AUBURN – Mayoral candidate Tammie Grieshaber doesn’t have issues with what the city has done over the past few years, but she does question the way it was done.

Communication, teamwork and tolerance are the big problems she sees on the City Council today.

“I think Norm (Guay, the current mayor) did a good job, moving through the ADAPT plan and the city’s comprehensive plan,” Grieshaber said. Both plans grew out of healthy public processes, and they showed a clear path for the city to follow.

The City Council has followed that path all along – whether it involved redevelopment downtown or around the Auburn Mall, Grieshaber said.

“Well, we hit a bump in the road with the property taxes, and the city’s communication really fell apart,” she said.

City staff could have done a better job of getting accurate information out to taxpayers. Councilors could have talked more, answered more questions and been better leaders for the community, Greishaber said.

And Mayor Guay could have demanded more respect from councilors and taxpayers alike, she said.

“I hope I would have reacted a little bit differently,” Grieshaber said.

Otherwise, she is confident that the city is run well. She points to the work she did last year and this summer with the mayor’s budget committee.

“It really opened my eyes,” she said. “I think, overall, we’re running a pretty tight ship.”

The size of city staff has actually decreased, and Grieshaber thinks the council has done a good job of cutting unnecessary spending.

But that makes the task of lowering property tax bills difficult at the city level.

“We cannot lower property taxes,” she said. “That is probably going to be a given, where we are.”

Any changes are going to have to come at the state level.

“There has got to be something else we can do so that the burden does not fall on residential property owners,” Grieshaber said. She pledged to work hard with state legislators to come up with something to help homeowners. She hopes to enlist the help of Auburn’s neighbors – not only Lewiston but the smaller communities that ring the Twin Cities.

“We can do a much better than we have,” she said. She has some experience with that, having served on the original 1996 L-A Together Commission. That group advocated combining many municipal services. It issued a report that was used as a reference for this year’s Commission on Joint Services.

“One of the things that has not happened in the past is municipalities have not worked well with their legislative delegations,” she said. Working with other cities and towns, she’s confident they can form some tax reform and relief for taxpayers.