Overview:
• Council Member Mario Benavente was elected to District 3
• He got married last year, and his wife’s home is in District 5. He says he still lives in the District 3 residence
• Per state law, if elected officials move out of their districts, their seats become vacant
• Mayor Mitch Colvin wants mayoral candidates to sign affidavits attesting to their residences
Fayetteville Mayor Mitch Colvin is questioning whether one of his opponents for reelection lives in his city council district as required by law.
City Council Member Mario Benavente, who represents District 3, got married last year in October to attorney Caroline Gregory Benavente. She lives in District 5. Benavente said he has maintained his primary residence at his father’s home in District 3, where he lived before he got married.
State law says city council members must live in their districts, and if they move out, their city council seats automatically become vacant. When the seat becomes vacant, the city council picks someone to fill the empty seat until the next election.
The primary for Fayetteville’s mayor and city council elections has been underway with early and mail-in voting, and ends with election day on Oct. 7. Ten people are running for mayor. The top two candidates from each primary will advance to the Nov. 4 general election.
Colvin hitting back?
Colvin raised the question of Benavente’s residency in interviews with CityView on Friday and Saturday after Benavente at a candidates’ forum brought up Colvin’s receipt of a $1,000 campaign donation four years ago from a building contractor who later abandoned $7.9 million of city construction projects.
CityView spoke with Benavente about his residence in February and again on Monday.
“Before I got married to my wife, it wasn’t a secret I was a city councilman for District 3,” he said. “And that requires certain expectations. Probably not going to be home every night for dinner, because there’s community watches. Probably going to have to spend a lot of my time doing constituency services, and right now, I’ve got to maintain my residence [in District 3.]”
Colvin said he would sign an affidavit attesting to where he lives and he wants other candidates to do the same.
“Yeah, I plan to do it, and invite all of those running for mayor to do it, just to assure the citizens we all have been serving legally in our right districts, and we’re running for mayor with the same intent,” Colvin said.
The rules for their home addresses
The members of the Fayetteville City Council are elected from nine districts.
“When the city is divided into electoral districts for the purpose of electing members of the council, council members shall reside in the district they represent,” says North Carolina law. “When a council member ceases to reside in an electoral district that he was elected to represent, the office is ipso facto vacant.”
What happens if someone thinks their city council member has moved out of their district but has not resigned? What can they do about it?
“State law provides no procedure for directly challenging an elected official’s residence,” local government expert Robert Joyce of the University of North Carolina School of Government wrote in a blog post in 2010. Instead, the constituent can go to the Board of Elections and challenge the official’s voter registration.
An elected official must be a registered voter in the district he or she represents, Joyce told CityView on Tuesday. If the constituent can persuade the Board of Elections that the official no longer lives at the address of their voter registration, the board can cancel the official’s voter registration.
When the voter registration is canceled, the official is no longer qualified to hold the office, he said.
If the official fails to resign after that decision, the board that the official serves on can use the voter registration decision as the basis of voting to declare the seat as vacant, Joyce said.
‘Where do you live?’ has come up before
This is not the first time that a local elected official’s residency has been questioned.
In the 2023 Fayetteville City Council elections, then-incumbent Johnny Dawkins took criticism after he had sold his home in District 5, moved into a rental home in District 5, and bought another home in the Raleigh area for his mother-in-law. Critics asserted he had moved away.
No one formally challenged Dawkins on whether he had moved out of the district. He lost that election to Lynne Greene.
In 2018, the candidacy of state Sen. Ben Clark was challenged when he sought reelection. Clark and his wife owned a newly built home in the Vander area east of Fayetteville, outside of his state Senate district. Yet he asserted he continued to maintain his primary residence in his old home inside the district in Hoke County.
An elections panel conducted a trial-like hearing and ruled that Clark still officially resided at the old home, and he could remain in the election.
On Sept. 8, the North Carolina State Board of Elections considered challenges against two candidates running for election this year:
- It concluded that Alderman Jimmy “Steve” Jordan of Andrews in Cherokee County does not live at the address he has in the town limits. It upheld a ruling by the Cherokee County Board of Elections that he was ineligible to run for reelection. The town board on Sept. 11 voted to remove him from office, the Cherokee Scout reported.
- It ruled that Shaunte McFarland, who is running for mayor of Sharpsburg, lives in the town and can remain on the ballot. Sharpsburg is in Nash, Edgecombe, and Wilson counties.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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