Joel Wachs‘ announcement that he’d retire from the Los Angeles City Council in October did more than tell us that we‘re losing the city’s senior career politician. It also proclaimed the end of city elected office as a lifetime option.This, of course, was the voters‘ choice nine years ago — way back when, on a crescendo of resentment toward the people we’d been electing to represent us, term limits suddenly became the rage. Ironically, it was Wachs himself, of all the council members, who first warned his fellow members that this was a bullet none of them could dodge. He, in fact, saw passed a slightly milder version of the limits than had otherwise been proposed: a version that would have let Wachs go on serving another two years from this point — had he chosen to.Wachs chose not to. And who can blame him? ”He was a good man, an honest man,“ said Chris Hewitt, the 94-year-old Studio City activist who first urged Wachs to run for the council in 1971. ”Now it‘s time for him to do something else.“