AUBURN – In her first meeting since the state began examining her move to Auburn, County Commissioner Helen Poulin on Wednesday reaffirmed her plan to stay in office and represent Lewiston.

“If it wasn’t OK to do, I wouldn’t be here,” Poulin said as she read from a prepared statement.

The statement was the only sign of anything unusual at the meeting of the three-member County Commission. Poulin’s residency drew no other discussion and no one from the general public attended.

Her situation continued to be debated at the state level.

The Maine Attorney General’s Office is consulting with the state Bureau of Elections to determine whether Poulin is breaking the law by serving as a Lewiston representative after moving to Auburn last month. She has more than two years left on her four-year term.

Commissioners must live in the districts they represent, bureau director Melissa Packard said last week.

Poulin disagreed.

“Before making this move, I reviewed the statutes to make sure that I could continue serving as county commissioner,” Poulin said at Wednesday’s meeting.

“The Maine Revised Statutes’ Title 30-A, Section 63, ‘Vacancies During Other Times,’ specifically states ‘removal from the county’ – for example, moving out of Androscoggin County – as a reason for vacancy,” she continued. “I did not move out of Androscoggin County. Also, Title 30-A, Section 101 states that one of a commissioner’s duties is to ‘represent the county.’

“Therefore, I will continue to work hard with constituents from Lewiston and the county as a whole,” Poulin said.

State officials have not indicated when they might rule on the matter.

Poulin declined to address the statute that reads, “commissioners must be residents of the commissioner district which they represent,” found in Title 30-A, Section 61.

Sheriff Guy Desjardins, who attended the meeting, said any murkiness in the law could be clarified by a charter.

For more than a year, Desjardins has lobbied for the county to create a charter, a tool used by most towns and cities in the area.

Some charters add structure to the way a government does business or make sweeping changes in how people are elected. Others set deadlines for budgets, clarify jobs and create safeguards against conflicts of interest and nepotism.

Usually, charters are not quickly imposed. County voters would need to elect a charter commission and then create and ratify a finished document.

Future changes would likely not occur fast enough to affect the current controversy. Poulin’s term expires at the end of 2010.

“I feel bad for the residents of Lewiston because they truly don’t have any representation,” Desjardins said.