Well, he didn't exactly say that, but he's already put in place a mechanism that if, approved by the lame-duck city council this week, would fast-track work on deciding how to spend the bond proceeds. Sort of like a football team going into a "no-huddle offense" to speed play. The council is to meet in special called session on Thursday to consider a plan offered by the mayor-elect last week that would create a 16-member citizens' committee to make recommendations on the bond.
It would be modeled on a similar committee that has guided the Cobb Board of Commissioners as it spends the $80 million in proceeds from its 2006 and 2008 parks bonds.
"We're going to kind of copy the county," he told me late this week.
Tumlin tipped his hands to the council, media and others via e-mail last Sunday morning.
"I have neither voice nor vote at the moment, so I used e-mail," he said. "I'm in sort of a gray area in terms of protocol, and I just wanted to bring it to a head. We might as well start the process now. There's no need to lose five or six weeks" waiting till he is formally sworn in in January.
"I would hope we could hit the ground running in early December," he said.
The citizens committee - if approved by the council - would consist of two appointments by each council member and two by the mayor. In a gracious move, Tumlin suggests that lame-duck Mayor Bill Dunaway make one of the two mayoral selections. Similarly, outgoing Ward 3 Councilwoman Holly Walquist, who was the park bond's loudest advocate on the council, but who was defeated on Election Day, would get one of the two Ward 3 picks. The other would go to her successor, Johnny Sinclair.
(That opens up the possibility for Sinclair to name Walquist as his representative on the committee, should he desire to do so. Or Walquist could conceivably even name herself.)
Tumlin calls the decision to allow the lame-ducks to name members "a good faith gesture on my part, but also a compliment to the council that got it passed. Whether they were pro or con about the referendum doesn't matter now. The people have spoken, and we're committed to it now. No one has to apologize for whether they were for or against it before."
Tumlin concedes that a 16-member committee could be unwieldy.
"But it's doable," he added. "The more ideas and information you have, the better the decision you'll reach. I hope they leave no stone unturned"
Tumlin added that the members of Marietta Progress Inc., the advocacy group formed at the last-minute to promote the bond, should have a strong presence on the committee.
He also admitted that creating such a committee might make the bond decisions less likely to be snarled in the council's cumbersome and easy-to-manipulate committee system, and also might bring more of a city-wide approach, rather than a ward-based approach.
"Let's look forward with optimism and lots of citizen input. The council will still control the final decision, but we'll have more information. And you get more public enthusiasm this way," he said. "The appointees will probably be very pro-parks people and not be as inclined to look at the boundaries between the wards and who gets what."
The citizens' committee and the council's bond committee both would be headed by east Marietta Councilman Jim King, Tumlin said.
"He's an engineer, he's pragmatic, balanced and fair and known for being the councilman that's least likely to start a battle with another ward," Tumlin said.
After years of constant feuding and bickering, the new mayor and council now have a chance to wipe the slate clean and start over, and that's what Tumlin's hoping for, too.
"It could help get us off to a good start. If we argue about who gets what, this bond could be a real albatross around our neck. I'd rather it be a nice Christmas present to the people of Marietta."
So do we all.
Joe Kirby is Editorial Page Editor of the Marietta Daily Journal and co-author of the new "Then & Now: Marietta Revisited."
Post a Comment
Follow us on Twitter!