I don't live in a country where it's called a "Council" and operates like a UK local Council, so my units of city government and their roles/functions might not

I don't live in a country where it's called a "Council" and operates like a UK local Council, so my units of city government and their roles/functions might not be the same, and that may be a misconnect in this conversation. But services provided by IT are only one part of what I expect my local municipal government to be able to do competently, and not necessarily the great part. While I would like the services provided by IT to be done competently (ideally beyond competently), it does not necessarily follow that they should be focused on to the exclusion or de-prioritization of things that are not IT, which it seems to me would be the consequence of the local municipal government reorganizing itself and considering itself as fundamentally and mainly a software engineering organization (or an IT organization in general, which is not necessarily the same thing either).