MOULTRIE, Ga. — Moultrie and Colquitt County governments are moving to eliminate a point of conflict by creating an independent authority to govern the recreation department.

Moultrie City Council voted Tuesday to ask the state Legislature to create the authority, which would have its own power of taxation. City Manager Pete Dillard said County Commission had already approved making the request.

“The City of Moultrie has provided a recreation department second to none for decades,” Dillard said. A significant concern was to keep the quality of the program under the new format. “We all fear change a little bit,” he said.

Nonetheless, he’s been a supporter of the proposed authority. “I do believe it eliminates a potential source of conflict with the county,” he said.

In the beginning, the city operated the recreation department for city residents. It provided sports facilities, parks and organized sports competition.

At some point, the county contracted to pay the city part of the operation expenses so county residents could participate too. That contract has become a point of friction in recent years because the county can’t verify how many residents outside the city of Moultrie actually use recreation department facilities. While the addresses of participants in organized sports programs could be obtained, how could someone tell how many people using the walking trail live in the city and how many outside the city? Without knowing how many residents from outside the city were using city facilities, the county had a hard time knowing what a fair payment plan was.

An independent authority might solve that problem. The authority could levy ad valorem taxes on its own and not need money from city and county governments. Dillard said the plan would be for the authority to levy 1.25 mills of property tax and for the city and county governments to decrease their tax levies by a similar amount so the tax payer would see no change — but that isn’t written into the law.

The law says the authority could levy no less than 1 mill and no more than 2, Dillard said, and the city and county governments would be responsible for setting their own millage, although they could justify a tax reduction because they would no longer have the expenses the Rec Department now incurs.

The city would continue to own the facilities, Dillard said, and lease them to the authority for five years. At the end of that time, the city would negotiate with the authority either a new lease or a sale. Dillard told the council he would not expect the city to ever sell any of the property, but that would be a decision for the council at that time.

A final point of concern that was raised during a city council work session on Tuesday was the disposition of employees. The proposed resolution would require the city to cede a number of employees as requested by the independent Recreation Authority, unless the city needed them for other duties. In other words, the new Recreation Authority would tell the city, “We need X number of employees,” and the city would have to provide that number of people or show that those employees were needed elsewhere. Those people would no longer be city employees but employees of the Recreation Authority and subject to the pay scale and benefits package of the authority.

Dillard said he expects it to take two or three years for the authority to establish accounting processes that would allow it to have employees at all. In the meantime, the recreation department workers would continue to be city employees with the authority reimbursing the city for their use.

The current recreation department has five full-time employees, who qualify for the city’s benefits package, city Finance Director Gary McDaniel told the council. All have lengthy times in service. The rest of the recreation  department employees are part-time and don’t qualify for benefits.

Dillard said Recreation Department Director Terry Peek told him that he was comfortable with the arrangements described in the resolution. That reduced council members’ anxiety about the employees because Peek — about three years short of retirement age — has more at stake than almost anyone else in the department.

Under the proposed resolution, the authority would be governed by a seven-member board. The city would nominate three members, the county would nominate three members, and each would nominate the seventh member on a rotating basis. All would be unpaid positions. Whichever group — city nominees or county nominees — that has only three members would select the chairman from among all seven board members. The other group would select the vice chairman, and all seven together would vote on the secretary and treasurer. Terms would be for three years, but initial terms would be shorter; that way only about one-third of the board would be replaced in any given year.

No one at the meeting speculated how quickly the Legislature would act on the resolution, but local legislation seldom has opposition if the affected governments are in agreement, which the city and county are in this case.