‘If we owed a dime, we’d pay it,’ Fulton Chair says on Atlanta water bill amid animal service fight

FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — Amid a tense few days for the Fulton County Commission and City of Atlanta involving contracts and payments for animal control services, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners addressed one part of the back-and-forth at their Wednesday meeting.

On Friday, Channel 2 Action News reported that Atlanta officials alleged the county owed the city nearly $6 million for unpaid water bills.

The amount was close to the bill that the Fulton County Commission wanted to charge the City of Atlanta to renew its animal services contract with the county, a cost ballparked around $6.5 million, up from $2.5 million previously.

Friday marked a heated back and forth between the city and county, ending, at least for now, with a lack of agreement on how to operate animal control services.

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At Wednesday’s commission meeting, Chairman Robb Pitts brought the water bill up for discussion.

“During my several conversations with Mayor Dickens last Thursday and Friday, he brought up to me that the county owes the city approximately $5.7 million in outstanding, past due water bills,” Pitts said.

While Pitts said he told Mayor Andre Dickens he had been unaware of it, he promised that he would review documentation showing it for the county’s bill and would pay it if it was indeed owed. Pitts said he’d asked the mayor to provide the documents so they could take care of the account.

“I said I was not aware of that but that I committed to him that if we owed a dime, we would pay it,” Pitts said.

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The county’s Chief Financial Officer was reviewing the outstanding payments, according to County Manager Richard Anderson.

“I do think this dates back decades,” Anderson said, “so there’s quite a bit of spade work to do to get to really what the numbers are.”

County CFO Sharon Whitmore said the county had more than 90 accounts with the City of Atlanta related to water, but that the largest one in question was likely the water usage at Fulton County’s Rice Street Jail.

“The largest account is the 901 Rice Street Jail, which is the Fulton County Jail, that’s also the account they indicate has the largest outstanding balance, according to their records,” Whitmore said. “We have been working with them dating back to the early mid-90s, on clearing, or reconciling balances, outstanding balances. Some of this relates to a sewer escrow account that was established in the mid-80s that we requested the details of how they held the account, they applied payments to our sewer charges against that account.”

Whitmore also said that in the early 2000s when the city transitioned to United Water, the county received communication then about an outstanding balance, but despite requests for more information, “no details were provided.”

The CFO added that part of the delay in fully reconciling the accounts was due to turnover at both the city government and county government. Whitmore said she asked the city to provide the relevant documents so they can compile them to find an accurate and more current dollar amount for payment purposes.

She added that meetings with the city’s own CFO and the Atlanta Watershed Management Department were being scheduled.

Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. said the back and forth between the two governments over animal services and water was “a tangled web” and said he would be motioning to restore animal services to the city.

Other commissioners raised concerns about getting the information so that it could not be continually used as “a negotiation tactic” while working on the animal services contract issue.

Whitmore told commissioners that in previous communications, an exact dollar amount had not been provided since at least 2019, up to the point where the animal services negotiations began in the current cycle.

Commissioner Natalie Hall asked if the county had tried to resolve it, and Whitmore explained that county officials had repeatedly requested the information needed to resolve it, but it had never been delivered until outstanding balances grew large, a process that she said documents show had repeated for several years, dating back to the mid-1990s.

Both the water billing balance from Fulton County and the animal services contract with the City of Atlanta remain, at this point, unresolved.

Channel 2 Action News has reached out to the Atlanta Mayor’s Office for more information about the water bill from Fulton County.

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