[IanWatson]

Part of me would really like to see municipal political careers (minus the mayor) limited to one term in a row, so that it would encourage more people doing it as "a service to the city" and fewer people doing it out of self-interested (though I totally recognize that many councillors are indeed in it to make a difference currently). This would also prevent a lot of the boneheaded decisions that are made because politicians don't want to piss people off before the next election.

To compensate for the fact that part of a councillor's very first term is learning, you could make terms six years instead of four, so they'd have four or five good years of being a knowledgeable councillor.

You'd also run into the problem that if every councillor was new, you'd lose institutional memory and experience. To fix that you could offset elections in each district so every year was an election year, but only in two or three districts. This would also prevent the distraction and reduction in government function that currently happens during a municipality-wide election year.