Think of the resolution the City Council passed Monday, City officials say, as sharpening Spencer Alpert’s role.

Alpert, chief of Alpert International LLP, is the man who entered into an agreement with the City of Auburn three years ago and renewed last year to develop City-owned downtown properties south of City Hall and to help with development proposals for other nearby downtown parcels.

He showed Auburn residents plans for a three block-commercial, retail and residential development called Auburn Junction just south of City Hall.

Monday’s resolution, which supersedes the old master development agreement, makes a new Alpert-affiliated company, Cerdimm LLC, not necessarily the developer but the entity that goes out into the world on behalf of the City, finds the money, people, developers and commercial brokers and puts them together to make stuff happen on those City-owned parcels.

City officials insist that’s the role they had in mind all along for Alpert, well known for his access to private markets and for his knowledge of developers, not only in King County and the Puget Sound Region but also across the nation.

Mayor Pete Lewis said that this was the role he had in mind all along for Alpert.

“When this effort was first developed, it was looked at as Alpert and Associates was going to be like a City developer. That was never the intent. He was to bring in the access to the markets and access to capital,” Lewis said.

In displaying those plans for Auburn Junction, Lewis said, Alpert did what the City Council asked him to do.

“For many years I asked him to go along with that and to provide some plans,” Lewis said. “I knew, being a past banker, that the market is going to build what the market builds. Plans are only suggestions about what we want, not necessarily what the market will provide.

“So I never worried that much about whether the current went to the left or to the right. I was hoping to see a developer come in and make an offer.

Now that the City has moved to complete its infrastructure requirements with the Promenade project along South Division Street – most of it replacing aged water and sewer lines – has completed the necessary zoning changes, made the necessary changes to all the codes, Alpert is ready to go with a commercial broker to find those funding sources.

But they won’t be banks, not in this economy.

“We all know that banks aren’t lending now. It’s the private capital that’s lending,” Lewis said. “So it’s about finding the private capital and finding the different developers, one that maybe does retail, another that maybe does residential but wants residential that can be done with condos. Figuring out how you put those things together on a block, that’s his job.

“We had put together all these plans to show what we could do. Now that we’ve got infrastructure ready, we are going to go out with his assistance and with a commercial broker and bring those people in to build those projects,” he said.

“The City Council has provided the codes that give the structure of saying, ‘These are the few things you cannot do and here are all the other things they can do.’ Now we say, ‘Bring us your examples so that we can move forward.’ ”