here are my thoughts about this:
"MAYOR OF FOO" VERSUS "MAYOR" OF "FOO" I am in favour of a separate item for every town and village which has a mayor or a council. I am against have a "Mayor of Foo" item for each these. If the mayor gets an item then the deputy mayor and the sheriff and the dog cacher should get items too. Much better to use the 'of' qualifier. If an administrative division has 2 councils e.g. the Senate and the Congress in many US states then create an item for "Iowa Senate" and use the statement "office held:Senator. of:Iowa Senate" so it keeps the same pattern.
This is along the same lines that I am thinking.
NOTABILITY My opinion is that a separate item should be created wherever this is necessary to record statements about a concept. If there are no useful statements you can make about it then it probably doesn't need an item.
Example 1: The "Iowa Senate" has a foundation date, a quantity of members, a headquarters location. "Iowa Senator" is a subclass of "Senator" and there is not much more you can say. (Note that even on the English Wikipedia "US Senator" is a redirect to "US Senate". Only the Occitan wikipedia has separate items for these. See Q13217683)
To make this work there will need to be a lot more qualifiers in existence.
Generally though I would agree with this too. Maybe it would be worth making an RFC on-wiki about notability to ask whether or not this is the intended way to interpret it and if we can change the requirements to this? It would also be a good time to address the dissonance between what the policy says and what is standard operating procedure.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott