CARLTON FLETCHER: Farewell Bill Williams: A politician for the right reasons

We’ll be riding the train without you tonight, The train that keeps on moving, It’s black smoke scorching the evening sky.

— Bruce Springsteen

Bill Williams was not a politician. But he became one for the right reasons.

The Lee County Commission vice chairman passed away over the weekend. Close friends tell me he’d broken a rib and went to the doctor for an x-ray. The x-ray showed a spot on Williams’ lung, and it turned out to be cancer. A short time later, he left us.

In this job, you meet some interesting people, especially when you cover government. I had the honor of covering the Lee County Commission not long after Williams was elected to serve that body. His story was an intriguing one: A CPA whose work included audits of a number of government agencies, Williams was looking over the Lee County budget as a concerned citizen and found a $1 million error.

Not long after that, Williams decided it might do well to have an insider’s view of the budget process, so he ran for office and won. He served four years, lost at the end of his first term to Greg Frich, then won the so-called “Redbone” district seat back four years later when Frich announced he would not seek a second term.

In the six-plus years he served on the commission, Williams was a stickler for budget details, as fellow Commissioner Rick Muggridge told me, “Bill knew the budget backward, forward and inside out.” And when department heads came before the board with their requests each year around budget time, they knew they’d have to justify every penny they asked for.

My favorite Bill Williams story had to do with budget hearings a couple of years into his first term, when the commission was trying to cut finances and Lee Sheriff Reggie Rachals — one of the really good guys in local law enforcement — had asked for funding to purchase badly needed equipment. It was one of those battles of will that often tend to get ugly.

When the morning session came for the Lee Sheriff’s Office to present its budget request, more than a dozen members of the force — in uniform, guns and all — walked into the room and surrounded the table where the commission’s Finance Committee sat. Chief Deputy Lewis Harris made an impassioned speech about the department’s needs, ending his comments with, “If, God forbid, there is a time when one of these officers is injured or worse in the line of duty because the department did not have the equipment it needed, maybe you gentlemen on this board can talk with the family and explain why that happened.”

The aftermath was one of those pin-drop moments with tension in the air so thick you could cut it with a knife. But Williams calmly outlined the additional equipment that had been included in the budget and said, respectfully it should be noted, “Under our current financial situation, that’s all we can do.”

End of story.

Muggridge told me of his colleague’s diagnosis a little more than three weeks ago, and I was stunned. I guess we should never be surprised when cancer, that bastard of a disease that knows no demographics and favors none, intrudes on anyone’s life. But I couldn’t help but think of all those long — and fun, I should note — talks Bill and I had when I’d go to his office and we’d get into politics. It was the kind of conversation that, in retrospect, I’m sure lots of people would love to have heard.

Sure, we talked about the local issues that were necessary. But then we just talked as two guys. We were both on the periphery of politics — he on the inside but only by necessity, me doing a job also out of necessity — and it was obvious that both of us found the whole business unpalatable. But it was obvious that Bill Williams did his time as a politician out of a sense of service to his community.

When Muggridge told me of Williams’ health issues, I made an immediate mental note to call him and encourage him, to tell him that no matter how bad the diagnosis, he should not give up hope. I had that insider information that I wanted to share with him for one reason only: Of all the politicians I’ve met and worked with over the growing number of years I’ve been doing this job, Bill was the most decent, the one guy I would believe no matter the surrounding skepticism.

But I never made that call. And now I’ll never get to. I know that, in the scheme of things and given the way things turned out, such a call would have been meaningless. But I’ll regret not having made it the rest of my life.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ABH_Fletcher.