Bainbridge Island Mayor Kol Medina wants to use secret ballots to whittle down the pack of candidates for the city’s vacant council seat.

There are currently 10 candidates for Bainbridge’s vacant Central Ward council seat, and the council will meet Thursday to interview the applicants.

At Tuesday’s council meeting, Medina said the council members should fill out written ballots to pick their top three choices for the position, and the ballots would be tallied at Thursday’s meeting to decide which five candidates should advance to a second round of interviews with the council next week.

Under Medina’s proposed approach, council members would not discuss their preferred picks, but leave it to city staff to count the council’s ballots and display a tally sheet at the end of the vote.

The tally sheet would only list candidate names and their vote totals, and not the council members who voted for them.

The council’s ballots would not stay secret forever. Candidates for the council who question the vote tally could later review the ballots if they make a request to see them, Medina said.

Even so, the proposal may run afoul of Washington state’s laws on conducting public meetings, as the Open Public Meetings Act prohibits secret votes.

Medina’s proposal sparked a bit of caution from the city attorney at Tuesday’s meeting.

“We’re going to have to look at this in terms of the OPMA, the Open Public Meetings Act,” City Attorney Joe Levan told the council after Medina explained his suggestion.

Levan said he would research the “whole balloting situation” and return with more information.

“Well, let me know. Quickly,” Medina said Tuesday night.

Medina’s ballot proposal was the biggest of several changes to the appointment process for a new council member.

Earlier, the council had planned to reduce the pool of candidates by reviewing the application packets and not conducting an initial round of interviews.

Medina said he rethought that proposed approach and came to the conclusion it wasn’t fair to all of the applicants.

“I think if all of those people have the courage and the interest to step up put their name in for this, they should all get the chance to sit here and speak to us and be heard,” Medina said.

Medina said after all 10 council candidates are interviewed Thursday, then the council could reduce the pack to three to five finalists.

At the next council gathering, on Tuesday, April 24, the council would start the meeting at 6 p.m. for another question-and-answer session before the vote to appoint a new member was taken.

At Thursday’s meeting with all 10 applicants, candidates will be given five minutes to address two questions that have been provided in advance.

(The two questions are: Are there any regional issues or forums in which you have a particular interest or expertise? [e.g. transportation, water supply, human services, water quality, fiscal management, solid waste, etc.] Do you want to serve on the city council because of a particular local issue on which you want to work or are your interests more broadly distributed?)

The council will then take a short break, and go in reverse order with additional questions posed to the candidates.

Council members would then adjourn to a closed-door executive session to talk about the candidates, before returning to the public session for the vote.

Medina also suggested that council members be given “ballots” with the 10 candidates’ names and council members mark their first, second and third choices.

Medina said council members would put their names on their ballots, but the ballots would not be shown to the candidates.

The ballots would then be given to the city clerk and city attorney for tallying, with each counting independently on separate tally sheets.

Medina said each first place vote would count for five points; second choice, three points; and third, one point.

The final tally sheet would be displayed at the meeting when it was complete, Medina said.

“Everyone in the room will see who the top votes are,” he said.

Medina also said that if any candidates disputed the vote tally, they could look at the ballots and do their own audit of the count.

The council member’s names would be on the ballot, Medina said, in case there was ever an audit: “There’s proof of whom voted for whom.”

The five candidates with the most votes would be invited back to the next council meeting.

Medina also said the vote to choose a final appointee would follow the same process, “but a little different.”

City officials said Wednesday that they were still researching Medina’s proposal.

“The city attorney is reviewing the plans for the council vacancy process and will work with the mayor today and tomorrow to confirm the correct approach,” Deputy City Manager Morgan Smith said in an email to the Review.

The seven-member council has had a vacant seat since the resignation of Mike Scott. Scott stepped down in March after accepting an appointment to the bench to be a judge in King County Superior Court.

The 10 candidates are Monica Aufrecht, Debbie Hollyer, Rob Evans, Nathan Daum, Marshall Tappen, Mark Jordan, Leslie Schneider, Mark A. Epstein, Wayne Roth and Robert L. Drury.