In other counties, council, council president, etc are part time jobs paying like 40k. There is a separate full time county exec who often has a staff of civil service people with relevant experience who administer the county business. A lot of the the council people are long time workers and business people who have "skin in the game" and are not living off the people.

Furthermore, in the city, all these full time council people have staffs of handpicked people who eventually get on the city dole in permanent positions. There are still a LOT of remnants of failed past city administrations (e.g. SRB and Young, who were both council pres before becoming mayor and utterly failing at it) In the surrounding counties, the jobs these people do, like constituent services, are handled by full time (career) county employees.

In the city, it takes interventions from council members to fix embarassingly basic issues like street lights, trash pick up, trucks on residential street,etc precisely bc it's a political patronage system rather than a well functioning govt. When a problem is finally addressed, residents clap like well trained aquarium seals instead of realizing the problem would've been dealt with immediately if the city was run properly.