There are several ways to approach the job of councillors, all of them perfectly valid.

Some councillors see their role as purely representing those who voted them in and giving a voice to a particular segment of society.

That might be the business sector, the rural sector, the battlers – or a combination of all sectors – and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that approach.

Other councillors, though, might see their job as providing a vision for the city, as setting the blueprint for the future of the Bathurst region that council staff are then paid to bring to fruition.

These are the big picture councillors who are less focused on the day-to-day detail than the grand idea.

There tends to be fewer of these councillors because grand visions might not win as many votes as fixing the potholes, but without big ideas the city can easily become stagnant.

Cr Jennings’ latest proposal, to demolish the civic centre and Bathurst Memorial Entertainment Centre to build a state-of-the-art facility combining both, should be viewed as one of those big ideas.

The future of the civic centre, in particular, has been the subject of plenty of discussions over the past decade or so.

For many years council actually made a point of putting away the odd million or so in the budget towards the cost of a new civic centre but that project fell off the radar five or six years ago.

Combining it with a redeveloped entertainment centre is a twist on the plan, but Cr Jennings should probably brace himself for an angry backlash – especially on social media.

Regardless of the relative merits or otherwise of the plan, few ratepayers will warmly embrace the idea of a nice, new workspace for council staff while rates keep going up and roads keep deteriorating in the rain.

And with council’s workforce actually in decline, there must be questions over whether a new civic centre is really needed.

But BMEC could be a different story, and Cr Jennings is right that the currently facility was never imagined as a long-term solution and maintenance bills are growing.

And so the discussion starts today. Where it ends, we’re not quite sure but the conversation is sure to be a long one.