AUBURN — In Mayor Jonathan LaBonte’s view, the Twin Cities don’t deserve their reputation for sharing — not today’s Twin Cities, at any rate.

“We are so busy congratulating ourselves for being awesome 30 years ago we have not realized that everybody has passed us,” LaBonte said.

Today, rather than working to find innovative ways to share, all of the efforts between Lewiston and Auburn go into preserving what earlier generations built, LaBonte said. He sees layer upon layer of bureaucracy that grew out of 30-year-old ideas.

“The groups we have today, all effort goes to keeping them going,” LaBonte said. “The project is just to keep them going as they have been. You can’t ask questions about why they exist because that turns its own battle.”

And the pinnacle of that kind of thinking for LaBonte is the ongoing charter process that seeks to make the two cities into one.

“If you want to be a model for the state, consolidation is not it,” LaBonte said. “The reality is, municipalities are not going to consolidate across the state. If they are going to do something to save money they are going to come up with something else. So, do we have the ability to invent the next great model to pull in more, to be a model for new communities?”

It’s been a thread in Auburn politics for years, LaBonte said, but he thinks it’s becoming a movement.

“It’s coming to a head now because we have a super majority of people on the (City Council) who are fed up,” LaBonte said. “Before, we had a vocal minority who were willing to ask questions but the majority did not want to rock the boat.”

That’s the mood Auburn councilors will bring with them Tuesday night as they meet with their Lewiston counterparts to discuss the fate of one of the community’s staple shared services, Lewiston-Auburn 911.

Auburn’s council is considering a plan to cut the city’s share of funding to L-A 911 from $1.07 million to $855,298. The original agreement, negotiated in 1995, splits costs for the service equally between Lewiston and Auburn.

LaBonte and Auburn councilors are arguing for splitting costs based upon use — specifically, the number of phone calls the center takes from each city. L-A 911 Director Phyllis Gamache said about 45 percent of the center’s dispatch traffic comes from Auburn, about 55 percent from Lewiston.

LaBonte said splitting the bill by that ratio makes more sense today than a 50-50 split.

“That’s been the model, and perhaps it made sense 20 years ago,” LaBonte said. “Compared to going it alone, a 50-50 split made sense. But now we have a county system we are subsidizing and we are still stuck with that 50-50 split.”

LaBonte knows he’ll have to negotiate a new agreement with Lewiston’s City Council to make that change, which leads to Tuesday’s meeting. The meeting begins at 5:15 p.m. in the Lewiston City Council Chamber on the bottom floor of City Hall with an informal gathering and refreshments. The formal discussions begin at 6 p.m.

It would be next in the line of joint Lewiston-Auburn services Auburn’s council has tried to amend or opt out of during the past two years.

Councilors stopped paying roughly $20,000 annual support to community arts group L/A Arts in the 2015-16 fiscal year, paying only for individual events and programs the agency offers in Auburn. Auburn councilors directed the city’s arts and cultural spending toward more Auburn-exclusive events.

The current budget does away with $160,000 in support for the Lewiston-Auburn Economic Growth Council for the coming fiscal year, replacing its marketing, business promotion and small business loan programs with Auburn-specific alternatives.

“The things we need help to do is to grow the city, and we’re not getting it,” LaBonte said. “To some extent we’ve had to work outside of the agencies we pay to do all this work. So either those agencies need to deliver or we’ll go find other partners.”

Just last year, the city effectively took over Great Falls TV, moving its staff and operations out of Central Maine Community College and into Auburn Hall, taking over a greater portion of the budget from Lewiston.

Great Falls TV staff, not city employees, now record and edit all of the public meetings in Auburn Hall, including the City Council meetings. Lewiston staff still operate the cameras for Lewiston City Hall’s public meetings, sending the feed to the Auburn Hall offices for rebroadcast.

Of the 10 shared Lewiston-Auburn shared service groups operating today, LaBonte said only the Lewiston-Auburn Water Pollution Control Authority operates as it should. That facility, south of the downtown in Lewiston, treats all Twin Cities sewage.

“It’s a well-run facility,” LaBonte said. “It’s a model built on fees for service, and each city gets to purchase the level of capacity they need.”

In LaBonte’s mind, that should be the model for shared services. He imagines semi-private groups offering regional services and charging a fee for them. Lewiston and Auburn could opt in or out, but so could other neighboring towns or private businesses.

“You could create a competing government to Androscoggin County,” LaBonte said. “You could sell transit services to the rest of the county, infrastructure management and various things. Then you allow municipal autonomy. They can sign multiple-year contracts, but rural communities can opt in for a rural level of service.”

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