I know some of you will think this question is prompted by the news that the Seattle City Council has unanimously passed a plastic bag ban that, if the Mayor approves it, will go into effect July 2012. Seattlepi.com reports that the bill forbids plastic bags “not just in grocery stores, but in department stores, clothing stores, convenience stores, home-improvement stores, food trucks and farmers markets.” Paper bags you can still get for a nickel, for free if they’re the small lunch-sack size.

Actually, I’m on record as saying I support a plastic bag ban, if grudgingly. I don’t have the data to argue the point persuasively, in any event. I’m told only 13 percent of plastic bags are recycled, but it seems to me that that is likely because so many people use plastic bags for secondary purposes. “Seems to me” is not, however, good enough for The SunBreak readership, I know. If the bags are noxious, better to get rid of them.

Still: “I’m sure there’s a German word for taking small steps on large issues and then congratulating yourself for being a leader,” wrote David Meinert on this issue, earlier. “That would be a perfect word to use in local politics.” Compost and goats, yes. Head taxes to fight downtown traffic congestion, no.

Anyone who has spent more than a few years in Seattle will shake their heads knowingly at this. Our City Councils traditionally get bogged down in minutiae, roll over to more puissant political forces, and in general hopscotch their way from hot-button issue to hot-button issue. I used to think that things might be improved if the council positions weren’t citywide, but represented districts–at least the residents of the Central District or Greenwood could have their say.

But on the other hand, if you step back, you might wonder why we think our nine Council members are suited for the job at all. When you review the committees that the City Council breaks up into, the problem comes into clearer focus. (My favorite is Energy, Technology, and Civil Rights. When I am elected to the Council I hope to run the committee on 30-Hour-Weeks, Sailboats, and Microbrews.) If we were hiring someone to run Seattle Public Utilities, would we choose Mike O’Brien? Is Richard Conlin the best Seattle can offer for SR 520 repair and replacement? In what way had Sally Clark distinguished herself as an architect or city planner before she chaired the Built Environment committee?

I don’t mean to knock the jobs that the council members have performed, but the results, I think, are amateurish (for good and bad–sometimes you get lucky, and they pursue their duties with a zeal and diligence that you couldn’t pay for, but it is also clear that sometimes a committee is chaired by someone who needed to chair a committee). It’s a little like running a city via jury selection, and the Council gets out of its depth, ironically, the more complicated and important a project is (cf: the waterfront design discussion).

It might be worth asking what the Council has proven itself good at, or what its purpose is, really. Are they nine mini-mayors, occasionally transforming via unanimity into Megamayor on pressing issues like plastic bag bans (leaving the DOJ report on Seattle’s overly aggressive police department and the Seattle Public Schools rudderlessness aside)? Or are they a deliberative voice for neighborhoods, checking the centralization of downtown administrative powers? (Or is that the battle of the ’70s, and less relevant today?)

When you look for the chronically congested processes in Seattle, again and again you come to see a gang of “regular people” elected to positions of oversight they are only occasionally qualified for: the City Council, yes, but also the Port Commissioners and the Seattle School Board. All have a history of sending up fiery reformers who discover belatedly that it’s not as easy as it looks–the problem is structural, not in the people we’ve chosen, necessarily.

Watch the City Council: With everything else that Seattle faces, they insist on pulling on the levers of social behaviors because those are the levers available to them. It’s not the right tool for the job, often, but that’s what regular people do when they don’t know what else to do.