Mayorís residency issue researched by attorney

By Barbara Brown
At last weekís North Branch City Council meeting, a former mayoral candidate raised concerns about the residency of current mayor Roger Else.
That issue seems to be settled, although the cityís attorney informed the council through a letter that the council would have to decide the next steps, if there are any at all.
With only about three weeks left to his term, Else was confronted during the public comment part of the councilís Dec. 9 meeting by former candidate Theresa Furman.
Furman raised questions about Elseís residency, claiming that he had sold his house and moved his belongings during the last weeks of November to Finlayson.
Furman submitted a letter to City Attorney Tom Miller which she copied to several county and state agencies including the county attorney and the stateís attorney asking for an investigation and claiming that the majority vote that passed a zoning amendment in November should be voided because Else was not a North Branch resident at the time of the vote.
The Nov. 25 re-zoning vote added 160 acres on the west side of the city to the cityís urban service area, making it available to receive city water and sewer services and changed the zoning area from rural residential to a zone that allows for smaller lots.
The re-zoning question passed with a 4-1 vote with Councilwoman Amy Oehlers voting against the changes.
Furman believed that vote should have not counted, she said, because she believed the mayorís residential status was questionable and that the issue should be put back through the voting process.
The mayor told people at the meeting that he still lived in North Branch and that his home phone number was still activated.
Miller, the cityís attorney, looked into the claims and said Monday that the council would have to make the decision of whether it wanted to question the mayorís residency.
Miller said during a phone interview that he researched the issue and found that the question of residency is often a fluid one and that in past questions of residency throughout the state something as simple as keeping a desk in a warehouse within a voting district has constituted residency.
Miller said Monday he had interviewed Else and his opinion would be that Else has enough proof to evidence his residency in North Branch, but he re-iterated that deciding the mayorís residency is not his decision.
ìIn all my years of practicing law I have never seen a question of residency raised like this,î Miller said Monday. ìI have been practicing municipal law for 11 years and itís never come up.î
Miller also said that his impression from the brief research he did was that the super-majority (4-1) vote that passed adding the 160 acres into the cityís urban service area could still stand.
He said simple math could be used to determine the outcome of the vote. He said even if the mayor had not been a resident, the council would have had four members and the issue would have passed with a 3-1 vote; still a super-majority of a four-member council.
Miller, who said he also forwarded his findings to Furman, said he would continue to investigate the issue if the council ordered him to.
City Administrator John Moosey said Monday he had received Millerís letter, but as of Monday the council had not received their copies. Moosey said the council could bring up the issue at its Dec. 30 meeting.

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