Walter says he's cleared to run; sheriff's not so sure.

As the 2008 election season gets under way, a difference of opinion over the impact of laws regulating political activities of government employees is emerging between candidates for one office in Leelanau County.

The two candidates are both seeking the Republican nomination for Leelanau County Sheriff in the August Primary election. One is the incumbent, Mike Oltersdorf. The other is his only challenger thus far, Mark Walter, a county commissioner who works full time as a lieutenant with the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Sheriff Oltersdorf said he believes there may be legal issues that Walter should look into that are outlined in a federal law, the Hatch Act of 1939, that regulates the political activities of local, state and federal government employees. Oltersdorf even gave his challenger a booklet that explains the act.

Walter, meanwhile, says he is confident that there are no legal issues that would impede his run for sheriff – just as there have been no legal issues that have prevented him from running for the seat he currently holds on the Leelanau County Board of Commissioners. Besides, Walter says, he has received written assurances from the Michigan Civil Service Commission that there are no legal problems related to his status as a state employee, as an elected county official, or as a candidate for Leelanau County sheriff.

Notwithstanding a difference of opinion between the two opposing political candidates, the Hatch Act has clearly had an impact on other local politicians in Leelanau County.

Last week, for example, Elmwood Township trustee James S. O’Rourke relinquished his seat on the township board because he had just accepted a new job at Cherry Capital Airport as a screener for the federal Transportation Security Administration. Under the Hatch Act, federal employees – or people whose government jobs are funded at least in part by the federal government – need to take special care if they engage in partisan political activity.

The impact of the Hatch Act on state or local officials is even less clear for government employees whose positions are part time, or whose agencies are only partially funded with federal dollars. Such was the case in 2000 when the then-director of the Leelanau County Emergency Management department, Dick Catton, relinquished his seat as a trustee on the Suttons Bay Township Board.

Citing the Hatch Act, Catton said he was required to step down because he had previously run as a Republican – and a portion of his salary came from federal grants for county emergency management programs. Catton said he’d been advised that he could win his seat back if he ran without party affiliation – which he did, unopposed, in the November 2000 General Election.

Catton resigned from his seat on the Suttons Bay Township Board permanently last year – but a problem the board encountered in appointing a replacement for Catton in 2007 related to another law regulating political activities by government officials.

The Suttons Bay Township Board last year appointed township resident Tom Nixon to replace Catton. Nixon was also a member of the Suttons Bay Public Schools Board of Education.

However, a review of state laws by township officials showed that a person cannot serve simultaneously on a township board and a school board if the government bodies have contracts with each other. In the case of Suttons Bay Township and Suttons Bay Public Schools, the bodies are partners in a contract that allows the township to collect taxes for the school. That’s why the two offices – school board member and township trustee – are considered “incompatible” under state law.

Nixon was forced to relinquish his seat after less than one month. The township board has since replaced Nixon by appointing William Drozdalski as a trustee.

Oltersdorf himself found that he was serving in an “incompatible office” in 1998 and was forced to step down from his seat on the Suttons Bay school board. It turns out that a little-noticed provision of the state Constitution specifically prohibits county sheriffs from filling any other elective office. At the time – nearly a decade ago – the sheriff said he was unaware of that provision of law until a local attorney brought it to his attention.

At a Michigan Sheriff’s Association meeting Oltersdorf attended in October, an attorney gave a presentation about the Hatch Act. That presentation prompted Oltersdorf to provide his political rival with a copy of a booklet about the act and a suggestion that Walter should think twice about running for sheriff before taking the Hatch Act into account.

Oltersdorf noted that candidates running for sheriff in other Michigan counties had been forced by the Hatch Act to give up their government positions because the agencies that employed them had received some portion of its funding from federal sources.

The executive director of the Michigan Sheriff’s Association, Terry Jungel, noted that many provisions of the Hatch Act remain a “gray area,” and the law has continually been interpreted and reinterpreted in court cases through the years.

Jungel said he would urge anyone running for office, for whom the Hatch Act may apply, to review opinions from the Office of the Special Counsel of the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board in Washington, D.C., or seek an opinion from some other qualified attorney.