By Paul Bean
Democratic Candidate Joan Shannon drew a hard line on police reform at the Burlington “Mayoral Match-Up” debate Wednesday evening at City Hall.
Independents Will Emmons and Chris Haessly, Progressive Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, and Democrat Joan Shannon answered questions from 7 Days reporters Sasha Goldstein and Courtney Lamdin.The candidates were asked about housing, police reform, homelessness, and the drug addiction crisis.
One of the biggest problems in Burlington currently is the lack of policing and delayed response times from law enforcement; however this is not because of lackadaisical approach but rather a lack of people, Shannon said. “The number one concern I hear in our community about are police, is they don’t come when they’re called,” said Shannon. “If we want police to come when they’re called, we need to hire more police officers.”
In 2020, the Burlington City Council voted to defund the police following a string of incidents of alleged police brutality and abuse of power, which lead to a mistrust of police and law enforcement within the community. “We have to be honest and acknowledge that harm has happened here in Burlington at the hands of some of the Burlington police, and that has disproportionately impacted black and brown folks,” said Progressive Mulvaney-Stanak. “It is not a safe place to call when you have that erosion of trust, and we have to be honest about this.”
From the start, however, Shannon said, she has vocally been opposed to the defunding of the police. “In 2020 I vocally opposed the defunding of the police from 105 to 74 officers which was led by the Progressive Party. That has led to some of the public safety challenges we have… when you call for help I think you should get a response… today we only have 21 officers to patrol Burlington, 24/7, 365, the whole city.”
The lack of trust between police and community members has only gotten worse since defunding of the police happened, Shannon said. “In 2020 when we defunded the police we also defunded ‘creemee with a cop.’ We defunded SROs. By reducing the number of police officers we reduced their ability to engage with the public.”
In response, Mulvaney-Stanak said, “both the community and the police deserve a better, transparent process of what accountability means in Burlington…we need to work with more urgency on this issue, it’s been years…I was really disappointed, we had a compromise, and this city Government recently failed to move something forward, and we’re going on four or five years of not having an answer of what police accountability here in Burlington means.”
Next they tackled the homelessness crisis. In reference to the Elmwood “pods,” Will Emmons said “we’re spending approximately $69k-$70k per homeless person and think about what it has done to our city, the fact that our business and our taxpayers are leaving, we will not have taxes to help anybody soon. What is the true cost to our city? Is it $70k? Or is it twice that?”
Shannon said, “unfortunately we cannot shelter a large portion of Vermont funded by a regressive property tax here in Burlington. We really need the state to take the responsibility that they have for providing basic shelter.”
Mulvaney-Stanak said, “we need to realize the urgency of the matter, that there is literally nowhere else for people to go. Many of these folks are unemployed, many of them have families with children, some of these folks are living with disabilities, we have to provide the level of dignity and understanding of the complexities of what it takes to house people. That is why we need a diversity of options we need to be developing.”
On the housing crisis, and building more housing Shannon said in reference to UVM, “building housing to add more freshmen and sophomores on college campus, only to then have those same freshmen and sophomores move off campus junior and senior year, is the only kind of housing we could build that would actually make our housing problem worse.”
“I myself hold my breath when I open our property tax bill, for our tiny little house (its not that tiny) in the old north end on a small lot, and that’s with two very decent Vermont incomes,” said Mulvaney-Stanak, “so we have to recognize talk about understanding in a crisis it’s not only about building more housing because we’ve been decades behind.
Independent Chris Haessly said, “It must be nice to own your own home. I can’t afford it. I work in the IT sector, my wife’s a middle school teacher, we make good income. We cannot afford a half a million dollars for a home here in Burlington.” Haessly believes some of this is due to UVM increasing its enrollment of out of state students and they’re doing this because of a lack of support from the state legislature as a public university.
One of the more interesting conversations Memorial Auditorium and what Burlington should do with the currently graffiti covered, vacant building which has been boarded up since 2018.
Haessly said “Burlington needs a new civic center, and while I hoped we might be able to refurbish memorial it is my understanding that the structural issues are too far gone…The new civic center would be a community asset to hold community events.. and I think we could anchor it with a minor league since hockey team, that was community owned, like the Green Bay Packers.”
Will Emmons considers himself a strong supporter of protecting the memorial auditorium as a public asset, “I think long time Burlington residents should stand up and fight for the building to stick around…I used to have my freshman basketball practices in that building…My mother has seen numerous concerts at that building including Bob Marley…I watched my brother get his kneecap kicked up his, his thigh in that building in his first MMA fight.”
As the March 5th City Meeting Day draws more near, the Burlington city council and mayoral elections are certainly heating up. Burlington Daily News will continue coverage of Burlington Mayoral candidates along with the city council elections.
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