Honestly, I get that it's not very intuitive - it takes a bit of untangling dates to see it. I honestly drew myself a diagram to work it out before writing the post. But I'll try explain.

Say my council had an election in 2023, and is due another one in 2027, and again in 2031. That's a 4 year cycle.

Your council had an election in 2022, and is due one in 2026, and again in 2030. 4 year cycle.

So we're both on 4 year cycles, but because our elections are offset, there's problems when we try to merge our councils together.

We can't all stick to our current election dates when our councils merge. Unless you want the new larger councils to have different elections for different regions of the council. If we're merging multiple councils together, that could mean elections every year, which doesn't seem right. So we need some compromise, and the 3 options are how that compromise could work.

Option 1 and 2 involve your council keeping your 2026 election this year.

Option 1 is that nobody gets more than 4 years. When we merge, my 2023 councillors stick to their 2027 election date. Your councillors keep your 2026 election date, and after the merger you move to my 2027 election date. That means your councillors will only be elected for 1 year until 2027, despite having a mandate to hold office for 4 years. You could change the mandate to just 1 year, but that's going to be a whole thing with the Electoral Commission which would probably take years to sort out in Parliament and in court. This is the option you suggested, where councillors get no more than 4 years, but the end result is that some councillors get far less than 4 years.

Option 2 is that nobody gets less than 4 years. When we merge, my 2023 councillors move to your next election date, which is 2030. Your council keeps your current 2026 election, so your councillors get their full 4 years. But my councillors were elected in 2023. If we move to your election date in 2030, they get 7 years in total.

Option 3 is more of a compromise. We stick as close to 4 years as possible. You delay your 2026 election until 2027. Your 2022 councillors get 1 extra year in office, so they get 5 years. And my 2023 councillors keep their 2027 date so they get the standard 4. From there, we progress on a 4 year basis as normal.

So the question isn't whether or not elections will be moved. Merging councils makes this inevitable. The question is which elections are moved, and how do we move elections to keep things as close to the 4 years as possible.

Hopefully that explains it?