Spokane City Council candidate’s eligibility to run called into question

Alejandro Barrientos’ qualification to legally run for Spokane City Council is being scrutinized over questions about whether he met the residency requirement for candidates.

Barrientos, who is running for the open seat for Spokane’s southern council district against Kate Telis, dismissed the concerns Friday as a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of court filings following his divorce last year.

The candidate’s residency issues were first reported by local alternative news outlet Range Media.

State and local law requires a candidate for public office to have lived in the jurisdiction for at least a full year before they file for office. Specifically, under the Spokane city charter, a candidate must have their “primary residence” be a “permanent address where he or she physically resides and maintains his or her abode.”

Compared to Tyler LeMaster in 2021 or Mark Hamilton in 2013, both of whom were disqualified from their runs for Spokane City Council because they didn’t fulfill the residency requirement, Barrientos’ case is less clear-cut. If he were to win the November election and his eligibility was challenged in court, his ability to hold office could come down to how a judge interprets the particulars of the law.

Barrientos is confident that he could overcome a court challenge, he said Friday.

“Legally, I don’t have any concerns,” he said. “If it needs to be litigated, I’m perfectly fine doing that.”

Barrientos is and had been a resident of the south Spokane district for years, but where he laid his head at night was at least somewhat in flux for nearly the full year before he filed for office.

Barrientos filed for divorce from his wife in May 2024. In initial court filings, he certified to the court that they were no longer living in the same residence and that his now-ex-wife would remain in their South Hill home.

Barrientos told Range Media that he stayed in different places before he purchased his new South Hill home in April, including at his brother’s house out of town and at a downtown condo he owned with his ex-wife. Primarily, however, he and his ex-wife both maintained that Barrientos still lived at the South Hill home with his ex-wife and kids.

“My wife and I had a plan in mind when we were putting (the divorce filings) together, but we soon decided the best thing to do was for my wife and kids to stay in that house while I was finding new housing,” Barrientos told The Spokesman-Review on Friday.

By October, Barrientos told the courts he would relinquish ownership of the South Hill property to his ex-wife and would gain full ownership of the downtown condo that the couple had jointly owned. But Barrientos claims to have never lived in the downtown condo full time, primarily using it as an office where he occasionally slept. He also told The Spokesman-Review on Friday that this property transfer hadn’t actually occurred yet, and the South Hill home where his ex-wife and children live is still in his name.

In any case, Spokane’s candidate residency requirement makes no mention of home ownership as a qualification, only that someone “physically resides” at a “permanent address” in the district.

Both Councilman Paul Dillon and former Councilwoman Lili Navarrete, who represent or represented the south Spokane district on the council, told Range Media that Barrientos had claimed to have recently lived downtown, in part to demonstrate an intimate understanding of the issues facing the area. Barrientos on Friday said they were confused.

“I think that people might be confused, and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt,” Barrientos said. “I have stated I’ve lived downtown, but this was all prior to 2018 when I moved to the South Hill.”

In a brief interview, Dillon reiterated that Barrientos had claimed to live downtown recently, not seven years ago.

“I understand divorce is very hard, and I want to be very empathetic to how hard that is,” Dillon said. “At the same time, it’s clear he told the judge he was not living in District 2 within the time frame of that residency requirement.”

Dillon has endorsed Barrientos’ opponent, Telis.

Spokane’s city attorney was unavailable to comment Friday, wrote city spokesperson Erin Hut, who added only that “If a question arises regarding a candidate’s residency and eligibility for office, the matter would require a legal challenge and a subsequent determination by a judge.”

If Barrientos was elected and then ruled ineligible, his replacement would be appointed by the Spokane City Council; notably, five of the seven sitting council members have endorsed Barrientos’ opponent.

Disqualifications are common

It is not at all uncommon for candidates to be disqualified because they hadn’t lived in a district for long enough, nor for elected officials to be removed from office because they accidentally moved outside of the district.

In most of those cases, however, the violation is more clear-cut.

Two candidates were cut from local ballots in 2021: Billy Costello, a candidate for Deer Park City Council, and Tyler LeMasters, a candidate for Spokane City Council.

Costello had been unaware of the one-year residency requirement and was open about having moved to the city only a month before filing for office. By the time the disqualification was discovered, ballots had already been mailed to voters. If he had won election and chose to take the oath of office, he would have been able to serve until being challenged in court and declared ineligible by a judge. He lost the election, however, making the legal questions moot.

LeMasters was, in a roundabout sense, also open about having moved to Spokane only six months before filing, having posted a video to Instagram announcing when he moved to the city; still, he fought a legal challenge until a judge had him removed from the ballot.

Unlike either Costello or LeMasters, there does not seem to be any evidence or record of Barrientos calling the downtown Spokane condo home, nor any other residence.

Dillon filed the court challenge against LeMasters in 2021 on behalf of the Parenthood Advocates of Greater Washington and Northern Idaho, the political affiliate of the Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and Northern Idaho. He noted that the case four years ago was significantly more clear-cut, and argued that reforms to the residency requirement may be appropriate to prevent the kinds of questions Barrientos is now facing, such as a requirement for candidates to proactively declare their primary residence when filing for office.

There was also the case of Spokane City Council candidate Mark Hamilton in 2013. Hamilton had purchased a house within the district almost exactly a year before he filed to run against the incumbent, then-Councilwoman Amber Waldref, explicitly with the intent of using the address in order to qualify to run.

That didn’t stop Hamilton from registering to vote at a second address outside of city limits, voting in out-of-city elections twice in 2012. A judge ruled against him and tossed him off of the November ballot.

But unlike Hamilton, Barrientos never registered to vote at his downtown condo or anywhere outside of the South Hill. A month after certifying that he would relinquish the south hill home to his ex-wife, he was still registered to vote at that address, according to voter rolls. By the time he voted this summer in the city’s primary elections – notably the first Spokane municipal election in which Barrientos had ever voted, according to state voter data – he had moved into and registered at his new South Hill home.