TALK ABOUT UPSTAGING YOURSELF ... The Cobb school system had announced there would be two public input forums to get advice on where to find what were then being described as $100 million in cuts from the $900 million FY2011 budget that takes effect July 1. But Superintendent Fred Sanderson torpedoed that plan just hours before the second one took place this week, turning what had been advertised as a session for allowing the public to give input on the budget into a session at which the public was told what kind of cuts to expect. In other words, the public was given the "input," instead of giving it.

As school watchers know, the second of the sessions to get input from the public on what and where to cut was slated for 7 p.m. Wednesday at Campbell High in vice Chairwoman Holli Cash's district. Remember that school officials had said repeatedly that "nothing was off the table" and the agenda for both hearings was to be public input. Sanderson said that specifics about the cuts were still down the road until after the state Legislature finalized its budget and funding levels for local districts.

But believe it or not, late Wednesday afternoon prior to the supposed "listening session" Sanderson released two pages of specific cuts to both the principals and the school board. At least two board members (Dr. John Crooks and Alison Bartlett) were reportedly furious at being blindsided by Sanderson and by his decision to release the cuts with no board input. (As for the other five, they probably didn't care, as bypassing the elected board is SOP for Sanderson.) Moreover, it stands to reason that the board should have been the first to get the "heads up" on the cuts from Sanderson, inasmuch as he and the principals work for the board, not the other way around.

It was a strange scenario, but unfortunately not a new one for this school board.

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ALSO THIS WEEK, school system communications czar Jay Dillon turned down a MDJ request for the names of the low bidders for the district's artificial turf project that has been held up by a court injunction. The school board was slapped with an injunction March 15 by Cobb Senior Superior Court Judge Watson White two days before the board was to OK the winning bids.

Even though the district reportedly got "good news" bids well below the targeted $1 million per football field, Dillon said he would not release the bid winners until the contracts were awarded. When MDJ reminded him that he and then-Super Joe Redden had announced months well in advance of the vote back in February 2005 that Apple was the winner for the system's plan to spend $100.8 million equipping each middle and high school student with a take-home laptop computer, a plan later nixed by a court order, Dillon didn't respond. So is the CCSD making up the rules as it goes?

At Thursday night's school board meeting the district's transparency policy was again exposed as a sham. Remember how after newspapers all over Georgia reported last summer about the school board's secret votes and illegal discussions in executive sessions that had been going on for years, longtime board attorney Glenn Brock issued a "mea culpa" of sorts, saying the unlawful meetings would no longer take place and additionally that he would, in the name of transparency, regularly update the board and the public on legal issues such as status of lawsuits against the district?

Well, it now turns out that the CCSD was sued on Wednesday in federal court by a school bus driver fired for speaking out. And the board, AT has learned, was briefed on the lawsuit by Brock Clay lawyer Clem Doyle, who was subbing for his boss, Brock, in executive session Thursday evening. Yet there was no public mention during the meeting of the lawsuit, which was filed on the driver's behalf by high-powered lawyer Peter Canfield of the well-known Atlanta firm Dow Lohnes.

Of course, Thursday night marked the second time the board has met since being blistered by the most recent session of the Cobb grand jury for its "gross mismanagement" of the transportation system - and it marked as well the second time the board has essentially "ducked and covered" rather than have any substantive discussion in public of that spanking. You'll recall that member Bartlett finally brought it up just as Chairwoman Lynnda Crowder-Eagle was about to gavel the prior meeting to a close; and that member Dr. John Abraham's goofy solution for cleaning up the system's mess was a proposal to invite the city managers of Acworth and Kennesaw to investigate the alleged mismanagement of the transportation department.

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IN ADDITION TO DOING AN END RUN around his board on the budget cuts, Sanderson also ducked several MDJ questions about the just-proposed cuts.

Asked via e-mail if any of his so-called "executive cabinet" members in the central office or if any or all of the six area assistant superintendents would be eliminated, Sanderson did not respond.

When he first ran for the school board in 2006 and early on after he was elected, then-maverick Abraham several times questioned the need for the area supers, who had been brought on board to fill positions created during the Redden administration. Abraham argued the area supers were an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.

Abraham missed most of the Thursday board budget session because he had been snowed in on a skiing trip to Colorado.

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QUALITY. NOT QUANTITY. That is the key factor in the county’s future development, warned Cobb Commission Chairman Sam Olens on Thursday at the conclusion of his final speech in office. He is resigning Tuesday to run for the GOP nod for state attorney general.

An overflow crowd was on hand for his speech to the Marietta Kiwanis Club at the Marietta Conference Center. Among those on hand were numerous local judges, Marietta Mayor Thunder Tumlin, southwest Cobb Commissioner Woody Thompson and northeast Cobb Commissioner Tim Lee, who will be resigning shortly himself in order to run for Olens’ soon-to-be-empty seat as chair.

Olens declared at the outset that as a short-timer he felt free to include some less than upbeat items in his talk.

“There are a couple nuggets in here that I previously would not have mentioned,” he said. “But what can you do to me? In five days I’m going to be unemployed anyway!”

For a full account of Olens’ remarks, read Bill Kinney’s Sunday column on these pages. His comments about the need to keep density under control came during the Q&A session after the conclusion of his remarks, and were in answer to a query from Northwest Cobb YWCA director Holly Comer. She asked what he would have done differently during his terms as chairman.

“We probably needed to focus earlier on reducing the densities of residential development,” he said after a few moments’ reflection. “It is a huge issue. We need to have our high density along I-75 and I-285 and I-20 and U.S. 41. We need to cool our density everywhere else.

“Some of the cities started helping us early on and some later on,” he said, adding that he had no problem with some of the high density developments planned in downtown Marietta, such as the now-stalled Meeting Place.

“Those were not an issue,” he explained. “They were in the center of a city. I’m talking about from an unincorporated Cobb perspective. It should be near the interstates and we ought to leave the rest alone. It took us several years to get to the realization that you should always be looking at quality and not jumping with everyone else that was looking at quantity. Remember that property taxes (from development) never pay for the future services unless it’s straight commercial.

“The fact of the matter is that this decade (the 2000s) before the recession we were already having our slowest growth since the ‘60s, both percentage-wise and in real numbers, with under 10,000 new residents per year. That’s the way you should continue post-recession. We don’t need to compete with Gwinnett and have 25,000 more folks on I-285. We need to concentrate on quality alone. And with that quality will come better quality of life, pardon the pun. The quantity game needs to be dead forever at that point for this county.”

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OLENS ALSO MENTIONED that among the accomplishments he’s most proud of are the purchase of two empty shopping centers for use as county facilities — the county annex on Whitlock Avenue and the senior citizens center/county office complex being developed on Powder Springs Road.

He said the county has made two offers on the KFC outparcel in the latter shopping center, with no response from the owners.

“This is a buyer’s market, so I’m not going to negotiate against myself,” he said. “We’re probably $100,000 apart, and they need to go down before I would recommend anything further.”

Meanwhile, stores in the shopping center across the road are getting new tenants and the area is looking up, he said.

“The halo effect is already happening. It will be a great benefit to those who live in that area,” he said. “Those two shopping centers are among the things I’m most proud of. It will be a huge gain for those folks on the south side of Marietta.”

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SICK BAY: Best wishes to Winston Strickland, proprietor of Strick’s Grill and Strick’s Barbershop on Hunt Street just down the hill from Marietta City Hall. The Cartersville resident and Marietta community leader slipped in the rain last week outside Roy Barnes’ law office and broke an arm, necessitating surgery at WellStar Kennestone Hospital to insert metal plates and pins. He’s still at Kennestone undergoing therapy. From his friends at Around Town, a big, “Get well soon, Strick!”