Willie ‘Bae’ Lewis: A last, shameless ploy
Published 3:50 pm Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Nothing says as much about Willie “Bae” Lewis’ imminent departure from the Port Arthur City Council as his desperation to hold on to his political position.
Lewis, who has served on City Council for two decades, holds one of two seats due for the scrap heap come May. It ends with completion of his term.
As the days draw down, he’s sought to overturn the inevitable by pitching his cause — in this case, his own political survival — to his City Council colleagues and to the Justice Department. Ain’t happening.
This issue was placed first before Port Arthur voters in 2016, when first citizens and then the City Council sought to streamline the board’s size. Right now, City Council members come from four individual districts, from cross representation of Districts 1 and 4 and 2 and 3 and from two at-large members. Add the mayor, and that makes nine voting members, unwieldy for a city of this size. Voters decided this issue.
Specifically, impetus to trim the size of the governing body came first from an unsuccessful voter petition drive, then from council members like Osman Swati, who holds seat No. 6. Like Lewis, he’s also due to leave the City Council in May. Unlike Lewis, he will leave while serving voters’ interests and with his dignity intact.
Not so for Lewis. He wasted more council time Tuesday, pitching the notion that the Hispanic and Latino communities will suffer for the loss of the District 6 seat, which he suggests would dissipate Hispanic and Latino voting power.
“Doing away with 6 breaks up the Latino and Spanish concentration,” Lewis said earlier this week. “It limits their power. If 6 is left alone, the Hispanics and Latinos could take 6” — someday.
Lewis called on citizens to contact the Justice Department to ask to keep District 6 intact, to get an injunction to preserve the status quo and, ostensibly, his own District 5 seat.
But Bruce Reyes, chairman of the Hispanic Business Council of the Greater Port Arthur Chamber of Commerce, says he senses no groundswell of support among Hispanics or Latinos for preserving the seat. Although Lewis has suggested many Hispanic and Latino people have approached the Justice Department, Reyes says he knows of nobody who has done so.
Worse, Lewis suggested that Swati and former City Council members Tiffany Hamilton and Morris Albright III all “sold out” the Hispanic and Latino communities by supporting the demise of District 6. “They have a problem with the Hispanic and Latino growth,” he said, without a shred of evidence that race-baiting charge was anything but baseless.
Lewis deserves sanction for his antics. In this case, his colleagues treated him like the crazy uncle in the attic: You hear a noise? What noise?