Lecompton ? Roy Paslay trudged home from his regular Lecompton City Council meeting one night last year, mumbling about how he couldn’t get anything done. Too much dissension. Too much confusion.

And that was before his wife entered the fray.

“It’s going to be interesting,” Paslay said, laughing. “We already had enough problems without her.”

When Marsha Paslay was sworn into office at the end of Monday night’s council meeting the Paslays became a rare husband-and-wife tandem sitting at the top of municipal government in Kansas.

In the last seven years, only three or four communities have had married couples serving on city councils and commissions, said Kim Gulley, director of policy development and communications for the Kansas League of Municipalities in Topeka.

This in a state with 627 cities, which together have more than 4,000 elected officials.

“In smaller communities, where you can’t get people to run, there occasionally are husbands and wives on the same governing body,” Gulley said. “The smaller the community, the more likely it is that this will happen.”

Such thinking held true this month in Lecompton, population 650.

The April 2 election drew only two formal candidates both incumbents to compete for three open seats on the five-member council. Marsha Paslay had mounted a write-in campaign, and her 21 votes were enough to hold off incumbent Mark Tunstall, who did not seek re-election but received 15 votes anyway.

That means Marsha Paslay will take a council seat alongside her husband of more than 30 years, who himself had been mayor for five years and starting in 2001 a council member for one. In Lecompton, the mayor votes only when needed to break a tie among council members.

Marsha Paslay said she doesn’t foresee any difficulty in making decisions.

“He has his own ideas, and I have mine,” she said.

Both Paslays understand that having two members on the same council does raise some touchy disclosure issues. State law, for example, generally prohibits two members of a five-member council from meeting to discuss city business.

That means the Paslays may live under the same roof, but they will have to limit their dinner-table conversation.

“What they have to do is not talk about city business at home,” said Larry Hendricks, Lecompton’s city attorney, who also made sure that it was legal for a married couple to serve on the same council.

Both Paslays said that they would be able to limit their discussion of easements, zoning changes and annexation requests to public meetings. The biggest issue facing the council is how and where the city should grow, and both Paslays say they support plans proposed by developer J. Stewart to build new homes on 300 acres at the southern edge of Lecompton.

The ultimate arbiters of how the Paslays handle their new shared situation will speak at the ballot box, said Gulley, whose organization represents interests of all cities in Kansas.

“If the public perceives that they aren’t making the right decisions, they can toss them out at the next election,” Gulley said. “It all rests in the public’s hands to make that choice. They put them there. If they don’t like them, they can remove them.”