- November 15, 2024
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William A. "Bill" Lewis, a former Palm Coast City Council member who championed the arts and efforts to protect the city's clean and environmentally friendly image, died Sunday, Dec. 20. He was 84.
A funeral service will be held at 1 p.m. Monday, Dec. 28 at the St. Thomas Episcopal Church located at 5400 Belle Terre Parkway, according to city staff. Lewis once served as chairman of the church's endowment fund.
Lewis, who moved to Palm Coast around the time of the city's 1999 incorporation, was appointed to the City Council District 4 seat in 2008 to take the place of Alan Peterson, who'd been elected to County Commission. Lewis then ran unopposed the following year.
"He was a gentleman in every sense of the word," Palm Coast Mayor Jon Netts said. "I never, ever heard a word from his mouth uttered in anger or in an elevated voice. Absolutely a perfect councilman — not that we always agreed on every issue, but he was always a gentleman, always respectful ... and a big supporter of the arts in Palm Coast; he always thought we didn’t do enough for the cultural arts."
Lewis also served on the city's Planning and Ordinance Committee from 2000 to 2002 and spend eight years on the Palm Coast Planning and Land Development Regulation Board.
In the 2014 elections, Lewis, a Democrat, made it to the runoff against Republican candidate Steve Nobile, but lost narrowly by a few hundred votes in the tightest local race of the election. His illness — he'd recently been diagnosed with shingles when the race heated up — kept him from doing much campaigning, and forced him to miss a number of City Council meetings over two months during his final year on the council.
While he served as a councilman, Lewis argued for more arts funding, saying repeatedly that the city should do more to support local culture, and arguing in favor of leasing land to the Palm Coast Arts Foundation.
"The arts were always important to him," said City Councilman Jason DeLorenzo, who served with Lewis. "He served in a very lean time, through the recession. And he’d always try to get some cultural arts dollars into the budget, which wasn’t always easy during the times that we were going through." Lewis had a non-confrontational style on the council, DeLorenzo said, and as an older gentleman, Lewis "had different life experiences than I did, and he was really good at communicating those to give us a bigger picture of what we were trying to accomplish."
Lewis backed the code enforcement rules that he felt kept the city beautiful, pressing the council to keep rules restricting commercial vehicles in driveways and barring cottage industries from operating out of homes, and pressing the council to take action to prevent commercial truckers from parking overnight at the local Walmart. He supported the construction of City Hall, saying the city needed a permanent home its residents could be proud of. During his election campaign, Lewis listed city beautification and economic progress as some of his priorities.
"He had a conservative point of view when it came to things like planning and code enforcement," Netts said. "He was absolutely about maintaining the city as it was founded: as an enivronmentally friendly, clean, neat, orderly community."
Netts said that Lewis, a father of two, was also a family-oriented man who could often be seen talking on the phone with one of his grown children before morning City Council meetings. "Every morning, with one of his kids, they talked," Netts said. "Very, very strong family orientation."
Lewis served on a number of local boards in addition to his involvement with the city of Palm Coast, including the Leadership Council Board of the Daytona Beach Halifax Chamber of Commerce, and the Advisory Committee of the University of Florida Marine Extension Program at Marineland, according to a bio on the city of Palm Coast webpage. He was a life member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity and served on the Flagler County Futures Committee for the 2010-2030 Flagler County Comprehensive Plan changes.
Lewis was awarded the Coretta Scott King Human Rights Award from the Chi Delta Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and the Ivy Community Foundation Inc in 2010, according to the city bio.
He began his career in medicine, getting a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. and working in the field for eight years before returning to school to get a master’s degree in Public Administration from Pace University in New York.
Lewis spent much of his career in New York. He worked in medical research at Cornell university, then as a manager a for the Saving Bonds Division at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, then as a pension investment national accounts manager for an international financial service firm and then as the complaints officer for the City of New York Board of Education, according to his city of Palm Coast bio.
Lewis raised two children, Pavalon and Bartlett.
