It hasn’t taken new Auburn Mayor John Jenkins long to make a lofty promise.

“City participation will be at its highest level ever,” the enthusiastic Jenkins said Monday, during his inaugural meeting as presider over the Auburn City Council. The former Lewiston mayor is bringing a frenetic governing style across the river.

To start, Jenkins wants to shake up the council meeting format, including moving the free-for-all public comment session from the meeting’s start to the end. In a conversation Tuesday, the mayor said the switch preserves public input, while expediting council business.

“From experience in long budget meetings, when it gets to 11:30 p.m. or 12:30 a.m., [councilors] may not make their best judgments,” he said. “They get tired.” Anyone who has sat through an interminable budget deliberation should drowsily agree; sometimes the business of governing is snore-inducing.

By placing time for public comment on non-agenda items at the meeting’s end, Jenkins hopes to keep councilors “fresh to deal with the city’s business.” Now, he added, on occasions citizens speak “ad nauseam” on issues, which delays council actions into eye-drooping hours.

The mayor also plans to institute old-fashioned ward meetings in Auburn, with his stated goal to “bring City Hall to the people.” Jenkins’ spiel is both populist and pragmatic. “People have told me, ‘I just can’t get down to the meeting,'” he said. “Government should be responsible to the people.”

Jenkins’ ideas, which are fresh for the oft-criticized Auburn council, are remnants of his Lewiston tenure. He expressed puzzlement at the attention his suggestions have garnered, and Monday’s resistance by the council, and chalked it up to natural resistance to change.

Councilors voted 4-3 to delay his recommendations until other communities’ experiences were studied.

While Jenkins zeal is laudable, the council’s gentle braking of his reforms was the right move. Solving the perplexing problem of poor civic engagement will take more than rescheduling public hearings and holding more meetings. If so, puzzled political scientists would have long figured it out by now.

The world of communications has also changed dramatically since Jenkins’ terms in Lewiston. If the new mayor really wants to spur civic engagement in Auburn, a more comprehensive look at city communications is in order.

For example: it’s the e-mail era. Yet the new mayor is the only member of the city council with an e-mail address published on the city of Auburn’s Web site, even though members of other boards – such as the charter commission – have e-mail addresses included.

Lewiston maintains biography pages and e-mail addresses for all its councilors; if Jenkins wants to imitate his former city, this would be an easy place to start.

No magical formula exists for spurring the public, save one: “If you listen to the people, you can’t go wrong,” Jenkins said.

If the new mayor simply does that, the public should follow.