Hi,
Sorry - just seen this thread. I hope you don't mind if I comment - I am hoping to bring some enterprise experience to this forum if at all possible
Are you saying the switches are all daisy chained together at the moment - council switch <-> switch 1 <-> switch 2 <-> switch 3?
If that is the case then depending on your structured cabling setup, and the switch locations - I would also recommend a hub and spoke physical topology, to reduce the size of the failure domain. Also I would suggest etherchannel (bundling/portchannel/lag) a couple of uplinks to your core switch, per access-switch.
In terms of copper vs fibre - I would probably not bother with the expense of fibre in this scenario - it is not really beneficial unless the run length is over 100m or the cabling standard used/run length will not support 10Gbps.
Otherwise I would totally agree that you should be in charge of the routing, although it will be a fairly simple setup. Also - as previously mentioned configuring multiple vlans along offers no security benefits unless you have some sort of access-list on the L3 interface, or the L3 interface lives on a firewall.
When it comes to providing network services at the edge - it is usual to just use the core to plug other switches into, and not to present access-ports. This way each switch has a specific role - but ultimately in a deployment of this size, it won't matter that much.
