Marietta Mayor Bill Dunaway just will not go quietly into the night.

His latest noise is accusing the city council and the Marietta Daily Journal of wasting $1.3 million of taxpayer money by delaying, for a month the approval of the DMDA hotel bond refinancing.

This, of course is inaccurate, but it does raise some interesting questions.

In 2007, Dunaway announced he had found a way out of the hotel and conference center problem and convinced the City Council to approved a new lease and franchise agreement with Dallas-based Remington Hospitality. Remington sought the Hilton Corporation to operate the taxpayers' white elephant, but to close the deal the city had to bring the 13-year-old hotel up to Hilton standards.

Marietta taxpayers swallowed a $7 million increase in the DMDA hotel bond debt to finance the improvements, increasing the hotel's total debt to over $30 million.

Dunaway claimed the city no longer to be in the hotel business, and "the landlord of an operation that is paying off the (DMDA hotel) debt and one day the city will be free and clear of that debt."

In August 2007, Marietta's Finance Director sent a memo to the City Council setting up the accounts for the FY08 refinancing of the public safety bond in the amount of $9.6 million, the school bond in the amount of $30.6 million and the golf course bond in the amount of $4.8 million and the $7 million increase in the Hotel/ Conference center bond. At the same time, the credit market was melting down, causing disruptions in the variable rate municipal bond market.

It is unclear how Marietta's team of financial advisors failed to see this train wreck and continued with the variable rate offering on the DMDA hotel bond.

Less than a year after Dunaway claimed he had solved the city's hotel dilemma, and about six months after the 2008 series school bond, public safety, golf course and DMDA hotel bonds were refunded, the city administration started buying back the $30 million-plus variable rate DMDA hotel bonds it had just issued.

The reason for this was that the lease payments Remington paid the city were fixed for 20 years while the DMDA hotel bond payments were variable, and in September 2008, interest rates on the bonds started increasing to the point that Remington's lease payments to the city no longer covered the debt payment.

Compounding this problem was the fact that the city had lost its ability to lower hotel debt borrowing costs because the 2008 hotel DMDA variable bonds were linked to derivatives. Such bond packages had become popular because they appeared to offer cities both the lower borrowing costs of variable-rate bonds and the predictability of fixed-rate bonds.

According to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, these "structures broke down during (the 2008) market turmoil, leaving some municipalities staggering under more debt than they can afford."

As early as August or September of 2008 city officials and their financial advisors came up with a plan to "stop the bleeding."

The solution was simple: Pay off the outstanding DMDA hotel bond debt and issue a new bond with a fixed rate. But its execution was complicated for two reasons. Where would the city get money to buy back the funds, and how could they be reissued without public knowledge or approval, i.e. referendum.

The inner circle knew the public's sensitivities to the tax dollars already wasted on the conference center and the mayor's 2007 boast, and wanted to avoid bringing this blunder out of the closet.

In November 2008, the city started buying back the bonds using "unrestricted" cash from to the Board of Lights and Water and the city's short-term investment accounts without the approval of the council.

It was about this time that Marietta's city manager should have presented this problem to the city council and the public along with all possible solutions. Instead, another year passed before the cat was let out of the bag. What's more, when it was finally revealed it had to be approved immediately "to save the taxpayer money," according to Dunaway.

Members of the council, who had been kept out of the bonding fiasco loop, balked at immediate approval and formed a committee to study this problem. Now Dunaway, in another one of his infamously inaccurate electronic epistles, claims that had the city council "voted on the re-financing at the Council meeting at the first of September (2009), they would have been issued at the first of October," and that this delay cost the taxpayer $1.3 million.

In fact, the wasted tax dollars can be laid at the city manager's and the mayor's feet. They knew this problem existed at least a year before they presented it to the council and public, avoiding the time needed for deliberate discussions and an informed vote by the council.

Dunaway is about to receive a pension payment from the taxpayer and City Manager Bill Bruton recently received a 12.1 percent pay increase.

I would suggest Councilman Grif Chalfant's bond committee review the matter of fault brought up by Dunaway, and if it rests with Dunaway and Bruton, a "claw back" of their pension and pay increase be initiated.

It is time for accountability for bad local governance. It is time that elected officials and bureaucrats suffer the consequences of their bad decision making. There is a limit to the amount of money taxpayers can continue to pay for their million-dollar mistakes.

Larry Wills is a retired recycling consultant.