Bill White (politician) - Mayor of Houston

Mayor of Houston

In 2003, White, a Democrat, ran in Houston's officially nonpartisan mayoral election to succeed term-limited Mayor Lee Brown, who was the first African-American mayor of the city. Running as a moderate with business experience, he appealed to Democrats and Republicans despite having little name recognition.

One of White's opponents in the race was Republican Orlando Sanchez, a Cuban-American and a former Houston City Councilman, who had unsuccessfully challenged Brown in a heated 2001 bid to become Houston's first Hispanic mayor. Also running was Democratic Texas State Representative Sylvester Turner, who had run for mayor in 1991 (against then-incumbent Kathy Whitmire and real estate developer Bob Lanier). In that race, Turner was embroiled in an insurance scandal exposed in an investigation by Houston's ABC affiliate, KTRK-TV that eventually led to a 1996 lawsuit; Lanier went on to defeat Whitmire.

In the November election, White, along with Sanchez, defeated Turner. In the runoff, White defeated Sanchez with 63 percent of the vote.

Mayor White was a member of the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition, a bi-partisan group with a stated goal of "making the public safer by getting illegal guns off the streets." The Coalition is co-chaired by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. White resigned from the group in July 2009. White's staff said that the group's focus had grown from its original effort to prevent the sale of stolen guns. Regarding a recent proposal to allow those with concealed gun permits to carry them into other states, White's staff added that he resigned the day that the group took out a newspaper advertisement denouncing that proposal.