The powers doctrine

This is the one methodological commitment that makes a municipal platform different from a national one, and it is the reason this project exists as a separate experiment rather than a chapter of MK-Claude.

The problem it solves

A mayor is elected on promises about schools, buses, policing, healthcare, cleanliness, housing and parks. Of those seven, a municipality’s formal power over each ranges from near-total to essentially none, and the ranking is not the one residents assume. Meanwhile the powers a municipality unambiguously does hold — what it writes into a contract, what conditions it attaches to a licence, what it instructs its inspectors to enforce, what it publishes — get almost no attention in campaigns, because they are unglamorous and specific.

Two failures follow, and they are equally bad:

The false promise. Proposing something the municipality cannot do. It is the standard move of municipal campaigning, and when the winner discovers the constraint in office, the failure is attributed to the person rather than to the promise.

The missed lever. Concluding “that’s the government’s problem” about something the municipality has been able to do by bylaw for thirty years and has not. This is the more common error in practice, and finding one is the most valuable thing this project can produce.

The rule

No proposal enters a policy paper without a named instrument and a named holder of it.

Every lever is traced to the provision that creates it, and classified:

Class	Meaning	What the paper must show
A	Municipality decides and funds	The instrument — bylaw section, tender clause, licensing condition, budget line, council decision, enforcement priority — the department that administers it, and why it has not already been used
B	Municipality decides, an external body must approve	The approving body, the statutory basis for its consent, and evidence of how it has decided comparable requests
C	Shared — delivery municipal, policy or funding national	The split, precisely: who sets policy, who employs the staff, who pays what share — and the leverage the municipality holds inside the arrangement
D	No municipal power	Said plainly, then either dropped or reclassified as an advocacy proposal with a named counterpart, a specific ask, and a realistic route

Every recommendation in every paper carries its class letter. The program for the city is sorted by class before it is sorted by theme, because the reader’s first question about a municipal platform is “which of this could you actually do?” and the document should answer it before it argues anything.

What this does and does not license

Class D is not a reason to stop. A municipality with no formal power over a problem almost always still appears somewhere in someone else’s process — as a statutory consultee, as the owner of the land, as the issuer of a permit the project needs, as the body whose objection triggers a hearing. Those points are leverage, they are citable, and finding them is what turns a class-D problem into a real advocacy proposal rather than a complaint. What class D forbids is presenting the outcome as something a mayor delivers.

“Requires ministerial approval” is not a verdict. Class B is a real constraint but a soft one, and it becomes analysable the moment you know how that ministry has decided comparable requests. A proposal that needs consent and shows the consent pattern is stronger than one that needs nothing and does nothing.

Political impossibility is not absence of power. Coalition arithmetic on the council, departmental resistance and Treasury pressure are real, they belong in the record research, and they are recorded — but they are not the same thing as lacking the authority, and collapsing the two is how a live lever gets written off. Where a power exists and is unused, the paper says that, and then explains the politics separately.

The mayor is not the municipality. Mayoral powers, council powers, committee powers and officials’ delegated powers are different things. A proposal that needs a council majority needs a council majority, and the platform counts the votes.

The precedent test

The analysis has a shortcut that overrides theoretical reasoning, and it should be run early: if another Israeli municipality has already done it, it is class A or B by demonstration. Tel Aviv-Yafo, Haifa, Beersheba and the smaller councils operate under the same Municipalities Ordinance, the same ministries, the same arnona rules and the same planning system. Where one of them has acted, the feasibility question is settled and the surviving question is why Jerusalem has not — which is a much better question, and one with an answer somewhere in the city-hall record.

Where it is applied

The doctrine is executed by the municipal-powers-analysis skill and the /map-powers command in the plugin, producing 02-jurisdiction.md for each policy area before any proposal is drafted. /draft-paper refuses to run on an area that has not been mapped.