AUBURN — City councilors from Lewiston and Auburn will meet Jan. 30 in an attempt to find common ground concerning economic development issues.

The meeting is at 6 p.m. in Auburn Hall and will be moderated by Jim Damicus, senior vice president of Camoin Associates. Camoin Associates is an economic development consultancy firm based in Scarborough.

“We think it’s going to be helpful to have a third party who can help clarify what we agree on, what we don’t agree on and help us work through those problems,” Lewiston City Administrator Ed Barrett said.

Auburn councilors called for rewriting the two cities’ contract with the Lewiston-Auburn Economic Growth Council last spring. The Growth Council is supposed to guide the Twin Cities’ joint marketing and promotions to help bring new business to the area.

Representatives from the city councils and the Growth Council met several times over the past summer, drawing up a new, eight-point contract. Auburn councilors balked at the deal last fall, saying they disagreed with parts.

Lewiston councilors invited their Auburn counterparts to help negotiate a new contract and Auburn agreed to fund the Growth Council’s operations through June 2014.

Auburn City Manager Clinton Deschene said the goal of the Jan. 30 meeting is to get the cities on the same page.

“I don’t know that we’ve ever really sat down and identified our differences,” Deschene said. “But the goal really is finding a common direction, concentrating on that and moving forward.”

The bulk of the workshop meeting will focus on economic development activities that have worked, those that have not and new ones that have been tried.

Damicus is scheduled to meet with a subgroup of councilors three times after the Jan. 30 meeting to refine those lists and help create a new scope of services for Twin Cities economic development.

“It was some 30 years ago, Lewiston and Auburn had to figure out what they wanted and went to Rockland and worked something out,” Deschene said. “Fifteen years after that, there was some changeover in the leadership at the LAEGC. They had some group sessions then and changed. Now, over the past couple of years, economic development has changed again and it’s time to realign our focus and see what we want.”

[email protected]