I had to chuckle a little bit about Paul’s concern;
A candidate for State’s Attorney is accusing his competitors of violating residency requirements for living outside of Minnehaha County.
Paul Bengford, an assistant city attorney for the city of Sioux Falls pursuing the county’s top prosecutor’s job, this week took to radio airwaves and reporters’ inboxes calling on two others in the race to suspend their campaigns because they have residences in Lincoln County.
“Crystal Johnson and Daniel Haggar have broken faith with voters by filing petitions falsely claiming each has a primary residence in Minnehaha County,” Bengford said in a news release Wednesday.
UPDATE: First of all, it is completely legal to be a State’s Attorney and live in another ‘adjoining’ county. Marty Jackley served in a county he did not live in. If it is a small county. It doesn’t apply in Minnehaha;
7-16-31. Residency requirements for state’s attorney in counties with low population. In any county with a population of less than five thousand persons, no state’s attorney is disqualified from holding office for failure to be a resident of that county if the state’s attorney is a resident of a county which is contiguous to the county in which the state’s attorney holds such office.
Source: SL 2004, ch 69, § 1.
But the concern really made me chuckle, because Bengford has been an attorney with the City of Sioux Falls for several years and has never said anything about the massive amount of city employees who don’t live in Sioux Falls or pay property taxes here. For example one of the city attorneys lives in Madison, our Fire Chief lives in Canton (he told councilors when he was appointed to the job that SF wasn’t a safe place to raise kids) and our Library Director lives in Minnesota. I think I was told once about a third of the city’s employees don’t live in Sioux Falls. I have often recommended that at least management and directors have a requirement to live in the city they serve, especially someone who works in public safety like our Fire Chief. Many councilors have told me they were not really concerned about it, so no ordinances have been proposed. It is pretty obvious Bengford is just trying to make this into a political football. Remember, Paul was the city attorney who went after Cameraman Bruce for a raspberry bush in his fenced off back yard as a public nuance. Bengford lost that case and many other code enforcement cases. Not only is Paul not qualified to be State’s Attorney, he barely is qualified to be a city attorney.
Vote for Crystal Johnson.
I also chuckled about Daniel Haggar defending his residency. His sister Jenna was rumored to be living out of state with her husband while serving her last year in the legislature. The legislature was asked to investigate the claims, but nothing was ever done about it. She resigned after the session was over.