AUBURN — Writing a charter to combine the Twin Cities will only be the first step, commissioners said Thursday.

Two days with national city government consultant Joseph Stefko convinced members of the Lewiston-Auburn Joint Charter Commission that steps to merge Lewiston and Auburn into one city will be more involved, extensive — and likely expensive.

“Up until two days ago, we looked at our job as fairly narrow,” Commissioner Chip Morrison said Thursday. “We just got a bigger job, to make this all make sense.”

Commissioners and members of the community met with Stefko in four sessions over Wednesday and Thursday to talk about what the charter effort needs, what community members expect and what consultants like his firm CGR could do to help. Commission Chairman Gene Geiger said Stefko returned to Rochester, N.Y., on Thursday afternoon. Commissioners began Thursday’s regular meeting with a review of the meetings with Stefko.

Geiger said he expects the consultant will write a work proposal for the commission to review.

CGR has written reports for as many as 30 communities in New York and the rest of the Northeast. It consists of a baseline review of both governments today — the number of employees, assets, taxes and other data. Next, they develop scenarios that combine operations, outlining benefits and drawbacks for each.

“They don’t do advocacy,” Geiger said. “They won’t do a PR campaign or political campaign and they can’t do final legal documents. We’ll need a Maine lawyer for that. But they can pretty much do any other thing. They have that expertise, so we’ll see what they have to say.”

Geiger said the company did similar work for Princeton, N.J., several years ago and it cost the community between $80,000 and $85,000.

Voters in both cities elected the charter commission a year ago, and they’ve spent the past 12 months reviewing a model city charter and the current charters from both cities.

The charter is the legal requirement, according to the state, but the effort will need more to do any good for the community.

Geiger said commissioners need to work more closely with local schools and with municipal unions to find out what they need and how they can work together.

Commissioners also need to do more public outreach, discussing their work and what people want.

“Up to now, we’ve depended on people to come to us,” Morrison said.

The group meets Thursdays, alternating between Auburn Hall and Lewiston City Hall. But Morrison said those meetings have been dry reviews of charter wording and have been sparsely attended.

“We knew that we have to get out there, but now we understand how robust our research has to be and our goals out there in the community and how we can go about getting it,” Commissioner Holly Lasagna said.

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