Our record for gauging public opinion is spotty at best, but if there is one supposition we’d be willing to bet money on, it’s that the vast majority of Denton residents want term limits for their elected city officials.

That’s why we were surprised the other day when the League of Women Voters sponsored a panel discussion on term limits and was apparently unable to come up with an expert who thought they were a very good idea.

According to the front-page account by the Record-Chronicle’s Lowell Brown in Friday’s paper, the panelists seemed to think that term limits aren’t very good at doing what they’re supposed to do, which is prevent political dynasties, diminish the unfair power of incumbency and infuse city government with new blood at a faster rate than it’s getting now.

Denton’s present term-limit provision certainly argues that they’re right. As now interpreted by the city, a Denton resident can serve pretty much an entire adult lifetime on the City Council if he or she is adept enough at hopping from one seat to another or sitting out an occasional term so as not to amass three “consecutive” terms in the same seat.

Panel member Brian Collins, a professor of public administration at the University of North Texas, theorized that Denton may have grown to the point that it might be difficult for “lay” council members to govern it. We may be entering a time, he said, in which the council will be dominated by political “professionals” who consider their seats on the council to be pretty much their only jobs.

Dorothy Damico, who was on the committee that drafted the present term-limits provision back in 1980, seemed to agree with Collins, and went a step further. If we are truly making the transition from “amateur” to “professional” council members, she said, we might be better off leaving the present term-limits provision of the City Charter as it is, ambiguities and all.

We find a lot to agree with in those conclusions, but we have some nagging questions, too, chief among them being, how do we persuade our residents to enter this brave new world?

We have never been all that enthusiastic about term limits, being of the quaint belief that voters get the chance to impose term limits every time there’s an election. We also agree with the panelists that government has become more complicated, and that it takes a lot longer these days to become an effective and knowledgeable council member. But we have endured enough power-hungry, bone-headed or avaricious long-term office holders to have some sympathy for supporters of the term-limits principle.

And, as we said earlier, we would bet a brand-new John B. Stetson hat that a sizable majority of Denton voters do indeed favor term limits and harbor a degree of resentment at those who find creative ways to get around them.

So what this good town needs, it seems to us, is a lively debate on the issue — a debate that comes after the sitting council drafts a strong, loophole-free term-limits provision and puts it on the ballot.

The debate will come during the campaign that precedes the vote on the new provision. If the hard-line term-limits supporters prevail, we will live with council members who may be disqualified from office about the time they figure out what the hell they’re supposed to be doing. If they don’t, we will live with the “professionals,” who will make governance their business but who may limit the possibility that anyone but the relatively wealthy can ever get elected to the council, a job that pays nothing.

It is our choice, and the City Council should give it to us by drafting that ironclad term-limits provision and letting us vote on it.