AUBURN – When it comes to telling their stories, Maine’s big communities have taken a back seat to their rural cousins.

From getting tax relief for big retail centers to downtown development and historic building preservation in Augusta, urban Maine does a lousy of job of telling its stories.

“We need to change the attitudes of our legislators or the rural caucus is going to clean our clocks every time,” Freeport Town Manager Dale Olmstead said.

Mayors, town board chairmen and managers from Maine’s biggest communities met in Auburn Hall on Tuesday over lunch to talk about the difficulties of being urban in an overwhelmingly rural state.

Most complaints centered on being passed over at the state level in favor of rural areas. For example, Biddeford Mayor Joanne Twomey said state cuts to mental health funding won’t affect most rural communities. People requiring those services live in the urban centers.

“So we’ll see the end result, with our police having to answer more calls,” she said.

Bangor City Manager Ed Barrett said a state energy conservation grant that could help urban centers remains unfunded, and Augusta’s Roger Katz said state building requirements make it hard to renovate historic buildings.

Councilors in Freeport would love to see more of the sales tax revenue generated in their shopping area come back to help pay for managing it.

“I had one councilor say that the money goes out of town in a culvert, but comes back in a garden hose,” Olmstead said.

The group agreed that Maine’s urban leaders haven’t worked together much in the past.

“We may provide the bulk of the dollars it takes to run this state, but we can’t agree on anything,” Freeport Council Chairman Rich Degrandpre said.

On Tuesday, they agreed they’d take steps to heal any differences and work together.

“We have to tell our stories, and that’s something the representatives from the rural communities do so well,” said South Portland Mayor James Soule. “They shove any other political affiliations out the door and just represent rural Maine. We need to be able to do the same thing.”

The group agreed to meet again on March 18 in Augusta.