MARIETTA - Cobb County may be gearing up to ask voters in November to approve a one cent special purpose local option sales tax for transportation and park improvements.

"This is county-initiated," city manager Bill Bruton told the Marietta City Council at its retreat on Saturday at the Hilton Marietta Conference Center.

"(County) staff notified all the cities that they're going to go for a SPLOST vote in November," Bruton said.

While the numbers are preliminary, the tax would be divided into 75 percent for transportation and 25 percent for park improvements.

The tax would collect an estimated $872 million. Marietta's portion of that amount would be a projected $84 million, broken down into $63 million for transportation and $21 million for parks, he said.

But not so fast, Cobb Board of Commissioners Chairman Sam Olens said when contacted by the Journal late Saturday.

"This is a very early draft. The (county commission) has made no decisions yet with regard to another SPLOST. We like to have our staffs work together on such processes," Olens said.

Olens went a step further, saying a SPLOST vote this year was "unlikely in my opinion."

Back at the retreat, Bruton said the county has asked the city to compile a proposed list of earmarks for spending the $84 million in anticipated city collections by April.

Mayor Steve Tumlin said if the proposed $21 million earmarked for park money came in at one time just as the $25 million parks bond issue city voters approved last November did, it would be "overkill." But unlike a bond, a SPLOST is spread out over six years and would not go into effect until 2012. Tumlin views the proposal as a continuation of the six-year transportation/public safety SPLOST Cobb voters approved in 2005.

"In the simplest of terms, we're voting to make it an ongoing source of revenue. We'll never be able to spike the ball on transportation. There will always be one more project to do," Tumlin said.

Council members asked if they could swap the proposed $21 million earmarked for city parks in the 2012 SPLOST for public safety expenses instead. Marietta Police and Fire Chiefs Dan Flynn and Jackie Gibbs say the city needs a police/fire training facility since city firefighters and police officers have to go out of the county to complete their training requirements.

"It's a huge overtime issue," Flynn said.

Besides cutting down on overtime, a Marietta fire/police training facility could bring in revenue to the city by charging other public safety agencies who opted to obtain their training there, Flynn said.

Councilman Philip Goldstein said he'd like to see a cost-benefit analysis on the proposal before moving forward.

The city would need about 20 acres for a training facility for police and firefighters to house such things as a firing range and driving course for police car driving maneuvers, Bruton said.

The city's Public Works department located by the Marietta Board of Lights and Water building is another facility that needs to be either renovated or replaced, having deteriorated since its construction in the 1960s, Bruton said.

In other news, Flynn announced that the Marietta Police Department was awarded a $56,289 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice that will allow him to outfit all his police cars with automated external defibrillators, a portable electronic device that treats heart attacks by shocking the heart back into its regular rhythm. Marietta ambulances and fire trucks already have them, but police cars are usually the first to respond to an event because they're the closest in the area, Bruton said.

"With a heart attack it's extremely important to cut down on the amount of minutes between when the heart attack hits and the service is given and so we anticipate that we'll be able to save lives by having this equipment," Bruton said.