MARIETTA'S $25 MILLION PARKS BOND almost didn't pass on Tuesday - but it did, by 59 votes. Now what? Are we due for more years of arguing and city council power plays as members - many of whom openly opposed the bond's passage - continue to fight like Mafioso for their "rightful share" of its proceeds? If it's business as usual at city hall, the answer will be yes. But it doesn't have to be that way.

The bond effort didn't even have an advocacy group pushing on its behalf until almost the very last minute.

Usually, such groups spring up as soon as a bond or SPLOST push starts. Not this time. It was only in the final month prior to referendum day that an ad hoc group, Marietta Progress Inc., was formed to push for its passage. That a group was formed at all seemed mostly due to the efforts of one person, retired CPA Steve Imler, who shelled out $5,000 from his own pocket to pay for start-up costs. His energy, and that of Chairwoman Kim Gresh of S.A. White Oil Co., and BLW member Arthur Vaughn, who took the helm of the fledgling group with just a few weeks to go, proved decisive. It's a reminder that two or three people can make a difference, and that five or 10 working together can sometimes move mountains. Or, as unfortunately was too often the case with the current council, seven people and a mayor working without a common goal won't accomplish much of anything.

The good news is that incoming Mayor Steve "Thunder" Tumlin is a quiet consensus-builder. And that the new council, which with one exception (Johnny Sinclair) will be holdovers from the old council, seems more than willing to put some of the acrimony to bed, at least for a while. We'll see how long that lasts. (Unfortunately, the bond's biggest supporter on the council, Holly Walquist, lost to Sinclair by just a handful of votes.)

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BUT ASIDE FROM BETTER PERSONAL RELATIONS, are there any steps that could be taken to make the process of selecting which lands to acquire for new parks, and how best to spend the money on existing parks, less toxic? Yes, in fact. And the city council need look no further than its own backyard for a prime example of how to do that kind of thing the right way. We're talking, of course, about how the Cobb government has gone about spending the proceeds of its $40 million 2006 parks bond and how it's now doing the same with the proceeds of its $40 million follow-up 2008 parks bond. The county's parks program has seen mostly smooth sailing with just minimal grumbling and geography-driven tug-of-wars. Why has its process been so different than Marietta's?

For starters, its board of commissioners and chairman, Sam Olens, are much more cohesive than the dysfunctional Marietta mayor and council were during the same period. But there are other factors at work other than just personalities.

* The county invited the public into the selection process, and the board followed the recommendations of the citizens' committee almost to the letter - something impossible to imagine the current mayor and council ever doing.

* The county process was as depoliticized as possible. And those driving it on the committee and the board deliberately took a "county-wide" view from the outset - i.e., they did what was best for everyone, not fight for funding district by district.

* The county's citizens' committee established a set of objective criteria that it has applied consistently when recommending tracts to purchase.

* It gathered substantive, objective data, reviewed it, then gathered qualitative data by visiting each site.

* The county communicated well with the public via public hearings and postings on its Web site, and encouraged the public to comment on the process via that Web site;

* And with the exception of Hyde Farm, the county invited citizens groups to take part in the planning process for each park site it acquired.

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YES, ONLY $5 MILLION of the city bond is for land acquisition. But the same sort of public-driven analysis of the city's other parks needs and priorities is the way to go in determining how to spend the other $20 million, rather than farming that out to a high-priced consultant or vesting most of the significant decisions about the bond with the council's Parks & Recreation Committee. The planning should be done looking at the city's parks as a whole, not as a one-off, hodge-podge of miscellaneous projects, as some seem to want.

Moreover, while it has been suggested that each council member might be able to appoint a member to a special citizens committee that would give input on the parks bond, the better approach, again, would be to mimic what Cobb has done. Each of the county's five commissioners appointed not one but three members to the citizens' advisory committee. That would translate to a 21-member city committee (or 24 if the mayor got to appoint people too, which he should). If that sounds too unwieldy, have each council member appoint two. A bigger committee adds diversity of views and voices and makes it less likely that each member of a smaller, single-appointee committee would just be a pawn for the council member who appointed him or her. It would be even better if in making the appointments, the council members were encouraged to give at least one of their appointments to someone who did not live in their wards. That would help foster a city-wide, rather than ward-based, approach to spending the money.

It's also key that the council respect the committee's recommendations at every step of the process, not blow them off. This needs to be a community-driven process, not a council-driven one that is easily susceptible to manipulation.

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THE NEW COUNCIL - many members of which were openly opposed to the bond - is about to have a great big pot of other people's money to play with. Let's hope it doesn't devolve into a game of "I, me, mine."

Keep your fingers crossed.

Joe Kirby is Editorial Page Editor of the Marietta Daily Journal and co-author of the new "Then & Now: Marietta Revisited."