By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe’s re-election campaign today accused Republican challenger Jim Keet of making conflicting statements about his place of residence in late 2008.
“Jim Keet said he was living in Florida. Now he says he was living in Arkansas,” said Anne Hughes, a spokeswoman for Beebe’s campaign.
A spokesman for Keet’s campaign said Keet has been open about having lived and worked for a few years in Florida and noted that Keet is a businessman, not “a career politician.”
Beebe recently raised the issue of Keet’s former residence in Florida, saying the time Keet spent living out of state between 2003 and 2008 left him out of touch with issues facing Arkansans.
Today, the Times Record newspaper in Fort Smith reported that Keet told a reporter he returned to Arkansas from Florida in August 2008. Beebe’s camp said the statement conflicted with an earlier one by Keet.
In November 2008, the Democrat-Gazette newspaper quoted Keet as saying, “Our primary home is in Gulf Breeze, Fla., and that’s where most of our furniture is located.”
Keet said at the time he and his wife, Doody, were living in Arkansas and intended to move all their furnishings from their Gulf Breeze home to their Little Rock home.
Hughes also questioned why, if Keet returned to Arkansas in 2008, he voted in Florida in November 2008 by absentee ballot. She said that under Florida election rules, a voter must be a legal resident of Florida to vote in that state’s elections.
“Something doesn’t add up,” she said. “In the months of August and September when he claims he was living in Arkansas, he should have registered to vote in Arkansas. He chose to vote in Florida instead, regardless of Florida election rules.”
Keet has said he moved to Florida in January 2003 as chairman of the board of Barnhill’s Buffet, a company he had helped found 20 years earlier. He has said he remained there until the company sold in August 2008.
Keet campaign spokesman Richard Atkinson said Keet put his Florida home on the market in 2005, but because the housing market was “not fantastic at the time,” the house did not sell until August 2009.
“He voted down there just because he was so busy he hadn’t changed his voter registration,” Atkinson said. “He was still moving. When you’re opening a business, as busy as you are, you’re not going to be able to move everything in one trip.”
Keet obtained an Arkansas driver’s license in April 2009 and switched his voter registration to Arkansas in January of this year, Atkinson said. He said that in August 2008 Keet technically may have been a resident of Florida, but he was physically back in Arkansas and intended to remain here.
Arkansas law states that to be eligible for the office of governor, a person must have been a resident of Arkansas for seven years. Keet maintains that the law does not require residency in Arkansas for the past consecutive seven years.
“He’s lived in Arkansas since 1975 and was down there for 5 1/2 years doing what business called him to do,” Atkinson said. “He wasn’t a career politician that stayed here and ran (for office). He was in the business world and he did what he had to do.”
