MARIETTA - For years - decades, even - members of Marietta City Council have met for dinner shortly after adjourning the council meetings. And what now clearly qualifies as a tradition continues, even though the city's new mayor heads home after meetings and questions the dinner gathering, and at least one council member does not attend and openly condems the practice.

One sentence on the city's Web site, that "Informal discussion will immediately follow at the Marietta Diner, 306 Cobb Parkway," is the only notice the council gives citizens about the gathering. On Wednesday night, five of the seven council members, as well as the city manager and city attorney, had dinner together after the council meeting.

A dinner meeting is perfectly legal, and Marietta isn't the only city in Cobb where leaders have a post-meeting meal (Kennesaw does, too). But such gatherings do raise a glaring question in a day when governments talk frequently about transparency: Is it a good practice?

No less than Mayor Steve "Thunder" Tumlin doesn't think so.

"If it could be perceived the wrong way, it's like a secret meeting," the mayor said. "Perception is a major concern of mine, and always has been."

The mayor said he doesn't attend the meetings because, "I'm fighting to have a balanced life. We meet a lot, so when the meeting is over, I'm ready to go home."

"You could find merit with the socializing," the mayor said. However, "it's not the type of thing that an interested citizen who didn't know anything could feel comfortable walking up to a table of people. So I don't think [a dinner meeting] has all the attributes of an open meeting."

"Philip Goldstein says it has been a practice for over 30 years. But if it's sending the wrong message and we can't justify it, I think we need to stop it," Tumlin said. "We do not want to send a message to the people we represent that we're not in compliance with the Sunshine law. We always have to be on guard that we're not breaking the spirit of the law."

Councilman Jim King refuses to attend the dinner meetings.

"I do not think they are appropriate, but that's only my opinion. I'm not condemning anybody who choses to go. But generally, it excludes the public," King said. "For me, it's wrong. We have rules about doing all of our work in public. I just can't see the people I represent showing up and injecting themselves into the table."

King does not believe that his fellow council members are conducting business in secret.

"They certainly cannot and never have voted there," he said. "But you could argue that decisions are made and deferred until you can legally make them."

He also doesn't think most citizens are aware of the dinner meetings, although he said, "I don't think most people know we meet every second Wednesday, either. So I'm positive that most people don't know about [the dinner meetings]."

"It's not against the law," King said. "But I don't think it's proper."

Councilman Anthony Coleman also does not attend the dinners.

"Usually I go home because I'm tired," Coleman said.

Councilman Philip Goldstein said the practice started in the 1970s, before he was elected to office.

"Basically, you have a number of elected officials, that constitutes a quorum, having dinner and engaging in conversation," he said Wednesday night at Marietta Diner. "There's no action that's taken at this. There's no vote that's taken at this."

However, during the campaign season last fall, then-Councilwoman Holly Walquist told the Journal that she had learned about the city's refinancing of the bonds on the Marietta Conference Center at one of the dinner meetings.

Goldstein said "no one has to preside" at the dinner meetings, and that although they are held in a noisy restaurant, he doesn't have any trouble hearing what others at the table are saying.

"If you had a whole crowd of folks in here you may not hear as well. But it is important to socialize. If you have a relationship with someone where you know them better than just seeing them in a meeting, it's much better to work things out. And quite candidly, that's the problem with a lot of other places such as Washington, D.C., and Congress. If you had more socializing, you could probably get more things worked out."

But is it a best practice for open government?

"Of course," the councilman said.

Why not do it at city hall, where it could be filmed and then available for any citizen to see?

"We do committee meetings and we do not film those," he said. "This is an informal social get-together of the city council. What's wrong with that?"

Johnny Sinclair, who was elected to the council again last fall after having sat out for a term, also sees a benefit to the dinner meetings.

"We've got a lot of personality conflicts on the city council, which we haven't always had, so I think it's good for us to be able to break bread together. When we can get along better as a group, I think we can get more things accomplished," he said.

"Of course the public is always invited to come sit with us," Sinclair said. "If the public came, which they never do, they would be welcome to sit at the table with us."

"Obviously, we talk about what just happened in the council meeting, and what we thought about it," Sinclair said. "It's impossible not to" discuss city issues when council members are together, he said.

"I acknowledge that," Sinclair said.

The practice has been going on so long, council members and city leaders say, that the notice is just routinely posted by city staff.

When asked who calls the meeting, city manager Bill Bruton said, "That's a good question."

"The mayor does not call the meeting," Bruton said.

Does anyone say in front of the television cameras, 'hey we're going to the Marietta Diner, come join us'?

"That's probably a good idea," Bruton replied.

But as for whether the dinner meeting itself is a good idea, though, Bruton said, "I'm not going to answer whether it's a best practice or anything."

Should it be televised?

Bruton laughed but said, "It would be fine if it was. Though the public would be extremely bored of anything that they would see on the televised part of it."

City attorney Doug Haynie said he always has dinner with the council members, though he said attending is his personal choice - and he's not billing the city for his time at the restaurant.

"I give them no legal advice there," said Haynie, though his firm earns about $400,000 per year from city work. "Most of the conversation is socializing, talking about kids, grandkids, vacations, sports, that kind of thing."

Everybody pays for their own meals, he said.

"I think it's a very good practice, for team building among the elected officials. They get to know each other. They get to know how to work better together. They can exchange ideas," Haynie said.

"They meet long enough to order dinner, eat dinner and go home," he said. "Sometimes it's midnight when they get there, so nobody's interested in staying long. And there are times they don't go at all."

Haynie said the city does not make the managers of Marietta Diner aware that the council members will be coming.

"We just show up. The Diner people don't know who we are, I would assume. We're like any other table of seven or eight people having dinner together," he said.

Ron Bucksot, a city resident who keeps an eye on city workings, said he has approached council members at a dinner meeting.

"Here you can present your case in a casual setting," he said. "One reason the public doesn't go is the god-awful length of the council meetings. The hours they spend down there is ridiculous."

Leaders in Smyrna and Acworth say their council members never meet for dinner before or after a council meeting. Kennesaw Mayor Mark Mathews, though, said a few council members there do go eat together after meetings.

"It's usually just a few of us. It's just a social thing. Since we're at the meeting anyway, we'll just go have dinner together. Anyone and everyone is welcome to attend, and there have been times people will go with us who have been at the meeting, or people will come up to us in the restaurant and pull up a chair," Mathews said.