Kay Rand oversaw the marriage of the Augusta Water District and the Augusta Sanitary District, a merger within the same city, but with all the details and concerns, it still took three years.

“It is a process that shouldn’t be talked about cavalierly, because it’ll backfire,” said Rand, a principal in Bernstein Shur Government Solutions.

“Finding who to partner with is the easy part, and that seems hard.”

Rand’s a panelist at a statewide conference planned for Lewiston in November, tentatively titled “The Dating Game: Courting Regional Partnerships.”

The daylong forum’s designed to hear how cities work out agreements, some of the pitfalls and how to start the process.

It’s also a peek into how Canada fared after that government ordered municipal togetherness. The conference is hosted by the Citizens Commission on L/A Cooperation, the Lewiston-Auburn Economic Growth Council, Maine Development Foundation and Maine State Planning Office.

“I’m not the wedding planner, but it is like that,” said Steve Eldridge, who for the past seven months has worked on details of a potential consolidation between the Twin Cities for the CCLAC.

“They’ve been dating for a long time but they still don’t know everything about each other,” he noted.

Among the speakers are two men from British Columbia’s government, Gary Paget and Brian Walisser.

“They’ve lectured extensively around the world,” Eldridge said. Canada, which has federated systems – municipalities that form a joint body to run departments together but maintain their own city councils and identities – is “a good model.”

“It’s important that we learn how they’ve done it,” he added.

Laurie Lachance, president of MDF, will detail what came out of $1 million in state municipal efficiency grants handed out over 2005 and 2006.

Cities worked on wastewater projects, bought supplies together.

“Bigger money didn’t necessarily guarantee bigger results,” she said. “I hope (conference-goers) will be inspired to think of taking collaboration to the next level.”

The event will take place Nov. 7 at the Ramada Inn, starting at 9 a.m. with a welcome from both Lewiston and Auburn mayors.

Eldridge said he hoped legislators, elected officials and community leaders would be in attendance. The L-A Commission will be sharing some of the latest figures on anticipated savings and expenses if Lewiston and Auburn were to merge police, fire and public works.

Augusta has eight fewer positions in its new Greater Augusta Utility District, Rand said, and it will save money, for instance, right now buying one new truck instead of two. It took being slow and deliberate, she said.

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