IN HIS INAUGURAL address Monday, Mayor Tom Menino made much of the city’s new economic climate, noting that there’s less money to spend but even more needs to address. Resources will have to be tapped from new venues, the mayor said. "We need new partnerships with the financial houses, the great educational institutions, our religious organizations, and with business leaders who helped lead our regional economy into its tremendous achievements of the last decade."

Well, how about drawing on another perennially underused city resource — Boston City Council?

Don’t laugh. The council could be — should be — a rich source of ideas and initiatives for the city’s future. It should also serve as a check on the mayor’s office. In a little-noticed move last July, the council, working with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), pressured the mayor to move approximately $1.5 million in funds from the Suffolk County sheriff’s office to the Boston Public Schools to pay for textbooks. (That spring, the GBIO had documented examples of embarrassing book shortages in the city’s classrooms.)

Unfortunately, such council successes are few and far between. In recent years, the council has occupied itself with legal disputes with the mayor, resolutions about the sale of OxyContin in drugstores, and periodic lunges by former council president Charles Yancey of Mattapan at 20 percent pay raises for councilors. "Stupid things," in the words of one council observer.

Meanwhile, council leadership has been barely on speaking terms with the mayor, much less on working terms. In 2000, the last year of former council president Jimmy Kelly’s seven-year reign, communication between the mayor’s office and the council was poisoned by the South Boston district councilor’s lawsuits against the mayor. (Kelly wanted the mayor to honor an agreement with Southie political leaders that would have funnelled millions of dollars to the community, in exchange for their support of waterfront development. Menino backed out of the deal when its details were made public.) Their sour relationship was on display again Monday, when Kelly boycotted his own swearing-in ceremony because he was angry that Menino hadn’t provided him with more complimentary tickets to the event for family members and constituents.

Relations between the council and the mayor didn’t get any better with Yancey’s election as president last year. As one council observer puts it: "The mayor won’t even talk to the guy. The mayor served with him [on the council] and thinks very little of him."

That said, the council’s relevance and performance isn’t dependent upon its relationship with the mayor. But it helps. Sam Tyler, executive director of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, notes that it’s hard for the council to "play an independent role and challenge the mayor" when it’s "bogged down in fighting with the mayor."

"Ideally you want a close, cooperative working relationship, and at the same time you want independence from the mayor," says Boston Herald columnist and former city councilor Tom Keane.

Whether the council can become relevant again — as it was in the mid ’90s, for instance, when it orchestrated the politically sensitive and difficult merger between Boston City Hospital and Boston University Hospital (an accomplishment noted by the mayor in his speech on Monday) — depends partly on whether it can get back on speaking terms with the mayor. And that depends largely on the relationship the new council president is able to forge with the mayor. So the surprise election of Councilor-at-Large Mike Flaherty, a Menino ally, as council president could be just what the doctor ordered.

I THINK IT MARKS a good day for the city of Boston and the council," says Councilor Mike Ross of the Fenway, who supported Flaherty’s bid for the council presidency. "There will be debate on substantive issues between the mayor and the council and a lot of the personality stuff will go away."

There’s no question that Flaherty and Menino are close. During Kelly’s very public feud with the mayor over the South Boston waterfront deal, Flaherty kept quite a low profile for a Southie pol, saying little, if anything, in public about the deal. And the mayor’s support played an important role in Flaherty’s election to the council in 1999. (That said, it’s believed Menino supported Flaherty, in part, because the mayor hoped Councilor-at-Large Peggy Davis-Mullen, an outspoken Menino critic who ran for mayor this year, would lose her bid for re-election if Flaherty ran strong. Instead, old-school pol Albert "Dapper" O’Neil was knocked off.)

Meanwhile, both the Boston Herald and Boston Globe reported that the mayor played a significant role in Flaherty’s election as president by letting it be known that he would support any bids for higher office made by councilors who voted for Flaherty. (Given that three of those who voted for Flaherty — Dan Conley of Hyde Park, Paul Scapicchio of the North End, and Brian Honan of Brighton — are each interested in running for Suffolk Country district attorney next year, it’ll be interesting to see which one, if any, gets the mayor’s support.)

It’s probably safe to assume that Flaherty’s election means that communication between the mayor’s office and council leadership will, at long last, resume. What this means for the council, says Keane, is that it will be brought back "in the loop on city stuff."

But it will take a lot more than that to make the council relevant again. What the council needs now is an agenda.

"One of the problems is that there really hasn’t been one single pressing issue for the council to hop on," says Suffolk County clerk and former councilor John Nucci. "I think they need to figure out what issue is important to them and force the mayor to deal with it."