AUBURN — For every opinion voiced Thursday night about combining the Twin Cities, someone said the exact opposite.

Whether it was about creating a new name for a combined Lewiston-Auburn, including current employees of the two governments in their discussions or where to focus their work, the 15 people who attended the first public meeting of the Lewiston-Auburn Charter Commission had opinions.

Auburn Mayor Jonathan LaBonte said the charter group had a rare opportunity to create a government from the ground up.

He recommended the commission not look at its work as combining two cities but as creating a government system that would work for the entire geographic area.

“Everyone has the blinders on, ‘Here’s what Lewiston is, and here’s what Auburn is,’ and trying to squeeze those two together,” LaBonte said. “As opposed to that, you could try forgetting there is government here. You have 100 square miles with a large lake as a public water supply, two ponds, two rivers, farmland, industrial land, infrastructure and 60,000 people. How can you best govern in that area?”

Thinking like that means that nobody has turf to defend, LaBonte said.

Former Lewiston Mayor Jim Howaniec said he would be willing to defend his turf, the city of Lewiston.

“It’s my identity,” Howaniec said. “I live on Pinewoods Road on the outskirts of town, out near the Lisbon town line. I have no affinity for Danville Junction or Gritty McDuff’s or New Auburn. I have no connection to Auburn.”

Howaniec said he was sure that no matter what the Charter Commission said, there would be organized opposition. And he’d be right in the middle of it.

For the six members of the charter commission, it was just want they wanted to hear.

“If this is going to go forward, we will have to address the concerns and the negatives,” Commission Chairman Gene Geiger said. “We have to make the citizens see that it’s worthwhile to change and not be afraid. We haven’t done anything yet, but this is going to be a good start.”

Twin Cities voters selected the six charter commissioners at the June polls, three from Auburn and three from Lewiston.

This was the fourth meeting of the commission since they were elected, and the first public hearing. Meetings are scheduled twice monthly, alternating between Lewiston and Auburn. The next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 11 at Lewiston City Hall.

Lewiston Mayor Robert Macdonald was the first to speak, urging the commissioners to first settle the question about the new city’s name: Keep it Lewiston-Auburn, he said, hyphen and all.

“Keep it L-A; keep it the way it is and I think that takes away a lot of the work and a lot of the problems you’re going to face,” Macdonald said.

But Auburn City Councilor Tizz Crowley disagreed. The hyphen in “Lewiston-Auburn” represents division to start with. Commissioners would be better served coming up with a new name.

“If the purpose is not just consolidating services, it’s putting two currently existing cities into one new entity,” she said. “We need a new name, if we are going to go through with this.”

Crowley said she wasn’t convinced it’s a good idea for Auburn. She said she felt it would represent a takeover of Auburn’s assets by the more populated Lewiston.

“There are 33,000 people in Lewiston and 23,000 in Auburn,” she said. “You can try to build protections in the beginning, but that is what is going to happen.”

Howaniec said he was concerned a combined city would be a burden on Lewiston’s taxpayers.

“Are we taking on more road maintenance because Auburn has more miles of roads, and will that present an unfair swap of burdens onto Lewiston?” Howaniec said. “On this commission alone, we have six commissioners — three from Lewiston and three from Auburn. In one sense, Lewiston is underrepresented on this commission. We have 60 percent of the population but only 50 percent of the members.”

Paul Robinson, a member of the Lewiston Planning Board and one of the volunteers who helped collect petition signatures to get the Charter Commission on Lewiston’s ballot, urged the group to work with the two cities’ employees and their unions. Doing that would ease many of those employees’ fears.

“When you talk about loss of jobs, you have to think about loss of services,” Robinson said. “Whether we like it or not, that’s going to be in the back of people’s minds.”

Alan Whitman of the East Auburn neighborhood said commissioners need to show a financial benefit.

“I want to hear a specific number of what kind of savings I’m going to see on my tax bill,” he said. “I want to see a list of who is going to get cut. I want to see some efficiencies addressed here.”

The commission is expected to spend the next two years or longer researching and discussing methods to combine Lewiston and Auburn and writing a consolidation plan and a new charter.

The group has no deadline, no budget and no staff. Whatever plans it comes up with will go to the public for debate and an eventual vote.

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