THE BACKLASH CONTINUES from this week's muddled attempt to rehire retiring Cobb Elections Director Sharon Dunn, which has turned into a fiasco for those involved. The county commission is to vote Sept. 14 on whether to give a $25,000 consulting contract to Dunn, who is taking early retirement from the county as of Tuesday. County officials have said they want Dunn on hand for November's elections to ensure a smooth transition for successor Janine Eveler, who was hired Thursday by the Board of Elections to succeed Dunn.

But Around Town has been told by a source very familiar with the elections board that Eveler is "totally capable" of running elections without Ms. Dunn. In fact, the same source said there were at least two elections board staffers capable of filling Ms. Dunn's shoes overseeing the 19-person department.

Meanwhile, a courthouse source has told AT that Ms. Dunn, and perhaps several members of the Elections Board, had been pressing the county for a $1,600-a-day contract (that's $200 per hour) for the statewide electoral consulting business she is in the process of starting. AT has been told by several sources that Dunn wanted to peg that $1,600 figure as the base rate for her new business. The source says there's no doubt Ms. Dunn, who has headed Cobb's elections department for 32 years, is probably the most qualified elections superintendent in Georgia. Her new business is sure to be a success with or without Cobb's contract largess, he said.

AT's source says Ms. Dunn was very aggressive in the rates she quoted the county, but dropped her request to $800 a day as the time grew near to go public with the contract proposal.

The Dunn contract was supposed to be a last-minute addition to the agenda for Tuesday's commission meeting. But such last-minute moves often are red flags to seasoned observers. And veteran northeast Cobb Commissioner Thea Powell was the one who put the brakes on this one, saying the board needed more time to consider it. The commission then tabled the matter until the 14th.

Courthouse observers noted that new Commission Chairman Tim Lee and southeast Cobb Commissioner Bob Ott had seemed poised to approve the deal before Powell began asking questions. One politico noted that Lee seemed so surprised by the questions that he looked "like a deer in the headlights." And northwest Cobb Commissioner Helen Goreham, though silent at the time, now reportedly credits Powell for upsetting the applecart.

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DUNN APPLIED for a $49,900 buyout as part of the county's push to help balance the budget by encouraging senior employees to take early retirement. But the Dunn deal gets suspicious when one realizes that although she gave the county her retirement notice early in the year, the elections board did little to nail down a replacement for her until after the embarrassing news broke this week of the lucrative consulting deal that was pending for her. The five-member elections board is selected by the commission. It hires the elections supervisor, whose hiring and salary are subject to commission approval.

Several critics of the Dunn deal tell AT that Elections Board Chair Beverly Smith and member Rob Garcia reportedly told Dunn they would hold off on hiring her replacement in order to let the cushy consulting contract kick in after her retirement.

And although Ms. Dunn may still get a consulting contract from the county through the rest of the year, don't look for it to be as lucrative as first proposed now that the sweetheart deal has been exposed and caused such a flap, and now that well-informed sources say Ms. Eveler is perfectly capable of doing the job without Dunn looking over her shoulder.

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SICK BAY: Retired Marietta Square haberdasher and WWII veteran Davis Walker was in the ICU at WellStar Kennestone for a day or two late this week after falling and needing 18 stitches to close a gash in his head, but is now in a regular room. We’re sure once he’s well he’ll do a “make-up” for the Marietta Kiwanis Club meeting he missed on Thursday. Walker has a quite a string going: 59 years of perfect attendance. … State Capitol researcher Gail Kaley of east Cobb is back at home after spending a week in the hospital due to complications from a colonoscopy.

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ALL THREE gubernatorial candidates — Democrat Roy Barnes, Republican Nathan Deal and Libertarian John Monds — are expected to be on hand for today’s forum at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. The 1 p.m. event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Medical Association of Georgia and an array of other medical organizations.

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MARIETTA WARD 4 Councilman Van Pearlberg will sponsor a town hall meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the City Hall council chamber to discuss traffic-calming devices for Campbell Hill Street and to give an update on how WellStar Kennestone Hospital’s plans are impacting traffic in that neighborhood.

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WEST COBB barbecue guru Gene Morris will host a barbecue for Cobb State Court candidate Jason Fincher at his home on Kennesaw Due West Road Sept. 12. Cost is $50 per family.

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HIGHLIGHTING the first full week of the high school football season was the trip by new coach Scott Burton’s Marietta High Blue Devils to Austell to play South Cobb High.

The game also marked the first regular season contest played on the Eagles’ new artificial turf system with money raised through SPLOST III to make sure all 16 Cobb County School District stadiums have rubber carpets.

Once the project is complete only four schools in Cobb County that play GHSA football will be without artificial turf — North Cobb Christian, Mount Paran Christian, Walker and Marietta.

It begs the question; would the Blue Devils ever play on the spongy surface at home? At historic Northcutt Stadium on Polk Street? Or in an on-campus stadium at the new high school on Whitlock Avenue?

Well, at least one MHS administrator would like to see turf — if not at Northcutt, then at least at a new stadium if one is ever constructed.

Marietta athletic director Paul Hall half-jokingly said he would be in favor of it if nothing else just to save all the money the school now spends just on painting the field.

After talking to a number of Blue Devil football boosters, it seems unlikely turf would ever be allowed to go into the soon to be 70-year old stadium on Polk Street. However, if a stadium were built at the “new” high school, it might be a different story.

At the moment, there are no plans for a stadium set in stone, but there has been informal talk about possible choices that may be made in the future. Those choices include building a football stadium that would surround the current soccer and track complex at the new high school; building a stadium on a different spot on the new high school campus; and/or renovating Northcutt.

Of course, the odds of pouring potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars into Northcutt would seem remote. The stadium is virtually landlocked, bordered on two sides by streets, which means the visiting side of the stadium cannot be altered. Doing any significant improvements to the home stands would likely eliminate the practice field behind the home stands and possibly the parking lot that lies next to it.

When the time comes to seriously begin considering whether to renovate Northcutt or to build a new stadium on the Whitlock campus, it would appear the logical choice would be to bring the football team home to its high school, instead of playing on a field originally designed for those who went to Marietta in the Great Depression.

And when the Marietta district builds the new stadium, that’s when the Blue Devils will start playing on artificial turf.

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YOU’LL RECALL that the Cobb school board initially denied this spring that it had promoted associate Superintendent Dr. Steven Constantino to deputy superintendent via a vote behind closed doors. State law prohibits votes or other final actions in secret. Boards can discuss certain matters in private, but cannot vote on them.

The board said not a word in public about Constantino’s promotion after that May 12 executive session. And there was no word of the change in the personnel report approved that day by the board.

District executives later termed the omission an “oversight.” All that was admitted to was that his duties had undergone some “realignment.”

The MDJ did not report Constantino’s promotion until a week later after being tipped off by a board member. Board spokesmen then claimed there had been no public mention of Constantino’s promotion because no pay adjustment was involved and it had therefore been considered “not newsworthy.”

Well, along with the agenda of this week’s Cobb school board meeting were the minutes of the executive session of May 12 at which Constantino was promoted. And those May 12 minutes clearly show he was promoted.

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STATE SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT candidate Joe Martin, a DeKalb Democrat, dropped by the MDJ offices this week to talk about his campaign.

When in the course of a wide-ranging discussion he was asked his impression of the Cobb school system and school board, Martin replied, “Ya’ll are lucky. You just have controversies over here. You don’t have scandals, like we do in DeKalb and Atlanta.”