Politics & Government

Homeless but not Aimless, Orleans Runs for Council

ACLU legal director says William Orleans' case is extraordinary.

William Orleans may not have a home, but all he is really vying for is a seat.

Though homeless, Orleans believes he has every right to run for city council in Greenbelt, MD. After having his candidate’s application rejected three times — in 2011, he’s finally made the ballot — the only challenger to seven incumbents.

“I’m homeless, I’m not aimless,” Orleans said. He thinks his qualifications to run shouldn’t be based on him having a place to lock up at night.

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He appears anything but drifting when it comes to city council. City Clerk Cindy Murray confirmed he attends almost all its meetings.

“Mr. Orleans is an extraordinary case,” the ACLU of Maryland Legal Director Deborah Jeon said, having gone to bat for him this time around. She found out just how unique his quest was when she queried colleagues at the ACLU’s national office to trying to find if anyone had handled a case like his before.

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She heard back about lots of right-to-vote cases involving homeless people, but no one reported having one involving someone running for public office. It doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened, Jeon said, it just means no one knew of a time when it had.

Jeon, nonetheless, approached City Attorney Robert Manzi about Orleans’ plight. He has been voting in Greenbelt since 2004, and she found it contradictory that he was enough of a citizen to vote, yet not enough of one to run for office.

Jeon said she didn’t think anyone really doubted Orleans lived in Greenbelt. Still they would not accept his application because he had supplied a post office box for his address. It seemed wrong to Jeon for the city to deny a citizen's fundamental right to participate in a democracy — over a form.

The city deserves credit, though, Jeon thinks, for resolving the problem a short time after her conversation with Manzi. 

There isn’t much about Orleans that is ordinary. Though homeless now, he once owned townhome in Greenbelt. He’s also an ex-Marine who has worked most of his adult life, long enough to earn a pension from the New York Times. Ask him his favorite color and you’ll hear — "taxi yellow" — indeed Orleans drove a taxi around New York City for around seven years.

When he was working, Orleans said he spent many of his vacation days in public meetings and libraries.

In 2004, he returned to his hometown of Greenbelt. He was in pretty bad physical shape. “Effectively I was a drunk — my liver was imploding,” Orleans said. The next day, he enrolled himself into the Veterans Administration Medical Center on Irving Street in the District of Columbia.

Orleans remembers that about a week later, several doctors stood at the end of his hospital bed and told him if he had one more drink, he would die. He felt he owed personal debts and some related to work he should produce.

“I did not want to die without doing everything I could to pay those debts,” he said.

He stopped drinking, left the hospital, and soon afterward got a library card and picked up a voter registration application. Several months later, he started attending city council meetings, lots of them — eventually becoming so angry at council that he decided to run.

Now full circle in 2011, after three failed attempts, Orleans will finally get his shot at council on Tuesday. When Patch asked what made him so determined, Orleans answered, “That sounds so awful high falutin’ — Bill Orleans the determined man. He’s a jerk, remember that, a determined jerk.”

Orleans said he despises pretension and wants to make it clear he doesn’t think he’s anything special, nor does he think any of the rest are special either. "Jerk" seemed his way of reminding himself not to get a big head.

Pressed for a clearer reason for his ongoing attempts to run, he said, “Why am I doing this? I respect Elmer Fudd’s persistence.”

Although Orleans stands out among the homeless — maybe even setting a national precedent — his estimation is that Greenbelt isn’t paying much attention.

Residents aren’t asking him questions about his stands on issues or why he’s running, Orleans said. That's disappointing to him when one of his reasons for becoming a candidate was to get Greenbelt to think. “People should question everything more,” he said.

Orleans doesn't think Greenbelt will elect him. Nonetheless, he plans to join the incumbents and watch the numbers come in on Tuesday night. “I’m going to be present for my humiliation,” he said.

Even if his prediction of a loss comes true, Orleans said, “Maybe people will perceive my request that they question themselves more.”

In the meantime, he’ll continue showing up at city council meetings. The vote will merely determine which side of the dais he sits on. 


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