured it wouldn't be effective at all.
"The meeting was not at all what I was going in expecting it to be," Pennington said. "I wanted it to be public but it turned into a very cold meeting with the two sides passing notes back and forth. If they had told me before that it was going to be like that, I would have left, because I knew nothing was going to get done."
Instead, Pennington said once the closed-door meeting ended and the two sides participated in the court-mandated session, council members and commissioners were able to meet and talk face to face over the next several days to come to an agreement.
Both sides walked away from the negotiating table without getting everything they wanted. Pennington said that's a good thing.
"Anytime you're negotiating, if both sides are unhappy and equally dissatisfied, then I think they have come to a pretty good agreement," he said. "Neither side got all they wanted but the community, I believe, won as a whole."
Pennington said he had no doubt that an agreement would get done eventually. He said the relationships already built gave him that confidence.
"I've known some of these people for 60 years. We all have the community's best interest at heart," he said.
"I'm excited for our whole community to be able to focus on working together on several important joint initiatives," Whitfield County Board of Commissioners Chairwoman Lynn Laughter said in a news release.
Laughter said she was "glad that we are able to put aside recent disagreements for the benefit of all."
After eight hours of initial mediation on Oct. 17, the city of Dalton and Whitfield County couldn't find common ground on an agreement over government services before an Oct. 31 deadline. The county's three other municipalities - Tunnel Hill, Varnell and Cohutta - had sided with Whitfield County.
In November, the city of Dalton sued the county and the three municipalities after a deal wasn't reached. Ultimately a mediator was appointed.
The sides met again earlier this month and didn't come to an agreement until Tuesday night.
The agreement, a three-year extension, expires in 2022.
The Dalton City Council approved the measure in a unanimous 4-0 vote at Tuesday's meeting.
The county commission is expected to pass the measure at its next scheduled meeting.
Contact Patrick Filbin at pfilbin@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6476. Follow him on Twitter @PatrickFilbin.