There are currently 1,227 elected councillors in Scotland and many do a decent job away from the spotlight while some go on to have much greater political careers elsewhere.

Most are content to sit through endless hours of boring committees and make decisions to aid the wider community.

The vast majority of people in Scotland would struggle to name their local councillors and even more wouldn’t have the first clue what their jobs actually entail. But the vast majority of Scots are happy enough to let them get on with it and only get agitated when things go wrong with something like bin collections.

However, it appears that in Scotland’s third city, residents seem to have fallen out with their councillors big time.

In recent years, it is fair to say that Aberdonians have lost all respect for their local representatives and blame whatever administration is in place for all the city’s woes. Quite why this is the case isn’t clear, but the good people of Aberdeen have become increasingly annoyed at several big ticket decisions that they don’t appear to like very much.

To be fair, the council has not helped itself as vicious local politics that was once the bastion of central belt councils have moved north and have taken up residence in the Granite city.

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The latest anger has been directed at city council co-leader Lib Dem Ian Yuill who recently managed to fall out with the city’s football club over plans for a new stadium. The replacement stadium for Pittodrie was to form part of the council’s ambitious plans to re-generate the beachfront at a cost of £150 million.

Aberdeen FC would move the short distance to a new purpose-built community stadium and prevent the club – and its fans – leaving the city for a stadium on the outskirts.

But then Councillor Yuill put a spanner in the works by refusing to pay a penny towards the stadium – despite it being the centrepiece of the council’s own grand vision, first put forward by the previous administration.

He said: “We are not in the business of putting council money into football stadiums.”

This appeared to catch the club – and the vast majority of Aberdonians – off guard as talks over funding were still ongoing. But it appeared that the knock-back would scupper the entire masterplan and drain millions of pounds out of the city in terms of footfall at a time when it is needed most.

As the original plans had taken place with the previous administration which was a different coalition probably explains a lot given tedious party politics that exist at local level.

Thankfully the council has since appeared to have backed down a little as the club is looking into financing the plans so hopefully common sense will prevail and the beachfront can be redeveloped. Of course, handing over taxpayers’ money to a private business concern is not generally a good idea.

But, sometimes you need a bit of lateral thinking and with estimates that the beachfront plan will generate £20 million a year to the economy the council can ill afford to let dogma get in the way. Especially one that has just spent £30 million on refurbishing city centre gardens and opened them in the middle of December.

Unsurprisingly, Aberdonians were unimpressed with many complaining about the lack of plants and shrubbery in Union Terrace Gardens, perhaps forgetting that not much grows here in December.

The gardens eventually opened more than 450 days late and the project took 1228 days in all. The Covid pandemic was, inevitably, blamed for some of the delays, along with the war in Ukraine and of course, Brexit.

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They took longer to complete than the Empire State building in New York, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Shard skyscraper in London.

Being a councillor is a thankless task as they are in control of vast sums of money and the decisions they make impact far more heavily on residents than national governments’ ones probably do.

The pay is pretty pitiful too so we shouldn’t be surprised that councils have many substandard elected officials who seem to revel in making bizarre decisions. But it is those that are extremely ambitious that are the dangerous ones as they seem to care more about being noticed by the national party bosses than they are about the local residents.

Allowing political parties to take over the running of councils along party lines is one of the worst things to have happened in civic Scotland. The best-run councils are those with independent councillors who care not a jot about party politics.

Too many councils, like Aberdeen City, are run for the benefit of the parties and not the people and this is all wrong.