Ex-councilman finds niche as independent
Reed Williams learned the hard way that he wasn’t a Republican.
Six years ago, the former North Side councilman decided to enter the GOP primary for the Texas Senate. At the time, Williams was based in Burnet County, where he owns a vineyard in Hoover’s Valley.
He entered the state Senate race with a formidable and varied backlog of experience: eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve, a long stint as an oil-industry executive, four years on the San Antonio City Council and a latecareer involvement in the wine business.
He tirelessly traveled across the 17-county Central Texas district and didn’t hesitate to spend his own money on the race.
But he never felt like he was in sync with the tenor of the campaign.
“Every time I stood up and said, ‘We need public education’ or ‘We need immigration reform’ or ‘We need water districts to take care of our water regulations,’ I was losing votes,” Williams said.
Ultimately, Williams finished fifth in the sixcandidate primary, earning only 7 percent of the vote.
The lesson for Williams was that he doesn’t fit in our two-party paradigm. He gets frustrated with stubborn ideology when he sees it as an impediment to practical solutions.
“I’m a very pragmatic person,” Williams said. “My job is to go solve problems. That’s what I did for 35 years in the oil field and it’s what I’ve tried to do in politics.”
That’s why Williams, 74, has decided to run in next year’s general election as an independent candidate for county commissioner in Precinct 3. Trish Deberry vacated the seat last week when she filed for county judge.
Beyond his desire to serve, which he has demonstrated repeatedly over the years, Williams hopes to make a statement about the growing dysfunction of the two-party system.
“Folks that are trying to make a living and educate their kids, they don’t want to be told what their ideology has to be,” he said. “They want to be told how they can make a living and get ahead. We’ve stopped doing it.”
Williams is widely respected, but he has never been fully embraced by any political faction, because he doesn’t adhere to dogma.
Take his presentation to City Council last Wednesday in his role as the chairman of CPS Energy’s Rate Advisory Committee.
Williams laid out an ambitious set of recommendations for the city to de-carbonize its energy portfolio.
He called for the shutting down of the Spruce 1 coal plant within three years, the conversion of the Spruce 2 plant to natural gas within 18 months and a swift move to contract for 900 megawatts of solar power.
His proposal was surely unsettling to fossil-fuel traditionalists but wasn’t necessarily satisfying to conservationists, who worry about the environmental impact of fracking for natural gas.
Williams is searching for a middle ground that attains energy stability while acknowledging that the future is with renewables.
There’s no defined political base for this compromise approach, but it’s the strategy that Williams believes makes the most sense.
The former councilman has been an exemplary public servant in San Antonio precisely because he instinctively searches for ways to bring together the best pieces of conflicting ideas.
As a councilman, he used his energy background to help then-mayor Julián Castro navigate his way through the complexities of the city’s investment in a problematic nuclear-expansion project.
He played a key role in crafting a municipal treepreservation ordinance and, as a San Antonio Water System trustee, helped shape the contours of the $3.4-billion Vista Ridge pipeline deal.
His calm demeanor and reputation for fairness have made him the go-to figure in San Antonio when there is a need to study a pressing local problem.
In 2013, Castro enlisted him to lead a task force examining public-safety costs.
In March of this year, after a devastating February freeze that caused massive statewide power outages, Mayor Ron Nirenberg asked him to chair the Committee on Emergency Preparedness.
In these roles, Williams has defied political orthodoxy.
For example, on the public-safety task force, this natural-born fiscal conservative pointed to the insurance exchanges of the Affordable Care Act — a program reviled by most Republicans — as a tool to alleviate the cost of insuring public-safety retirees not yet old enough to qualify for Medicare.
Recalling his “terrible” experience in the 2016 Republican Senate primary, Williams concluded, “I don’t fit” in the current political system.
“I’ve got to find a place, and I think there’s other people looking for a place that’s not all left, not all right,” he added. “A group that is very interested in compromise.”
That group couldn’t find a better spokesperson than Williams.