At a special meeting at 5:30 p.m. April 7, the Auburn City Council chose seven candidates to interview at a special meeting next week when they pick one to fill the unexpired council term of Deputy Mayor Larry Brown.

City council adjourned into executive session at 6:25 p.m. to evaluate the qualifications of the candidates, whose names they did not know. By the time the hour-long, behind-closed-doors session ended and councilmembers had filed back into council chambers, there were 14 valid applications.

But they still did not know any names, only numbers because, as Mayor Nancy Backus explained, the city had redacted any identifiers such as names, or street or web addresses. Any interviews and final action appointing the new councilmember will be open to the public starting at 5 p.m. April 14 at City Hall.

Brown, Position 6, resigned on Feb. 16 for unspecified health reasons.

Backus said the city got 45 applications for the seat by the deadline, but only 44 were valid, meaning the applicants actually lived within city limits. Each valid application was assigned a number, 1-44, before council members got their first looks at the applications and made their unranked recommendations. City Clerk Shawn Campbell then received the recommendations from all six councilmembers, and tallied the information to pare the number down to a workable 15. On Monday, one candidate dropped out, leaving 14.

When the executive session ended and councilmembers returned to open session, their next task was to decide how many of the 14 remaining they would later interview based solely on their qualifications. If they choose 10 people to interview, councilmembers would get 10 votes, but only one vote per candidate. By evening’s end, they had chosen seven numbers of the still nameless applicants to advance to April 14.

Backus offered advice to the candidates, whom the city will notify.

“We encourage you that if you are a candidate, you do not stay in council chambers while another candidate is being interviewed,” Backus said of April 14. “That is a courtesy because … if you sit in the room and hear the questions, that would, maybe, give you a bit of an advantage. We can’t force you to stay in another room because this is an open public meeting.”

State law gives cities 90 days from the occurrence of the vacancy to appoint, by a majority vote of a quorum of the remaining members of the council — at least four of them — a qualified person to fill the vacancy. If the council does not appoint a person by then, state law allows King County to step in and appoint a qualified person to fill the vacancy.

In other action Monday night

The council accepted a $20,000 grant award from the Seattle Police Department on behalf of the Washington State Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.