Eight Voters in A Single-Wide? Residency Questions Fuel Heated Rosman Election
Rosman Mayor Brian Shelton and seven other family members were registered to vote at the in-town address of a mobile home, adding to long-standing residency questions about town officials.
ROSMAN — It would be a tight fit — eight adults, a full 2 percent of the town of Rosman’s 400 voters, living in a 24-year-old single-wide mobile home at 305 Woodyard Lane.
But that’s what was indicated in the list of registered town voters, at least before amendments to these rolls this week.
Rosman Mayor Brian Shelton, his wife — recently resigned town Alderman Deedra Shelton — and six of their adult children were all registered to vote at the property. None of them were present when a NewsBeat reporter visited one evening last week — just a town employee who said Shelton was allowing her and her husband to stay at the home.
“Once I started going through that list and cross referencing the addresses, I started laughing,” Ricky Traylor, Shelton’s opponent in the acrimonious race for mayor, said of the registration list. “I was like, ‘He’s got his whole family living at this mobile home next to the river.’ ”
To Shelton, this issue amounts to one more baseless and politically motivated charge about his actions as mayor and town administrator, none of which have been shown to be illegal. The registrations at the house on Woodyard — owned by former US Rep. Charles Taylor — were legitimate, Shelton said, because it served as the family home for about 12 years.
“I have six children and she (Deedra) has three and they have all lived with us,” Shelton said. “I’ve got the rental receipts if you want to see them.”
The crux of the issue — that family members living out of town are registered to vote inside of it — is being rendered moot by annexations and recent and planned changes to voter registrations, he said.
Brian Shelton, his wife, and two of the children registered at Woodyard are, after extensive renovations, just now moving to the one-time doctor’s office on a 5.5 acre property on Rosman Highway the couple bought in 2019.
“Anybody who has been there and has seen the work on the house knows this,” he said. The land was annexed into the town earlier in the summer.
Other children registered at the Woodyard address recently moved to family property on Old Turnpike Road that was annexed into the town during Tuesday night’s Board of Aldermen meeting.
Shelton and his wife changed their registration to reflect their new residence on Monday, said Transylvania County Elections Director Jeff Storey, and Shelton said all his family members will have correctly updated their registrations by the time of the election.
But to Traylor and Shelton’s other critics, the residency question has added a galling dimension to what they say is Shelton’s self-serving management style as mayor and town administrator.
They point to one land deal that profited Shelton with the help of town infrastructure investment, another that could provide a bigger boon in the future and the time he spends improving such investment properties while collecting a salary as full-time administrator.
(Shelton has said he takes vacation or sick time to do outside work and otherwise devotes at least 40 hours per week to town business.)
The benefits of this arrangement, critics say, flow to Shelton and his wife, Deedra, who they say have lived out of town until recently, and has been enabled by a compliant Board of Aldermen that has included two members, Deedra Shelton and Jared Crowe, who also live or have lived outside town limits.
Judging from how regularly the Sheltons’ vehicles have been parked at the Rosman Highway property, said Rose Baltezore, a utility customer who lives just outside of town, she suspects the Sheltons took up residence there long before they changed their voting address.
In county property records, Crowe’s address is listed as 28 Passmore Ln., northeast of town, while he’s registered to vote at the in-town address of 36 J.C. Chapman Road. When a man named Phillip Kitchen arrived at the J.C. Chapman property last week to drop off his teenage daughter, he told NewsBeat the house is occupied by his former wife, who is Crowe’s stepsister.
“I have no comment,” Crowe said when asked about his residency after Tuesday’s meeting. “I hopefully will in the very near future.”
“You don’t want to help anybody except people outside of town,” Traylor said to Crowe during a shouting match that erupted at the August meeting.
“How are you going to make decisions about our water, our sewer, our taxes? You shouldn’t be on the Board . . . You don’t live here!”
“Good Old Boy”
Baltezore said Deedra Shelton’s abrupt resignation and replacement are further examples of the cozy relationship between Shelton and the Board.
Brian Shelton read his wife’s brief letter of resignation near the beginning of Tuesday’s meeting. Mayor Pro Tem Missy Hendricks immediately nominated Walter Pettit as the appointee to serve the remaining two years of her term. Her motion was approved without discussion and Transylvania County Clerk of Superior Court Kristi Brown was on hand to administer the oath, after which Pettit took a seat behind the dais.
The whole process took less than eight minutes, most of which was filled with Pettit’s meandering introduction of himself as an 81-year-old military veteran, business owner and former Alderman.
Transylvania County Elections Director Jeff Storey confirmed that the Board had the power to appoint a new member. Asked after the meeting about the speed of this action, Shelton said several residents had previously expressed interest in replacing his wife, whose resignation had not been announced publicly before Tuesday.
But he said the choice of the appointee was up to the Aldermen, and Hendricks said Pettit was the obvious candidate because of his experience on the Board.
“I think it was prearranged,” Baltezore said Wednesday of Pettit’s selection. “He’s one of the good old boys.”
“B.S.”
Traylor said the Sheltons’ suspect addresses on registration forms potentially amount to “voter fraud.”
Actually, Story said, the issue is not that clear and the state law covering the voter residency “allows a lot of leeway.”
Specifically, the law acknowledges that voters can temporarily move but still maintain an older address as their home of record, Storey said, with college students and military personnel being prime examples.
The law states that this flexibility extends to anyone who has “the intention of returning” to the listed address. The burden to prove otherwise is left to anyone who challenges a voter’s residency, the law says, and if such an appeal to a county’s board of elections is successful, it results not in a criminal charge, but the voiding of the vote.
“We don’t determine anyone’s residency unless it’s brought before the board,” Storey said.
Determining a candidate’s residency is likewise left to challenges, which must be filed no more than 10 days after the end of the office’s filing period, a deadline that for the mayor’s race passed on Aug. 4, Storey said.
Traylor hasn’t taken any such actions, he said, because he only recently learned the full scope of the Sheltons’ residency issues, which would be resolved by annexations and amendments to the voter rolls.
Still, there’s no doubt the matter has helped fuel animosity between Shelton’s backers and critics.
Once-sleepy town meetings have recently featured crowded chambers and raucous arguments. On Tuesday, several attendees spoke heatedly either in favor of or against the annexations, which included the 40-acre parcel that Brian Shelton has said he hopes to sell to the town as the future site of a water intake and treatment facility.
Ricky Traylor’s wife, Cathy, also spoke at the meeting — not about the annexations but to push back on what she described as false accusations that she confronted and “cussed out” a respected long-time resident.
“In the future, keep my name out of your lying mouths, and you know who you are,” she concluded.
Asked after the meeting why she had resigned from her post, Deedra Shelton also cited unwarranted criticism, but from Traylor’s allies: “All the ridicule we’ve been getting from everybody in the county.”
Brian Shelton was more direct: “She’s tired of all the bullc—.”
So is he, he said, when asked about his decision to annex his parcels into the town. It was done not because the previous registrations were filed improperly, he said, but to silence critics.
“When they keep coming up with so many things — that I don’t live here and I don’t live there — I just decided to annex everything I own. Then what can they say?” he said. “I’m tired of the bullc—.”
Shelton, who has served as mayor since 2007, said he has been highly effective in that role, attracting affordable housing and expanding the town’s tax base and utility system. The opposition, he said, has been orchestrated by Traylor’s half brother and Shelton’s longtime political rival — former Rosman mayor and current County Building Director Mike Owen, who was angered because Shelton denied Owen’s request for the town to hire his son to do grading work.
“Everybody got mad at me because I wouldn’t let his son do work for the town,” Shelton said of Owen.
No, Owen said, he just wanted the town to repair a road near his home that was washed out during a 2021 flood.
“I didn’t care who fixed it, I just wanted it fixed,” he said.
Traylor, a self-employed landscape gardener, grew up in Rosman and left to serve in the military and attend college. He returned to town in 1993 and has lived there ever since. He has long been concerned with the way Shelton runs Rosman, he said, and decided to enter the race after learning of Shelton’s plans to sell the proposed water treatment site to the town for $1.2 million.
As for Shelton’s take on his reasons for running, “that had nothing to do with it,” Traylor said. “That’s b.s.”
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