Corpus – Corpus Mayor Stacy Devisers yesterday avoided impeachment when the city council rejected, by a narrow one vote majority, the articles of impeachment presented last week. The vote, which was originally supposed to be held last Thursday, also saw two DLP city council members lose the party whip after they crossed the aisle and voted to reject the articles of impeachment which stopped a special mayoral election from taking place.
The articles, brought forward by the DLP controlled council’s ethics committee, primarily cited embezzlement and fraud as grounds for impeaching the popular, twice elected SCP Mayor. During the heated council debate yesterday, SCP councillors angrily asserted that the grounds were “void of fact” and politically motivated. The leader of the Independent group on the council agreed and added that the “DLP [were] abusing the political process which they claim to uphold to further their own political aims”.
The Democratic Left Party also suffered criticism from within their own ranks which peaked when two councillors broke party lines on the vote, giving the opposition the two votes needed to reject the articles and stop the impeachment process from continuing. In a joint statement to the council, Cllrs Wigley and Duff said that “proof of guilt was not evident” and that it “[appeared] to be a DLP ploy to have an election and to attempt to install a Mayor sympathetic to our aims”; they agreed with other comments made in the chamber that such a ploy resembled an abuse of the political process.
Devisers herself, who continued her work despite the council meeting, thanked all the councillors who voted to reject the impeachment articles. The Mayor, who was opening a school at the time, said she was “happy and thankful” that the council “saw sense” and that she intended to continue with her plans to privatise the sanitation services, the move which many have said originally led the DLP to initiate the impeachment process.
JOSHUA ALEXANDER, Corpus Editor
