VOTERS MORE THAN EVER are demanding openness and transparency of their elected officials these days. And new Marietta Mayor Steve Tumlin is off to a good start when it comes to ensuring the city government embodies such qualities - though more remains to be done. Tumlin has taken aim at several long-standing council practices, many of which three-decade council veteran Philip Goldstein has implemented and/or made shrewd use of through the years to enhance his own power and subtly look after his family's downtown business interests.

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FOR STARTERS, there is its monthly council work session, which for decades has been styled "the Committee of the Whole." It took place in the cramped council board room on the fourth floor of City Hall, with only a few spare seats for staff and the public, which often has to loiter in the hallway outside to keep track of the action.

"I haven't always been mayor, and I've stood in the hall and sat in the gosh-awful metal chairs," Tumlin said. "It chills somebody's desire to come see their government in action."

Also, the COW had no rules, did not have to operate under Robert's Rules of Order and the mayor had no veto or tie-breaking vote at such meetings. So Tumlin successfully lobbied the county's legislators to approve a local bill requiring it to follow Robert's. And just as significant, he moved those meetings - now known simply as work sessions - to the council's spacious regular meeting chambers on the first floor.

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TUMLIN ALSO HAS taken aim at the council's Wednesday night committee meetings and the pre- and post-meetings that long have bracketed its regular meetings. Each of the council's seven committees meets sequentially on the same night once a month in the tiny board room upstairs. The marathons start at 5:15 p.m. and typically run past midnight. Not only is that grueling for the council, staff, public and media, it surely deters interested residents from running for office. Few people with a responsible job and/or a family are going to devote so much time for so little. Such meetings might as well be called "candidate repellents."

Moreover, although each committee has only three members, all seven council members typically attend all seven committee meetings. That's a good indication of how little trust they have in one another. It's also not the way it's done in Congress or the Georgia General Assembly. Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee don't show up to keep an eye on the Agriculture Committee when it meets, or vice-versa.

Goldstein has long used the committee system to quietly "deep-six" proposals he does not like, and anything Tumlin can do to loosen his grip will be welcomed. Those meetings should be shortened and streamlined and moved downstairs to the main council chambers, as Tumlin wants to do, to bring more sunshine into the process.

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THE COUNCIL ALSO TRADITIONALLY has held a "pre-meeting" upstairs before each of its regular monthly meeting downstairs. It's a dress rehearsal for the real meeting, but one where real business often gets done. Much of the public is unaware of the practice, but that is where council members have one last chance to lobby each other, swap votes and iron out controversies without a crowd looking on.

It's also the last chance to have an item moved onto the "consent agenda" - the portion of the main meeting agenda onto which all items expected to gain unanimous approval are lumped for one time-saving vote.

Yet though it saves time, the consent agenda - a misnomer if there ever was one - is a disservice to the public. That's because the council views regarding the items in question have already been hashed out, often in private. The resulting unanimous vote leaves no "audit trail" for the public and media to follow in trying to determine where elected officials stand.

The council spent lavishly - $600,000 in taxpayer dollars - to renovate that chamber in 2001 and install the latest in audio/visual equipment. And that's where all such meetings should be taking place, not in some cramped cubbyhole on the fourth floor.

Tumlin is working to have those pre-meetings moved to the council chamber, along with the committee meetings. He has already persuaded the Board of Lights and Waterworks, the city utility of which he is chairman - to start holding its meetings there as well, rather than in the Marietta Power Building on North Marietta Parkway.

"It's just not (public-) friendly," the mayor said of the utility's building.

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AFTER THE CONCLUSION of the council's regular meetings, most members and select city brass traditionally have retired for a late-night repast at a local eatery, with the Marietta Diner the venue of choice on most recent occasions. The meetings technically meet the letter of the Open Meetings Act, because they are posted ahead of time. But the public is not made to feel welcome at them. Any "John Q. Citizens" who show up must try to sit at nearby tables and hope they can hear what's being said at the council table. There is no agenda for the meetings and no official business supposedly takes place. But you can be sure that city business is discussed amidst the other talk about families, sports, etc.

To his credit, the new mayor quickly made known he did not think such meetings were appropriate and did not reflect well on the council. Although he has soft-pedaled his criticism of them, neither did he show up for them. And last month when Goldstein - in clear opposition to the mayor's desires - proposed an ordinance that would have ordered the council to hold post-meeting dinner meetings, Tumlin basically laughed it out of the house.

"You're putting lipstick on a pig," he said. "To tell a council member that they 'shall' appoint a restaurant or a location or whatever you call it is absurd. I'm going to veto this because this is really below the dignity of this council, and our code deserves better respect that this. I mean, this is your own personal little thing."

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TUMLIN IS EYEING an additional change: He wants to greatly expand the number of meetings recorded and viewable on the city's website. At present the formal monthly meetings are the only ones recorded - yet they are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the number of hours the council and its committees actually meet. And much of those meetings are given over to formalities. Most of the council's "real" business is transacted in the other meetings.

"We probably only do one-tenth of the people's business (at the regular meetings)," Tumlin told the MDJ last week. "Like the other night, (we had) 30 minutes of fluff and 40 minutes of business - and yet we probably had nine hours in it. And most of the public didn't see the other nine hours or couldn't catch it if they had insomnia and went to the city Web page."

Deliberate or otherwise, such limited coverage amounts to an attempt to deceive the public. The proper course is to record everything, put it all on the Web site and then let the public sort through it to decide what it thinks is important.

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FOR TOO LONG, City Hall has been a place "where good ideas go to die," thanks to the cumbersome committee system and marathon, yet secretive meetings. That has long needed to change - and we're glad to see that thanks to the new mayor, it's finally starting to happen.