LEWISTON — The fate of the Lewiston-Auburn Charter Commission’s work depends on balance going forward, members said Tuesday night.
The commission worked for two hours Tuesday in a Geiger company meeting room to create four new committees that will draft plans for a combined Lewiston-Auburn. After settling on a rough structure and a set of goals, the bulk of the work was devoted to naming names and trying to find the right balance.
Members said it’s important for the committees to be fairly balanced between Lewiston and Auburn residents, between young and old and between men and women.
And just as important is to balance the size of each committee, making sure that community voices are represented but that there are not so many people that no work gets done.
“They’ll have one heck of a time managing a group of 18,” commission Chairman Gene Geiger said. “You’ll have to call them up and get them out. You have to do minutes and all that stuff. This is a big number.”
Geiger said he thinks the charter group needs at least one more meeting before it starts sending out invitations to the community.
One committee would study public safety, another would look at education, a third would look at public works and utilities and a fourth would look at general city operations and administration. Each committee could have up to 18 members — two from the Charter Commission itself, an elected official from each city, as many as six staff “experts” in the given area, employee union representatives from each city and six citizens.
“You want interested people, whether it’s the community Everyman, the professional, the association head,” Geiger said. “For each of these slots, we want to be thinking about the characteristics we want. Everybody will fill a slot for a certain reason: young, old, man, woman, young professional, educator.”
For example, the Public Safety Committee would include police and fire chiefs from both cities, or their deputies, as well as representatives from Lewiston-Auburn 911 and United Ambulance as staff experts.
Similarly, the City Administration Committee would include Auburn’s city manager, Lewiston’s city administrator and several department heads from each city as experts.
City councilors would be selected by the mayors of Lewiston and Auburn to serve on three of the committees, Public Safety, Public Works and General Government.
School Committee members would be appointed by the School Committee chairs or by the superintendents to work on the Education Committee.
Charter commissioners will have to decide who they’ll invite to represent the public.
“We need people who have certain characteristics we prize,” Geiger said.
Those characteristics include energetic, self-confident residents with wide networks of contacts, healthy skepticism and a willingness to work a lot. Charter commissioners hope the committees will sit for weekly meetings, two to three hours each, for May and June.
The final say will be up to the Charter Commission.
“One thing we need to get across to people is that they won’t be making the final decisions,” Geiger said. “As a practical manner, what they recommend will probably be agreed to. But I don’t think we can say we’ll do everything that’s put on the table. We have to reserve the right to approve the final recommendations.”
Lewiston and Auburn voters elected six commissioners — three from each city — in June 2014 to study and draft a new charter combining the two cities. The group has met twice each month to discuss government options, to meet with local government representatives and to write a draft charter combining language from the Lewiston and Auburn charters and a national charter model.
The commission released the draft of the charter as well as a document comparing it with the current Lewiston and Auburn charters in January and hired consultants CGR to help figure out how a combined city would work.
Voters are tentatively set to vote on the charter in November. If voters of both cities decide to merge, it would take at least a year to get the preliminary details worked out and years for the consolidation to be complete.
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