The Burlington, Vermont City Council met Monday night. Among the topics on their agenda were city redistricting, an update on the downtown City Place development and a multi-modal railyard transportation project.
The council meeting began with a presentation and discussion on redistricting. The city is currently divided into eight wards and four districts that each include two of the wards. North District Independent Mark Barlow noted that the council’s Redistricting Working Group met on Sept. 21st and Oct. 3rd to discuss a potential consensus map.
“The trajectory of our discussions over those two meetings has been in the direction of an eight-ward map as it can best achieve some of the objectives identified by the ad-hoc committee and some of the public process that’s gone on around redistricting, including keeping the New North End and Old North End separate," explained Barlow. "It also allows for the creation of a downtown ward, having multiple representatives, and can allow student populations to be better distributed across multiple wards. Another benefit of the eight-ward configurations are that they allow for either a 12 or a 16 councilor solution.”
Fellow working group member Ward 1 Progressive Zoraya Hightower said her constituents do not like the eight-ward configuration for the city.
“They really wanted the seven-ward map and want us to go back to considering that," Hightower reported. "They feel like everybody’s getting what they want in terms of the New North End being separate from the Old North End and Ward 8 being reconfigured and Ward 1 is the one who’s losing on all of those fronts. So I got a lot of feedback at the NPA (Neighborhood Planning Assembly) that folks did not love any of the maps.”
Ward 5 Democrat Ben Traverse pointed to another challenge regarding how the city will redistribute its so-called “student” ward.
“If councilors are going to prioritize maintaining historical boundaries, then I do think that one of our eight wards is going to have to maintain a student population similar to Ward 8 as it is right now. And from the very beginning we were saying that’s not something we wanted to do.”
A redistricting work session is planned next week. The City Council is targeting putting a redistricting plan on the Town Meeting Day ballot in March.
City leaders also received an update on the stalled CityPlace downtown development project. Mayor Miro Weinberger, a Democrat, noted that it is the first update to the council and the public since May, when local developers secured control of the site.
“Since taking over the project in May the local partners have made extensive progress and are on the verge of moving from a project that has been stalled since 2018 to one that is under full construction," noted Weinberger. "As a sign of that I am happy to share that the city received a building permit application for the project’s foundation earlier today. To take this step, however, and start construction of the foundation further action from the City Council will be needed.”
Farrington Construction David Farrington owner is part of the trio that formed CityPlace Partners. He said construction is expected to begin in early November with a planned three-year schedule to complete the development.
“We’ll be blunt. We were handed a mess when we bought this thing," asserted Farrington. "One of the first things we had to do was clean up three or four lawsuits. Some of them were really impeding progress on the project. And I guess we should say also we’re planning on building this exactly as it was permitted originally. It’s 427 units, including the CHT (Champlain Housing Trust) units, 420 or so parking spaces and about 45,000 feet of streetside retail all the way around. And there is a restaurant and public observatory space on the roof of the south building.”
Details of what action is needed were reviewed during an executive session that followed the report to the council. Mayor Weinberger noted that council action may be sought as soon as Monday.
Burlington’s Railyard Enterprise Project is a proposed “network of multimodal transportation infrastructure improvements connecting Pine Street and Battery Street...” The council heard an update from the Department of Public Works and unanimously approved the selection of a preferred alternative plan.
