BR.councilappoint.072018_HS_578

As seen on a TV screen, Tara Wicker holds up her finger showing two spots of blood, hers and fellow council member Trae Welch's, showing they both bleed red regardless of race, Thursday, July 19, 2018, during a special meeting of the metro council to appoint Buddy Amoroso's successor.

 Advocate staff photo by HILARY SCHEINUK

A caustic East Baton Rouge Metro Council debate over how to fill Buddy Amorosoโ€™s council seat tumbled so far off course that Councilwoman Tara Wicker was repeatedly likened to Judas for reaching across political and racial lines when casting her vote.

As he walked out of the four-hour meeting Thursday, Councilman Trae Welch wondered how much further the council could fall. While he and other council members said Friday they hope they can still work together in the future, many meeting attendees on Thursday urged black council Democrats to resist supporting the white, Republican majority.

The debate raised questions about what type of governing will โ€” and should โ€” prevail in Baton Rouge, and which local politicians are willing to occasionally forsake the D or R behind their name or racial politics in decision-making.

Three Democrats stood by a pledge to abstain from voting for anyone to fill Amorosoโ€™s council seat, and Wicker cast the tiebreaking vote alongside Republicans to appoint Amorosoโ€™s wife, Denise, to the seat. While the labels of Wicker as a traitor spread quickly, she said Friday that she received dozens of messages that denounced the comparisons of her to Judas and that supported her for playing a different Biblical role at the Metro Council โ€” as peacemaker.

โ€œItโ€™s counterproductive to frame this issue as a somehow race loyalty test,โ€ said Albert Samuels, a Southern University political science professor who led a report on race relations when Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome took office. โ€œBlack people do have the right to disagree with one another. Sometimes, itโ€™s important to call out the people who will try to insist that we must think one way.โ€

Samuels described Wickerโ€™s stance as courageous said reactions calling her Judas or an โ€œUncle Tomโ€ were bombastic. It may be too early to tell how her stance might affect her political future, though Wicker is term-limited as a councilwoman and has previously expressed her desire to eventually run for mayor-president.

Samuels and political consultant John Couvillon agreed that voters may have short enough memories that the recent Metro Council debate could be long forgotten by the time another local election happens in 2020.

But Couvillon said the move on Wickerโ€™s part also set her up for the type of crossover appeal thatโ€™s necessary for a candidate to win an election in a parish that is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome used that crossover appeal to secure her election in 2016, and she also condemned the pledge from Democrats last week about boycotting to vote on Amorosoโ€™s seat.

Wicker said Friday she was not surprised by the pushback from members of her own party on her vote to appoint Denise Amoroso. Wicker said she will continue to reject calls that she only support black Democrats and urged other council members to do the same.

She said she lives with the reality of poverty in her neighborhood, and understands why people are fed up with a lack of economic development and disparities, especially in north Baton Rouge. But she questioned why members of her own party did not afford her the same respect they gave to Democrats who abstained from the vote.

โ€œThe division is easy, the hatred is easy, the black, white stuff is easy,โ€ Wicker said. โ€œWeโ€™re been doing that for years. But what has it gotten us? Has it gotten us progress? Has it gotten us more housing, more economic development?โ€

Democrats Donna Collins-Lewis, LaMont Cole, Chauna Banks and Erika Green never rescinded their announcement that they would vote against anyone, including Denise Amoroso, for the open council seat. Green was absent from the meeting, while the other three did not vote when Amorosoโ€™s name came up.

Cole and Collins-Lewis stressed during the meeting that they did not see their decision as a personal one and said they did not intend to upset Amorosoโ€™s family. But both said they saw abstaining from the vote as a chance to make a statement about their voices โ€” and those of black people and Democrats across the parish โ€” being overlooked by white, Republican colleagues.

Banks insulted Wicker during the meeting and on her social media pages afterward, joining in the Judas comparisons.

โ€œJudas met with the 12 disciples and he told his plan to go the cross ... That was a setup for Judas to tell Pontius Pilate what the plan was to capture Jesus,โ€ Banks said during the council meeting. โ€œCouncilwoman Wicker sat in the room with us for two hours, listened to our plan, called us immoral, told us we were going to hellโ€ฆ.โ€

Samuels said the council Democrats need to regroup. Wicker and the others who did not go along with the political ploy had legitimate grounds for questioning the Democratsโ€™ strategy, he said, especially without a guarantee Gov. John Bel Edwards would have appointed a Democrat to Amorosoโ€™s seat.

Many at the meeting said deadlocking the Metro Council with six members of each party would force Republican council members to listen more to black voters and Democrats, but Samuels questioned whether Republicans simply would have waited out the nine-month period until a Republican is elected to the seat next March.

โ€œThis is the worst of all worlds,โ€ Samuels said about the Democratsโ€™ strategy. โ€œYou take a pretty controversial stand that invites you to a lot of criticism on one hand, and then you are unable to pull it off. So you lose both ways.โ€

Couvillon said the bickering on the councils raises the need for โ€œvoices in the middle playing referee,โ€ which could come from council members or from Broomeโ€™s office.

Welch, who apologized Thursday for his previous comments about Democratsโ€™ spitting on Amorosoโ€™s grave, said Friday that he was still trying to process the Metro Council discussion.

He said the 10-day-long political fight could have been avoided if the council members of both parties had spoken to each other about their plans for Amorosoโ€™s seat before the Democrats released their statement last week. A major take-away for him has been the need to communicate and share ideas, especially controversial ones, before they wind up on council agendas.

Though around 40 people spoke during the councilโ€™s public hearing, most were not residents in Amorosoโ€™s southeastern Baton Rouge district.

Welch and Wicker both said they did not see the group, which largely pushed for the council to vote against Denise Amoroso, as representative of the parish as a whole based on the other feedback they had received in their districts about the vote.

โ€œI know weโ€™re better than this,โ€ Welch said. โ€œIโ€™m disappointed in this. Iโ€™m disappointed in how far weโ€™ve gotten.โ€

Follow Andrea Gallo on Twitter, @aegallo.โ€‹

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