A Question of Residency - UPDATED

The issue re-emerged (see below) earlier this month, with a passing reference in an article in The Register-Herald of Beckley.

While describing his plan to announce for secretary of state, Senate Majority Whip Billy Wayne Bailey, D-Wyoming, said he had moved to Beckley.

The article noted that the state bars more than one senator from residing in any given county (in a multi-county district), but Bailey said he could reside in Raleigh County "even though the county already has a senator — fellow Democrat Mike Green."

“Sure I can,” Bailey told the newspaper. “I just can’t run for senator again.”

The Register-Herald followed up this week, by citing provisions of the West Virginia Constitution that appear to raise questions about Bailey's ability to retain the seat from Raleigh County.

Bailey told the newspaper that he can claim residency in both counties.

“I’ve got a post office box in Pineville and I can claim a residence at my mother’s house in Alpoca,” Bailey told the newspaper, while also citing his job at Wyoming County's senior center.

But as The Associated Press reports today, Gov. Joe Manchin raised similar arguments while a delegate seeking to run for the state Senate in 1984. The state Supreme Court rejected his claims, and that of a second Senate candidate, before knocking them both off the ballot.

The justices concluded that Manchin and his family lived in the wrong district, and found that the deciding factor. That ruling also says that senators "must be residents of both the county and the district from which they are elected."

(Manchin changed his residency after the ruling, and won the Senate seat in the following election of 1986.)

Update: My apologies to Phil Kabler and The Charleston Gazette. He ran an item about Bailey's residency, "WYOMING DELEGATE IN NAME ONLY?", way back in January.

Kabler cited an August 2006 deed filing by Bailey and his wife for a $160,000 house in Beckley. He also reported that their children enrolled in Raleigh County schools that fall.

Bailey told Kabler that his family "moved there after they determined that the cost of the mortgage payment was less than the $900 a month his wife was spending for gas to commute from their home in Pineville to her job in Beckley."