By Kolby LaMarche

The Burlington City Council’s Racial Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging committee will convene in special session on Tuesday evening to resume a painstaking examination of a revised public-safety resolution whose language has already been reshaped by departmental critique and one full committee meeting.

The document is the mid-August rewrite of Burlington Forward, the framework Democratic councilors advanced on a 7-5 party-line vote on August 3 after a public hearing that stretched past three hours and drew more than one hundred speakers.

In the weeks since that referral, the city’s equity office has submitted detailed annotations, and the committee has since produced a new draft that inserts equity statements while leaving the original enforcement architecture made by the Democrats largely undisturbed.

Tomorrow’s special meeting will test whether that balance satisfies the committee or whether further amendment is required before the September 14 reporting deadline. The committee is chaired by Progressive Laura Sanchez-Parkinson.

After the August 3 vote sent the measure to four committees, the Office of Racial Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging reviewed the draft and returned extensive comments. The office’s primary objection was that the repeated assertion that public spaces belong to “everyone” failed to recognize that different communities encounter those spaces differently.

People with disabilities, individuals experiencing homelessness, children and youth, older adults, New Americans, and members of historically marginalized racial and ethnic communities face distinct barriers, the comments argued.

An overarching equity statement should appear early in the resolution so that equitable outcomes are not treated as secondary, the office recommended.

The office also heavily encouraged adding language acknowledging systemic inequities and questioning whether existing resources had been distributed fairly or had reached the communities with the greatest needs.

Immediately after the opening recital about the civic importance of public spaces, a new paragraph now states that the city recognizes equitable access requires attention to the differing experiences, needs, and barriers faced by community members and visitors, including a wide range of people. It was not immediately clear, however, how this would impact the timeline or process of any new potential enforcement actions.

At its regular meeting on August 25, the REIB committee devoted most of its time to these textual shifts. Councilors examined whether the new equity paragraph adequately addressed the office’s concerns, whether additional refinement was needed to ensure the language would influence implementation rather than remain declarative, and how the added framing interacted with the resolution’s enduring emphasis on accountability.

No consensus recommendation emerged still.

The revised text does not impose new legal constraints on enforcement authority, does not alter resource allocations or performance metrics, and does not remove the tools the original sponsors considered essential.

It does require that those tools be interpreted through an additional “equity” lens of differential experience and barrier recognition.

Whether that interpretive requirement will shape operational decisions—how officers are deployed, how camping is managed, how disorder is addressed on the ground—remains unresolved, like the language itself.

This careful textual negotiation is unfolding while residents witness the continued strain downtown. In late August, Burlington police, working with federal partners, conducted targeted surveillance in City Hall Park that resulted in eleven arrests on drug-related charges. Interim Police Chief Shawn Burke noted that most of those arrested were cited and released, a reminder of the limits of street-level enforcement when the broader system lacks capacity for sustained intervention.

Business owners, meanwhile, have begun organizing more formally; the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce has moved to create a Downtown Business Alliance to give merchants a clearer voice at City Hall.

At the same time, the full City Council on August 24 approved a separate, bipartisan resolution asking the state for concrete help, including a new 100-bed low-barrier shelter and greater support for the court system.

Governor Phil Scott responded coolly, observing that other parts of Vermont also face hardship.

The atmosphere surrounding the process and the reality on the ground remains a multi-faced front, where no one solution or conversation is sticking and feelings are only growing stronger.

Only a few days ago, a standing-room-only crowd of business owners and managers filled City Hall to confront Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak with accounts of daily disorder.

A restaurant manager described being jabbed by a discarded syringe and now facing medical tests he never previously needed. Another business owner reported that someone had defecated on the patio three days in a row and that foot traffic had fallen twenty percent from an already difficult previous year.

One resident, who asked not to be named, told BDN after the meeting that they too had a “scary experience” for weeks after getting jabbed downtown while walking back to her car. “I can’t even wear sandals downtown anymore,” she said.

Speakers spoke of open drug use, unpredictable behavior, and a sense that the downtown they had invested in was slipping beyond their control.

The mayor told the room she was “not satisfied with the status quo” and cited efforts to hire more officers and address problem behavior earlier, yet she also stressed the limits of municipal capacity and the need for greater state support.

Much of the mayor’s plan, and that of the council’s too, has focused largely on state aid that has never been promised or discussed in any real detail.

“It feels like they have run out of options, looks like it to me,” the woman who earlier spoke to BDN, bowing her head in disappointment.