AUBURN — City Manager Clinton Deschene said he’ll take a seat at the table with City Councilors next month at a special Saturday goal-setting session.

“I want to participate, and I want the assistant city manager to participate, too,” Deschene said. “We need to be part of the process of coming up with ideas and solutions. That’s why it came out that we need a facilitator to run the meeting.”

The goal session will be moderated and facilitated by Carole Martin of Rockland.

Deschene, who was hired in June, said it makes sense to have someone leading the meeting who’s not involved in day-to-day city business.

“It’s a pretty important meeting, because I really want to set goals,” Deschene said. “I don’t want to spend six hours talking about whether we should plow the roads more or not, or if we should fix more potholes. I want to come up with five specific goals and a work plan from this meeting.”

One theme of the meeting will be imagining the city in 10 years. Councilors will be asked to envision what Auburn will look like in 2023 and then think about what they need to do between now and 2014 to make that long-range plan happen.

“I hope we hear a lot of bad ideas,” Deschene said. “When you rule out the bad ideas, it lets you figure out what the really good ones are.”

The meeting will be open to the public, but members of the public will not be invited to speak.

“It’s definitely open to the public, but the public needs to remember that it’s about the council setting goals and figuring out how to work with each other,” Deschene said.

He also expects the meeting will help guide future work on the 2013-14 budget.

“I envision we’ll do these on a high level every couple of years, with a facilitator,” Deschene said. “Those will probably be on the election years. And then, on the off years, we’ll do a smaller one, run by the city staff.”