Hale, Salinas, Thomas Are 3 Viable Options For At-Large 4-Then We Must Hold Them Accountable

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(October 29 update: Ms. Salinas has said she will speak up forcefully about ICE which would be a break from how Houston City Council is addressing the issue, Mr. Thomas who was late to the race is running a strong campaign that includes the Houston Chronicle endorsement & Mr. Hale was wrongfully arrested protesting the erasure of the Pride Crosswalk in Montrose. Good on all three of these candidates.)

Houston At-Large City Council Position 4 is on the November ballot. The election is to fill the upcoming vacancy created by Councilmember Letitia Plummer, who is running in the Democratic primary for Harris County Judge. 

(Above-At the Labor Day Democracy rally and march, Ms. Salinas on the left dispensing water and on the right Mr. Thomas talking to a voter. Below-Mr. Hale addressing the crowd with Ms. Salinas observing at the September meeting of Bayou Blue Democrats.) 

Early voting is October 20-October 31 & Election Day is November 4. Here is where you can vote early. 

Here is a list of all At-Large 4 candidates, their recent primary voting history, campaign finances & websites on the spreadsheet compiled each election season by Erik Manning. It's an excellent resource.

I’m going to speak well of three candidates in alphabetical order. 

Ethan Hale: Mr. Hale is a young person running on the left. He is discussing opposition to HPD working with ICE, the harmful power of landlords over renters, taking municipal control of CenterPoint, taxing polluters and so on. These are things that should be discussed. Here is his website. 

Without institutional or establishment support, you have to proceed without visible guideposts. Strong views are often marginalized by official channels, until some years later when many of those views and positions are adapted by official channels. 

I’ve been where Mr. Hale is his current campaign. It can be a lonely road. I ran for the Cincinnati Board of Education in 1997 when I was 30. While I had a measure of institutional support from some unions and a local gay rights advocacy group, it was a learning process. The limits of what political establishments want to hear are narrow.  Mr. Hale is saying necessary things. We should listen.

Alejandra Salinas: Ms. Salinas is upfront about who she is—She’s a successful attorney at a big law firm, an out lesbian and a mainstream Obama Democrat. Nothing fully unusual or surprising about that in local Democratic politics. Here is her website.

Ms. Salinas understands democracy is under attack, and that our freedom and her marriage to her wife are in jeopardy. Ms. Salinas has a section on the protection of democracy on her website platform that says “….protecting democracy is rapidly becoming a priority for local government in Houston.” While Ms. Salinas is likely thinking most about legal challenges to anti-democratic actions, she did walk the full route from the Galleria area down Westheimer to Lamar High School in a very heavily-policed Labor Day rally and march. I appreciated that she did so. I retain hope that when habeas corpus is suspended, Ms. Salinas will take to the streets. 

Ms. Salinas has establishment folks who have taken her under their wing. Some embrace a failed, and at this point dangerous approach to politics, that views transactional relationships across party lines in disregard of their part in diminishing democracy and remaining silent on attacks on issues such as marriage equality.  In her early 30's, Ms. Salinas will likely outlive by decades many of her present day patrons, and then be in a world where political success and access at the cost of throwing marginalized people overboard is unquestioned as the norm in Houston municipal politics. 

If elected, Ms. Salinas will have to decide between a business as usual that has resulted in this nightmare we are living, or take advantage of her office, youth and financial independence as a successful attorney to help our political establishment muster up some courage to actively stand up for Houstonians who want to live freely. 

Jordan Thomas: Mr. Thomas is running a campaign heavy on well-considered public policy ideas. He has experience in Houston city government. His emphasis on road and pedestrian safety, among many other topics, would save lives in Houston and make better our streets that are so often defined by the aggression of many Houston drivers. 

I am not policy-orientated. You can check out Mr. Thomas' website and see what you think. Mr. Thomas merits credit for offering a detailed and optimistic blueprint of what Houston can be. He is doing so against the strong headwinds of white-supremacist autocratic nihilism from Washington, a state government that hates cities and Mayor Whitmire’s grumpy, poorly-reasoned relentless attacks on urbanist ideas that he clearly views as some type of cultural affront.

I don’t see at the moment a path to the type of extensive thoughtful policy discussions and actions Mr. Thomas envisions. But maybe Mr. Thomas sees it more accurately. It’s clear he cares about Houston and is willing to back-up that concern with thought and effort. He merits being heard. 

These are the three best candidates in this race. I believe all three are navigating a horrible political and social climate in good faith, each according to how they see the world. I think they are decent people. Vote for whichever approach works for you. 

(Regretfully, I must mention candidate and former Councilmember Dwight Boykins. Mr. Boykins was the Firefighters Union endorsed candidate for Mayor in 2019 and has made crudely-stated assertions of how in his view young women should behave. Please don’t vote for him.) 

After your vote, hold whoever wins fully accountable. Anybody signing up for political office at this point is signing up to take political, career and if need be physical risk on the correct side of a police line, to protect us from a hostile state and federal government. It is clear we are moving toward authoritarianism and that this must be resisted. My expectation of whoever wins this seat is that they will be a meaningful part of the needed opposition to the steep erosions of our freedom. 

I'm on the Egberto Willies Politics Done Right Show every Thursday from 6 AM to 7 AM for the Houston Democracy Project segment. You can hear the show on the radio, stream it on KPFT or watch later Egberto's YouTube channel.​​​​

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