Disrespectful.

How else to explain Auburn Mayor John Jenkins’ zeal for killing joint services and the citizens commission that has spent years devising ways to save money? On Monday, the Auburn council will hear Jenkins’ resolution to scuttle the panel, before even talking to it.

Volunteers from both riverbanks have spent too much time and taxpayer coin looking into collaborative services to have their work brushed aside in a fit of small-minded politics.

If Jenkins is the leader he was elected to be, he’d withdraw his shortsighted resolution.

If not, and it passes, the state should demand Lewiston-Auburn repay the nearly $200,000 it got to study joint services. Abandoning this effort would waste time, money and opportunity.

There will be nobody to blame except city leadership, which has done its level best over the past 13 years to ensure savings of collaboration stay unseen. They’ve protected their nests like jealous hens, in absolute ignorance of the common good and popular sentiment.

Disrespectful.

Taxpayers of L-A want collaboration, not another joint governing board. They want, at first, collaboration in back-office services to gauge its effectiveness, before moving toward bigger, more visible services such as fire, police, public works and administration.

They want cost-effectiveness and to raise the value of government. They want this because these trying economic times demand it. And they want this because, like us, they want L-A to prove it can be done, so our friends and neighbors elsewhere can benefit.

Most of all, they want this because there’s real money at stake – tangible savings to taxpayers and families, who need their government to find creative ways of delivering services more efficiently instead of squeezing dimes from everywhere, even the rain.

This is exactly what the joint services commission has delivered. Over two years, the panel met diligently to deliver the popular mandate: a plan to combine computer systems between L and A and a seamless conversion of the cities’ assessing departments into one.

The savings are clear: $50,000 to Lewiston per year and $90,000 to Auburn per year.

Commission members even took the councils’ blatant meddling in stride, investigating their cockamamie suggestions with patient grace. They have neither been diverted nor disillusioned, believing, until recently, their recommendations would be met with a similar respect.

How wrong they were. Instead of an audience, the door was slammed in their face.

Disrespectful.

Auburn councilors must reject Jenkins’ resolution, or they and the new city manager, Glenn Aho, must provide a better plan for saving taxpayers the $90,000 from combined assessing.

Ideally, Auburn’s reticence on collaboration means it also has better ideas for saving the $2.7 million from collaboration that’s been identified by commission studies and city audits.

Our confidence in that is weak.

On Monday, there can’t be equivocation, pleas for time, or some other “wag-the-dog” from the bottom line of taxpayer savings. This plan has been two years in the making. It’s not a surprise.

Either Auburn has a better plan or it doesn’t.

We don’t think it does, yet it will still, astoundingly, consider abandoning joint services.

You know what that is?

Disrespectful.