Scandal sheets: Coleman not first Minnesota pol to make news in bed

Where politicians lay their heads at night can be a point of pride–even memorialized in bronze, as seen above. In other cases it proves not to be so prestigious, as Sen. Norm Coleman discovered last week when the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a Senate ethics complaint about his rental of a basement bedroom from a Republican fundraiser. Here’s a laundry list of other Minnesota pols who probably lost sleep over public interest in the location of their beds.

In 2005, Sue Ek ran as a Republican in a special election for state representative in St Cloud’s District 15B. When the DFL Party challenged her residency, she claimed she lived with her parents in St. Cloud although she admitted sometimes sleeping at her office in another home her parents owned in St. Paul. A week before the election the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled she didn’t meet legal requirements for living in the district. Ek’s mother Kay tried to take her daughter’s place on the ballot but had to run as a write-in candidate and lost to DFLer Larry Haws. Her daughter’s removal from the ballot for residence reasons didn’t afford Kay Ek the ballot access Walter Mondale got after Sen. Paul Wellstone’s death.

Kris Reiter tried to take the place of her father, Jim Reiter, as St. Paul’s Fifth Ward Council Member after his death in 2003. She and three others successfully filed to run after the elder Reiter’s death in early October. A Ramsey County District Court ruled that Kris Reiter, a Shorewood resident, was eligible because she had lived at her parents’ St. Paul house beginning in early September, meeting the city’s 30-day residency requirement.

Kris Reiter finished second to Lee Helgen in the election, but not without more house-related controversy: Reiter first said she’d sold her Shorewood house to her campaign manager, Sheriff Bob Fletcher, but then said he was renting it from her. When an audience question that was read aloud from a stack of index cards at a League of Women Voters candidate debate made an allegation about Reiter’s relationship with Fletcher, Fletcher used his authority as sheriff to confiscate the cards. (Reiter and Fletcher later married.)

Wherever Al Oertwig woke up Aug. 7, 2005, it was to a James Walsh story in the Star Tribune that took nearly 2,000 words to tell the tale of the St. Paul School Board member who often spent nights in his office at 306 Colborne, the St. Paul Public Schools headquarters building. Oertwig weathered that storm, admitting he sometimes worked late but claiming he did indeed reside in the East Side duplex homesteaded in his name. When he hit the headlines again last year with allegations he’d used a library computer to view child porn, Oertwig quit rather than fight the charges which he denied but expected would tarnish him forever. Six months later St. Paul police exonerated him.

Jesse Ventura talks up his extended trips to Mexico, raising the question of whether he spends enough time in Minnesota to run for U.S. Senate. It’s a similar question that Vice President Dick Cheney faced in 2000, when he claimed residency in Wyoming but lived in Texas.

The U.S. Senate also investigated Sen. Dave Durenberger for ethics violations, some of which related to billing the government for stays at his own home state condo. The Senate denounced Durenberger in 1990 and he pled guilty to misuse of government funds in 1995.

That was the same year state Rep. Andy Dawkins and state Sen. Ellen Anderson married — but couldn’t live together because they represented different districts. After 2000′s redistricting failed to bring them together, Dawkins retired in 2002 and the Capitol lovebirds finally were able to share a roof.

Minneapolis City Council Member Lisa McDonald faced a similar problem when she married George Soule, the finance chair of her successful 1997 campaign for a second term, the next year. He lived one block outside of the city’s Tenth Ward that she represented. Their "commuter marriage" had them at her Bryant Avenue house during the week and at his Lake Harriet-area residence on weekends — an arrangement that City Pages said inspired "whispered speculation" that McDonald no longer lived in her ward. She told Burl Gilyard: "Seems to me if I wanted to get around that, I’d sell the house and rent a place."

Let the record show McDonald did not rent out a basement apartment from a political operative.