After all, it is responsible for everything the staff do and the outcomes achieved. But it is likely to be distracted by the detail when it should be looking at the whole picture.
Each local council employs one person, the chief executive. The chief executive is then responsible for carrying out the what the council decides.
Councils are required to make sure the role of democratic processes is clear and understood by councillors and the community: they must also be effective, open and transparent.
The council decides on the strategic overview and the direction of the organisation. The chief executive carries out these decisions by managing the staff and resources available, and advising staff about the budgetary and other effects of the decisions being made by council.
The council is in charge. It is the job of the chief executive to give the council good advice such that they can make what they consider to be good decisions. If the council considers it is not getting the information it needs, at the end of the day there is an employment issue with the chief executive.
Likewise, if the council makes it impossible for the chief executive to carry out the proper functions, that is an issue between the chief executive and the council.
Nothing in these processes suggests it is the role of council to go over budgets line by line.
In fact, doing so would be having councillors get among the weeds when they have a chief executive to be across these figures.
Councillors were not chosen for their expertise in doing this. It would also generally need to be done behind closed doors, which seriously erodes the primary principles of open processes.
It is the role of council to say what it wants to achieve, and receive advice about the effects of choosing some options over others.
It should be having these discussions publicly so that we can all try to understand why they made the decisions they did.
Since council is in charge overall, it can and sometimes does become involved in the delivery of services because ratepayers are unhappy about what is happening.
For example, there have been recent complaints around the new rubbish collection system in Dunedin.
It appears a council decision to attempt to reduce waste to landfill has been translated by staff to mean pressure should be put on ratepayers to overfill their red bins and use extra private rubbish removal systems by limiting the size of the bins and the frequency of collection.
It is unlikely council wanted overfilled bins, or imagined private contractors dealing with the extra rubbish would reduce waste to landfill.
This discussion is one we may expect council to have.
But if the council regularly gets mired down in administrative functions, councillors feel their "job" is a full-time activity and they lose sight of their proper role.
When council does not meddle in running the business of the council operations, they should be freed up to make better high-level strategic decisions, watching over the sacred cows and the elephants in the room during decision-making.
We pour millions of dollars into safety traffic measures, climate change responses and relationships with iwi and owning various unused or underused buildings which are not providing any efficient use of resources and have no discernible strategic value.
Council could be asking whether the spending in these areas is value for money, and whether there are more effective ways of achieving whatever we were wanting to achieve.
They could be looking at whether registered dog owners should pay for unregistered poorly behaved dogs.
They could be looking at whether whatever money is spent on climate change in South Dunedin makes a blind bit of difference to anything, and if so what that difference is and how much it costs.
They could be spending time understanding about why borrowing money today may amount to stealing from our children if the money is not spent on infrastructure our children need. They could get to grips with what Aurora has actually done and what it is likely to achieve. They could look at the cost to ratepayers of keeping assets which are not paying their way.
And if council is prepared to take best evidence advice around climate science, it should also be prepared to take advice from people about financial investments and from the chief executive about what it costs to carry out the minutiae of council operations.
Democracy is based on us choosing our representatives for whatever reasons we see fit. Despite preposterous suggestions that it is compatible with only letting those properly qualified stand for public office, democracy relies on common people representing the rest of the common people. They will always need to rely on good advice.
Councillors will always need to rely on advice on which to base their decisions.
If councillors make proper strategic decisions, based on good information and with us all in a position to know what they knew when they decided we can then choose councillors who are most likely to make decisions we would want them to make.
• Hilary Calvert is a former Otago regional councillor, MP and Dunedin city councillor.
