When the Edmond City Council announced an application process for filling its vacant Ward 1 seat, one eligibility requirement caught the eyes of onlookers. To hold public office in Oklahoma’s fifth-largest city, residents must be a “freeholder” or “landowner.”
Since its original 1925 text, the Edmond City Charter has contained language excluding residential renters — as well as anyone who lives with a spouse who may not have property in their name — from seeking municipal office, according to Edmond City Attorney Madeline Sawyer.
“No person shall be eligible to be mayor, or councilman unless he be a citizen of the United States and of the state of Oklahoma, a freeholder in the City of Edmond, at least 25 years of age, a resident of said city at least one year next prior to his election, and a qualified voter of said city and ward from which he seeks election,” Article II, Section 9 of the charter reads.
Sawyer confirmed the city’s interpretation of the ordinance “requires candidates to own property located in the City of Edmond.”
With Ward 1 Councilman Tom Robins resigning his seat to pursue a 2025 mayoral campaign, the Edmond City Council is accepting applications from property owners — age 25 and older — through 5 p.m. Monday, Dec. 2. The council is expected to make a two-year appointment at its Dec. 9 meeting.
With “landowner” designated among the eligibility criteria, the charter restriction caught the eye of House District 39 Rep. Erick Harris, an attorney first elected to represent core Edmond in January.
“I went, ‘Well, that is interesting,'” said Harris (R-Edmond). “Whether or not it’s legal, I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone has challenged that or not, but it did catch my attention.”
Mayoral candidates support potential change
Historically, property ownership requirements for elected office have been challenged in other states. In New York, for instance, an appellate court overturned a 1937 ruling with its decision in Landes v. Town of North Hempstead (1967), which said “arbitrary exclusions” for officeholding run afoul of constitutional protections “whether we regard it from the viewpoint of the person seeking office or of the individual voter.”
“The ownership of land, however, as a prerequisite, a condition precedent, to holding elective town office constitutes an ‘invidious discrimination’ against nonlandowners, a sort of economic gerrymandering which runs afoul of the equal protection and due process clauses of both federal and state constitutions,” the New York court’s chief judge wrote.
Historical context
Espoused by prominent Founding Fathers, the concept of a land deed deeming someone fit to cast a ballot or hold office were common in the early stages of the 18th-century American experiment.
But over time, land ownership restrictions for public office holding have faced court challenges in many states.
Oklahoma does not appear to have easily identifiable case law or state law directly on point.
Complicating matters, not all municipalities in Oklahoma are created equal. While laws about “strong-mayor-council” and “board of trustees” forms of municipal government only require elected officials to be “actual residents,” cities with charters like Edmond stem from different laws.
For “charter” cities of at least 2,000 people, Article 18, Section 3(a) of the Oklahoma Constitution and Title 11, Section 13-102 of state statute employ the term “board of freeholders” when establishing a governing body. And although Title 11, Section 16-110 specifies six months of voter registration as the only applicable requirement for “filing as a candidate in a nonpartisan municipal election,” Section 16-102 says those provisions may be superseded “to the extent that such residency requirements are governed by municipal charter.”
With no legal challenge of Edmond’s land-ownership candidacy requirement pending, any change regarding who should be able to seek Edmond municipal office may be more likely to come from the City Council itself.
To that end, all of Edmond’s three declared candidates for mayor in 2025 told NonDoc they support modifying the ordinance in question.
Robins, who stepped down from his Ward 1 seat to become Edmond’s first declared mayoral candidate this cycle, offered blunt a assessment of the historical intent behind the property ownership requirement.
“The 1920s history of when the city charter and others like it were written is clear,” Robins said. “Landholder is pretty clearly meant to be interpreted to mean white male, or at least primarily white males. The history bears that out.”
If city leaders want to ensure candidates are permanent residents of the community, Robins said he supports extending Edmond’s current one-year residency requirement to two or three years.
“You can run for governor, you can run for Senate, U.S. Congress, without that requirement (of land ownership), so I think it’s time to modernize it,” Robins said. “It shouldn’t be harder to run for mayor than it is for governor.”
Mark Nash, Edmond’s most recently announced mayoral candidate, also said the city should look at a potential change to the charter.
“The issue of property ownership to serve on the council is one of several issues in the charter that deserve a strong look for revisions,” Nash said. “If you want to attract more qualified candidates, why wouldn’t you include renters with the necessary knowledge, skills, desire and a history of living in Edmond?”
David Hornbeek, a local architect and the second candidate to announce his mayoral run this fall, agreed with Robins and Nash.
“I believe that we should have similar requirements to the state statutes on state legislative races, which simply require being registered to vote in that specific district for a period of time,” Hornbeek said. “There is no requirement of owning property.”
Beyond mayor, Edmond voters will be seeing new faces for two other City Council seats in 2025. With the 2025 filing period days away, only one candidate has declared each in Ward 3 and Ward 4, where neither incumbent is seeking reelection. Wards represent another peculiarity in Edmond’s election ordinances, as February primary ballots are cast only by ward residents, but April general election ballots are cast citywide for all seats.
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Ordinance dates to era when Edmond touted as ‘all-white’
In discussing the property ownership requirement, Hornbeek referenced Senate Bill 1617, which was passed in April to help cities remove racially discriminatory language from local land plats. That bill and its predecessor, House Bill 2288, were authored after Edmond businessman Wayne Frost discovered a racially restrictive covenant in the plat for property he purchased in 2022. (Although a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling said race-based prohibitions against land ownership violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, such unenforceable language still appears in land documents around the country.)
Like many of its racially restrictive neighborhood covenants, Edmond’s “freeholder” requirement for political candidacy dates to the 1920s, when articles published in local newspapers promoted Edmond as an all-white town. While some Black families lived in Edmond prior to Oklahoma statehood, Edmond saw a substantial effort to keep Black families from living in the city during the early 20th century. Just three years before the Edmond City Charter was adopted in 1925, the Ku Klux Klan’s Edmond chapter held a 104-member parade across the city.
Although Frost said he was unaware of the land ownership requirement for public office in Edmond, he said it seems discriminatory.
“A lot of the covenants, laws and restrictions back in those days — to me, a majority of that was really for the sole purpose to prevent African Americans from holding influence,” Frost said.
It is unclear if the requirement has been strictly enforced over time, Frost said, but he added the law should not “be on the books” in Edmond.
Mayor Darrell Davis, who became the city’s first Black mayor in 2021, did not respond to a request for comment. Ward 2 Councilman Barry Moore and Ward 3 Councilwoman Christin Mugg each said they were dealing with personal situations last week and were unable to review the history of the ordinance.
Ward 4 Councilwoman Stacie Peterson was the only member of Edmond’s current governing body to discuss the property ownership requirement. In a text message, she suggested the ordinance is only meant to ensure candidates are residents of their district.
“I have no idea what their intent was in 1925,” Peterson said. “In my opinion, the only reason being a homeowner is required is to merely prevent folks from living in other cities and renting a place in Edmond to run for an elected position. The only intent is to ensure the person is an Edmond resident. This is not unusual for elected positions, i.e., must live in the ward, district, city, state, country for which you represent.”
While residency mandates are common for public offices, candidates for neither statewide offices nor legislative seats are required to own property in Oklahoma. The same is true for city council candidates in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Norman. However, the City of Moore also contains a “freeholder” requirement in its charter.
