As an Auburn newcomer and political outsider running against a couple of native borns to be the city’s next mayor, Scot Pondelick’s first task has been to introduce himself to voters.

The three will vie in the August primary. Pete Lewis has decided not to pursue a fourth term in office.

For Pondelick, it’s a process. It’s not easy but his spirits are up.

“I’m very optimistic right now,” he said.

Even a meager showing for his meet-and-greet at the Auburn Library last week could do nothing to dampen the Iraq war veteran’s enthusiasm for the campaign to come.

By walking the city, Pondelick said, by ringing doorbells, by sounding out whomever he could, he is getting his name out there and giving himself a good understanding of what matters to voters.

“There’s a big influence for change, because there’s a lot of problems that we have,” Pondelick said, standing next to his campaign manager, Chris Truppner. “It’s the whole deal of working together, that’s what we really need to work on.”

At the top of the next Auburn mayor’s to-do list, Pondelick said, will be the city’s deteriorating roads and empty storefronts.

One way to meet those problems, Pondelick said, will be to get government-owned businesses, that is, the Auburn Golf Course and Auburn Avenue Theater, to a place where they aren’t losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, as they are now doing.

First, get both funds to where they break even. Then take the anticipated $800,000 in savings and combine them with the $2 million the City expects to save with the recent courthouse change and costs to run the SCORE jail, and the City could began to do something about its aging streets, Pondelick argues.

“By taking all those funds and leveraging them to get state grants, we could use them to help pay for these different things,” Pondelick said

As the City needs about $6.2 million for road maintenance, however, and with the state talking about additional cuts to transportation funding, Pondelick noted, the City may have to include other options.

Pondelick said another problem is the City’s communication or lack thereof with its residents.

“There’s a lot of citizens I come across who say, ‘Yeah, we should have been told about things like — the waste transfer station or the courthouse changeover,’ ” Pondelick said. “Sometimes City people have to actually go out and talk to somebody. I’ve met people who have lived in Auburn for years and never met a candidate and never met anybody from the City doing anything.”

For almost a year, Pondelick has been bringing himself up to speed on City matters by attending all the meetings he could, from meetings of the Auburn City Council meetings to meetings of the Public Works, Municipal Services, Finance, Planning and Community Development committees and recently the Les Gove Community Campus committee, the Transit and Trails committee and the Auburn International Farmers Market committee.

“I look at it like a jigsaw puzzle — a puzzle with no picture for a reference and no defined shape of the pieces, but somehow they all work together,” Pondelick said. “Sometimes you hear the mayor say something at one meeting that references something else, and about two weeks later at another meeting you figure out what it’s tied into. I’m not in the know, but I can figure it out. So attending those meetings has been very helpful.”