There are certain jobs in a town government that belong to the town council, and there are certain jobs that belong to the town administrator. This is not a distinction that requires a law degree, although at the Aug. 11 town council meeting it occasionally seemed to require several.

The matter at hand was the hiring of a finance director.

Council member Mary McDowell had proposed creating a two-member council advisory committee that would take part in interviewing candidates for the job and make recommendations to the town administrator.

It would be, she was careful to say, only advisory.

That is a comforting word. Advisory sounds harmless. It sounds like something you might do while sitting in a rocking chair, offering a neighbor a thought about his tomatoes.

But there is a difference between offering advice and becoming part of somebody else’s hiring process.

The Portsmouth Town Charter is fairly plain about this. Section 304(c) gives the town administrator the authority “to appoint all department heads and other officers and employees” whose appointment is not otherwise provided for. The council must approve the appointment of department heads.

Section 305 goes further. It says the council or any of its members “shall not direct or request the appointment of any person to, or removal from, office by the town administrator.” It also says that, except for purposes of inquiry, the council and its members shall deal with the administrative service solely through the town administrator.

There is a reason for all this. Somebody has to run the place.

The council is supposed to make policy, adopt ordinances, approve budgets and provide oversight. The town administrator is supposed to run the administrative side of town government. If the council wants to know what the administrator is doing, it can ask him. If it doesn't like the result, it has the authority the charter gives it.

In the case of a department head, that authority is considerable. The administrator makes the appointment. The council gets to say yes or no.

That would seem to be enough.

Co-town solicitor Joe Larisa Jr. made the perfectly reasonable observation that the charter does not explicitly prohibit council members from advising the administrator during the hiring process.

This is true, in the same sense that the charter probably does not explicitly prohibit council members from coming into town hall with bags of horse manure and scattering them around the finance department.

A charter cannot list every conceivable form of interference. You have to read the thing as a whole and pay some attention to why the words were put there.

Another attorney, Leonard Katzman, who has spent considerable time reading Portsmouth's charter, offered perhaps the most useful illustration of the evening.

Imagine, he said, your boss sitting beside you and saying, “I want you to look at this candidate — may be a good hire. Just advisory, just advisory!”

Are you really going to say no, Katzman asked, knowing that your boss could fire you?

It was a good question.

There was another curious thing about the timing.

McDowell said she had told the council at its July 27 meeting that she intended to introduce her resolution. The finance director's position was posted that same day. On Aug. 4, she learned that Town Administrator Richard Rainer Jr. had offered the job to someone who had applied three years earlier.

McDowell said she was “disheartened” by Rainer's actions and believed they had “circumvented a process” necessary for a job as important as finance director.

But Rainer had advertised the position, reviewed the applicants, narrowed the field, interviewed his preferred candidate, selected her and brought his recommendation to the council.

That was the process.

The council was being asked to do what the charter says it should do: approve or reject the appointment.

Councilor David Reise pushed Rainer on why he hadn’t provided additional information on his candidate until the Aug. 11 meeting. Again, that is what the administrator is there to do. He does the vetting. He makes the recommendation. The council asks questions and decides whether to approve it.

“Process is important,” McDowell said.

It is.

Which is why the council ought to be particularly careful about changing a process that already works, and that is spelled out in the town charter.

There is nothing wrong with a councilor having an opinion about who should be finance director. Councilors are citizens, too. But there is a difference between having an opinion and sitting at the interview table.

The town council already has a seat at the table where it matters.

It gets the final vote.

For a government that is supposed to have clearly defined responsibilities, sometimes the best way to protect the process is simply to stay in your lane.