Well, there are rather different and arguably incompatible definitions of "conservative" here.
For the natives (the Winter Walkers) among the townsfolk, that means trying to recreate native society- they want what they had before the disaster that forced the survivors of their tribe to join up with the colonists to form a single united community. This is "conservative" in the sense of "wishing to restore a past condition of things."
For the colonists, there is again a desire to restore a past condition of things, but an idealized condition without, for instance, an oppressive nobility. However, the desire is on some level very similar to that of the Winter Walkers: 'we want a social order like what we remember, only a little better.' The trouble is, again, that there is no one perfectly unified vision of what this even is, and some of the customs that many of the colonists remember may be counterproductive for this new environment.
Whereas the Winter Walker tribe survivors are bringing with them one set of assumptions about how things "traditionally" are supposed to work (communal holding of land, tools that belong to whoever is using them), the colonists are bringing together a nother, somewhat blurrier set of assumptions (individual land ownership being a thing, property rights over tools being inheritable).
The Council-empowering options here are not "conservative" seem to be less a matter of "we want things to work the way they usually worked in our past." They seem to be more about "we want things to work in ways that empower us, the managing/governing group of this society." That's... not quite the same thing. Not the same kind of 'conservative.'
...
And again, the big political issue at stake here is that the colonists make up a majority of the population. Alienating them by refusing to concede to any parts of how the bulk of them want the laws to work is going to cause a lot of dissension.
