Documents raise questions about Johnson’s residency
Courts documents raise questions about the residency of State Rep. Connie Johnson, who is also running for State Senate.
Johnson had been staying with her ailing mother in a house in the city’s West End neighborhood.
During that time, Johnson was renting out her own home in the North Point neighborhood to a pair of tenants she later sued, accusing them of not paying the rent.
In a sworn affidavit submitted in that case on Feb. 7, Johnson lists her address as being in the 5800 Block of Maple Avenue - which is outside both the House district she represents, and the Senate district she is seeking to represent.
Johnson said she was taking care of her 63-year-old mother, who suffers from lupus. She said she was only using the Maple Avenue address for a corporation she owns that was the official plaintiff in the rent dispute.
City records show that, at the Maple address, at least some of the utilities were in Johnson’s name.
Johnson provided letters that she says she wrote to the tenants saying she would “not be at home very often” and would only be at the house “mainly on the weekends, sometimes, not even then.”
Senate candidates are required to live in the district they want to represent at least a year prior to the elections. Johnson’s election would be in November.
The director of the city Elections Board, Scott Leiendecker, confirmed that the agency has begun an inquiry into Johnson’s residency, which will be forwarded later this week to state election officials.
Johnson, meanwhile, insists that she “doesn’t owe anybody an explanation.”
“This is about petty personal politics,” Johnson said in an interview. “This is not about the issues facing the 5th Senatorial District.”
Read more about this in tomorrow’s Post-Dispatch.
Johnson
The only relevant inquiry by the E Board would be on behalf of the Secretary of State in connection with the senate contest in which Johnson is currently a candidate. The legislature is the sole judge of the qualifications of its members, so any contest of her eligibility to continue to hold her state rep seat would have to be brought in the state house. Highly unlikely this late in the session.
As to senate eligibility, Johnson is OK as long as she can establish that she is merely residing outside the district temporarily with intent to return. That was the ruling in two cases at opposite ends of the political spectrum: Republican Kit Bond’s 1972 run for governor (where supreme court held his one-year residence in GA while an appellate law clerk did not run afoul of his 10 year MO residency requirement) and Green Party Jason Murphy’s 2002 run for St Louis License Collector (city circuit court upheld his residency in spite of an intervening school-year abroad in Germany).
Johnson’s trademark arrogance about not owing anybody an explanation is another story.