small to be a unitary authority even now (Bristol seems about the right size). "You can't have an elected mayor for Bath; Bath doesn't exist as an administrative unit. You could only have an elected mayor for B&NES. Possibly you could have a parish council for Bath (and it might even be able to call itself a city council) but it would have no more power than any other parish council." "I have given this some thought and I do believe that the chances of modifying the current arrangements in BANES are next to zero- the government would laugh in our faces if we tried to get them to dedicate time and resources to fine tuning our tiny little local authority, in isolation. which is why i have said the best way forward is to make those modifications ourselves. "innovation" it's called. i think it would be feasible to make INTERNAL modifications to and within the current system taking advantage in particular of the new emphasis on Localism being promoted by the coalition. for the record, my personal favourite would be for Bath to have an elected mayor. that would solve it all in one go. Bath could have its own mayor with its own mayor's department that works within but is also separate from BANES. In exactly the same way that Boris Johnson works with, and yet separately, from all the various London Boroughs. "If anyone overlooks those points it's only because they completely miss the point - that