Jun 26, 2009  |  By: Lou Chibbaro Jr.  | COMMENTS     

Two local activists are asking the D.C. Board of Elections & Ethics to investigate whether a voter referendum petition to overturn the city’s same-sex marriage recognition law should be disqualified because the minister behind it is not a legal D.C. resident.

Attorney Cary Silverman, president of the Mount Vernon Square Neighborhood Association, and Martin Moulton, president of the D.C. Convention Center Community Association, said information they gathered from public records and submitted to the election board Wednesday shows that Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. appears to be a resident of Maryland, even though he affirmed in an affidavit that he lives in the District.

Silverman and Moulton said they were acting as concerned D.C. citizens and not in their official capacity as officers of their respective neighborhood groups.

“The available evidence suggests that Rev. Jackson does not fulfill the residence requirements of D.C. voter registration law,” the two men wrote in their request to the election board. “For these reasons, and based on the attached evidence, the D.C. Board of Elections & Ethics should reject his voter registration and petition for referendum.”

Silverman and Moulton included 52 pages of attached documents with their six-page letter calling on the board to investigate Jackson’s residency.

Among the documents are copies of voter registration records from Montgomery County, Md., that list Jackson and his wife, Vivian Michelle Jackson, as being “active” registered voters in Maryland.

The letter submitted to the election board by Silverman and Moulton points to additional documents the two men provide the board from the Maryland Department of Assessments & Taxation showing that Jackson and his wife own two houses in Silver Spring, Md.

The Montgomery County voter registration documents show that Jackson and his wife list one of the two Silver Spring houses — the one located at 15713 Holly Grove Road — as their address for purposes of voting in Maryland.

In its own investigation into Jackson’s residency, the Blade learned from sources familiar with the Jacksons’ Holly Grove Road home that neighbors continue to see people coming and going from the home’s four-acre property and were not aware that the Jacksons had moved out of the large Tudor house.

Jackson told the Blade at the conclusion of a June 10 D.C. election board hearing that he is a D.C. resident and that his car is currently registered in D.C. He declined to say when he moved from Maryland to D.C.

But Silverman and Moulton say in their letter to the election board that people who live in the Whitman condominium apartments at 910 M St., N.W., which Jackson lists as his D.C. address on several documents related to the referendum, say they have never seen Jackson in the building.

Two people who live in the building told the Blade they know of a few residents at the Whitman who think they have seen Jackson in the lobby. However, one resident on the building’s sixth floor — near apartment 630 that Jackson lists as his home on his D.C. voter registration form — says he has never seen Jackson coming or going from that apartment.

An attorney representing the Whitman told the Blade the building’s management and condominium board would have no comment on any matter involving a specific owner or resident, based on the board’s policy of protecting the privacy of its residents.

D.C. property records, which are publicly available from the city’s Recorder of Deeds web site, show that the apartment Jackson claims as his residence is owned by Joseph Honaker and that Honaker is taking the homestead deduction from his property tax bill. Honaker could not be reached for comment.

Under the city’s tax law, the homestead deduction — which significantly reduces a homeowner’s property taxes — can only be taken if someone uses the home or apartment in question as their primary residence. A house or apartment being claimed for the homestead deduction cannot be legally leased to a tenant under the tax law.

Silverman and Moulton say in their letter to the election board that the Whitman’s condominium bylaws established a cap on the number of apartments in the building that can be rented and that cap was reached last year.

Although Jackson has declined to disclose when he became a D.C. resident, Maryland election records show that he and his wife voted in Montgomery County in the November 2008 election, indicating he was a Maryland resident at that time.

Sources familiar with the Whitman have told the Blade the cap on renting apartments at the building was reached prior to November.

“Rev. Jackson does not appear to live in The Whitman ...