AUBURN — City practice may be to have associate Planning Board members who only vote under certain circumstances, but that’s not what Auburn’s ordinances say — and that could be a problem, councilors learned Monday.

“How would a court deal with a fact that the key votes were made by associate members and that they have no written authority?” Planning Board Chairman Bob Bowyer asked councilors during a Monday night workshop. “I don’t know what the outcome would be, and I don’t want to know. It seems to me the easy way to fix it is to amend our ordinance, and that is the principal thing we are recommending.”

Bowyer said the Planning Board has been working for several months discussing its practices and writing them in a policy and procedures manual.

“We thought it best to evaluate those and have a written document,” Bowyer said.

That’s when the board discovered the associate members are not written in city ordinances.

The Planning Board has nine members, all serving three-year terms and all appointed by the City Council. Seven are full voting members and two are associate members. According to the board’s practices, associate members are only allowed to vote if one of the regular members is unable to vote.

“We have had associate members for quite a while, and they frequently sit in for a regular member when they need to be absent or must recuse themselves because of a conflict of interest,” Bowyer said. “We could get to a situation where an associate member, serving in place of a regular member, becomes the deciding vote on an application before the board.”

Bowyer said the board should complete its policy review at its Jan. 13 meeting. It could come back to city councilors as soon as Jan. 19.

Mayor Jonathan LaBonte said he’d like to see the ordinances also require a minimum of two meetings per month and time dedicated to providing a public comment period at each meeting.

Councilor Tizz Crowley said she was pleased with the work and would be willing to postpone a vote on the Planning Board policies until all of the city’s boards were ready to adopt something similar.

Councilor Robert Hayes argued against waiting.

“If this serves as a model for other committees, that’s fine,” Hayes said. “But let’s deal with what has been recognized as a weakness now. Let’s correct that.”

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