AUBURN – Complaining about roads and city services is fine, unless you expect the problems to get fixed.

“Those things cost money, and where do you think that money comes from?” asked Dan Herrick of 470 Hatch Road. “It’s our money. It’s our taxes.”

Taxes and city spending were the big issues for Herrick at the City Council meeting with Ward 3 residents Monday night.

“The best thing we can do is regionalization, combine services with Lewiston,” Herrick said. “That’s what I want to see happen.”

But the 55 other people attending the meeting had their own ideas. They wanted information about roads, paving and city recycling and host of other city services.

It was the third of five neighborhood meetings scheduled this year. Jenkins and the City Council will host the Ward 2 meeting next on March 12 at the Park Avenue Elementary.

Like previous meetings in Wards 4 and 5, Monday’s meeting was well attended.

“If these work for you, well keep doing them,” Jenkins told the crowd. “It doesn’t stop here. We’ll make another round. We’ll go back to Ward 5 and start over again.”

For Whitney King-Buker, who lives in an apartment building along Manley Road, recycling is the big issue. She urged the city to repair or replace a recycling truck that was removed from the Mid-Maine Waste Action Corp. entrance last month.

“I live in an apartment and I don’t get curbside recycling,” King-Buker said. “And with that truck gone, I don’t have an easy way to recycle.”

Instead, she takes her recycling to a transfer station in Falmouth. Heather Runnels, who lives in the Edgewater Apartments on Main Street, has the same problem. Her apartment is filling up with tin cans and other recyclables.

“I try to throw things in the Dumpster, but I just can’t bring myself to do it,” she said. “There are much smaller communities than Auburn that manage to recycle more. We really need to do something.”

Jenkins’ developing tax reform plan also drew some skeptical comments. Dick Kendall of 207 Stevens Mill Road took issue with Jenkins saying he would charge a simple fee based on overall acreage.

“I think that defies reality,” Kendall said. “I don’t see how you can charge the same fee for an acre of land that’s covered with ledge and unusable as you would for a grass lot downtown. They’re not the same, and you can’t charge them the same.”

Jenkins’ equal land fee is one part of his plans for tax reform, and he invited Kendall to meet with him to discuss it. Andy Titus of 45 Carson St. said the land fee appealed to him because it could help level property taxes.

“I don’t like my property taxes being based on values, like some sort of stock market thing,” Titus said. “All we want to do is even things out, so we don’t see these huge spikes.”

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