Whether an elected member of a County Board of Commissioners vacated his seat after being sent to federal prison; Appellate jurisdiction; Factors hindering appellate review; What issues could & could not properly be resolved at this time

Although the 9/12/25 “order appealed did not resolve all of the parties’ pending claims, and is thus not a ‘final’ order appealable as of right,” the court exercised its discretion to treat their “claims of appeal as granted applications for leave to appeal. However, because of the procedural stance of these cases—particularly the fact that both actions were neither captioned nor argued as actions seeking relief in the form of quo warranto—we are unable to give the parties what they all seem to desire: a definitive ruling as to who currently holds the disputed seat.” Instead, it vacated the trial court’s 9/12/25 order in these two these consolidated, election-related appeals, and remanded. The parties disputed whether defendant-Brant remained an elected member of plaintiff-Monroe County Board of Commissioners, to which he was elected in 11/24, or he “vacated that position when he was sent to federal prison in a sister state later that same month.” For jurisdictional purposes, the court treated the “claims of appeal as applications for leave to appeal and grant them both.” It found that its “ability to reach the substantive merits of the ultimate question posed here is significantly hindered at this juncture. At their roots, the parties’ claims in these actions—and their respective requests for injunctive and declaratory relief—almost all depend on the answer to one fundamental question: whether Brant’s seat was vacated as a result of his conviction and incarceration in another state or whether, instead, he remains a sitting county commissioner. For a variety of reasons, a definitive ruling on that issue is simply not possible at this time.” But it determined that “not all of the issues currently before this Court defy appellate review entirely. While we cannot now rule on the question at the heart of this dispute—i.e., whether Brant currently holds the disputed seat—because that question may only be resolved via a properly instituted action for quo warranto, there are a few discrete issues we can properly resolve at this time.” It concluded that first, “the trial court erred when it purported to rule on whether Brant still held the disputed seat because the parties did not bring a quo warranto action.” Second, it found that “the trial court was correct when it declined to grant Brant’s request for an injunction precluding the disputed special election.” He did not “seek a writ of mandamus, the proper remedy for” his claim, or “name the proper election officials as parties in” his complaint. Third, it held that the trial court erred in granting him “a declaratory judgment that his incarceration in another state did not act to vacate his seat because [it] did not address or decide potentially dispositive legal issues raised by the parties below.”