The city of Burlington will finally open its shelter pod community this week, a project that city officials had hoped would be operational last November. That development comes soon after the state auditor found fault with the financial management of the city’s TIF, or Tax Increment Financing, district, something the mayor says was not an accurate assessment. WAMC’s North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley sat down with Democratic Mayor Miro Weinberger, who a day earlier led a coalition urging voters to reject a citizen driven Town Meeting Day ballot question that would create a Community Control Board to oversee the city police.
This, I think, is the most important issue before voters on Town Meeting Day. It's about question number seven and this is one that has not come through the normal ballot question process. Normally, when voters are asked to weigh in on Town Meeting Day it's as a result of action by the city council and the mayor, or the school district. In this case, this is a petition that has met a threshold for a few thousand signatures. And both questions seven and eight have gone on the ballot in this way. This proposal is basically what they call a control board for the police. This is a concept that was proposed in 2020 and I vetoed it then and the council sustained that veto. I think this specific proposal is very problematic for a number of reasons. And it is really an untested unprecedented concept, a lot like the move by the City Council in 2020 to reduce the size of our police department by 30% without studying it. This, too, is a concept that hasn't been studied. It's different than any other community board in the country. Why I'm concerned is it will really set us back in our efforts to rebuild the police department. So I was against it in 2020. I'm even more against it if that's possible now because of what's happened for the last two plus years. We've lost about 40% of our officers and we're just now getting some momentum and rebuilding the department. If this were to pass, if this were to become our foundational document, it would, I think, end all that momentum and we'd be back even worse than we've been. So that's essentially what this issue is about. And a number of other community leaders and organizations came together to reinforce this message. So we heard from the UVM Medical Center, from the Howard Center, from the Burlington firefighters and ASCME, the union perspective about how there's just no due process in this charter change the way it's been written and the way that public employees deserve when we grant them in all other settings. There was a number of former city councilors and current city councilors there. I was very appreciative to have such a broad coalition of Burlington leaders trying to communicate to Burlingtonians that this is something that people really need to pay attention to and has the potential to be a real problem.
What are some of the other problems with this proposal from your perspective?
Well, I put them in three big categories. One, it's really important for people understand this is an unprecedented, untested idea that hasn't been studied. You know, I think if you just read the title, you know, it sounds like civilian oversight. Sounds good, right. And civilian oversight is good. More than 100 communities including Burlington have some form of civilian oversight to their police departments. Very, very few of them, however, actually have disciplinary authority. And the ones that do have disciplinary authority are very, very different than what is proposed here. So I think that's one important point. Secondly, this proposal just lacks the basic protections that we put in place to ensure fairness to employees who are being disciplined. For example, for up to two weeks of suspension of pay, there's no grievance process at all. Secondly, there's no appeal process. The board, the way it's set up, is extremely unusual. You would think if you were setting up a board like this to have some role in discipline you would want expertise in law enforcement. Anyone who's ever worked for law enforcement or currently works is prohibited from serving on this board. And then the way people are actually put on is this very unusual process that has no political accountability to it. Here's how it works. The mayor and the city council choose a group of a nonprofits on an annual basis. Those nonprofits each get to pick one member of a committee and then that selection committee is the one that actually appoints this board. There's no provision to recall them. There's no way to replace them. You know it has the potential to create a really out of control rogue board.
It's a citizen petition and it appears that it's Progressives that are supporting it. Is this a way to sidestep the city council and move forward with some of the progressive proposals to reduce the influence and ability of the police department to do its work? Because a few years ago they were moving forward with their efforts to defund the police and diminish the size of the police department. Is this a way to sidestep and work around it?
It is explicitly a way to go around the mayoral veto. It is interesting the way you asked that question there, Pat, it really does raise sort of a good point. It is an idea that came out of that moment, the defund the police moment. And you know what I find maybe most surprising and disappointing in some ways about how this is currently playing out in terms of a debate: for the last year, year and a half, really almost unanimously on the council there has been a change in direction. Even the Progressive counselors have realized it was a mistake to cut the police department back by 30% back in in 2020 and they have joined me and Democratic counselors in putting millions of dollars into attempting to rebuild the department. And what's confusing about this is the Progressive counselors have recognized that we should not be headed in that direction, the defund direction of 2020. They've reversed course. But here, I think this is really a very contradictory vote for them to now be supporting this control board concept which will clearly undermine that effort. Everyone here in Burlington believes that our police officers need to be held to very high standards. There's broad support for the many measures that we've taken together in recent years to strengthen the Burlington Police Commission. I'm very committed and have been for some time to accountability and transparency efforts like putting body cameras on all police officers. And now we've just in recent weeks been able to add a new position that allows us to redact faces and other private information and get these body cam footages out on the streets quickly. So there's a big commitment in this community to police oversight and accountability. I'm very committed to that. Chief (Jon) Murad is very committed to that. There's a lot that we can work on together and I think a lot of area of common ground with the Progressives. And when this control board is defeated, we will be able to continue that conversation. Unfortunately, the way a charter change by petition works is if this passes there's no further work on it at the local level. This goes straight to Montpelier, to the legislature, to the governor. And it really eliminates any possibility of further kind of work with the City Council to further improve and refine our systems.
An issue that was brought up in the news magazine Seven Days regarding the use of police officers to patrol a condominium association raised a bit of controversy lately, particularly when the issue was raised: 'Well, how can we allow these people to be working for extra money there when we need the police patrolling the city because we don't have enough officers and you could be paying them overtime here.' I think some people raise some eyebrows with the press conference where you brought the city leaders in saying don't pass this proposal thinking is this damage control?
They're unrelated. The reason we had the press conference is because voting is about to start on the Town Meeting Day ballot. And this is an issue again of great importance to the future of public safety and police oversight in the city and now is when we have to talk about it if people are going to have the information they need when they start voting. So yeah, you're right, there has been some controversy around this issue. I think less so since I've had the chance to kind of really study what happened here and share complete information. And I think when people have the full picture they feel much better about what happened here. First of all, let me start by saying our police officers work very hard and they work a lot. You know, officers owe the city a 40-hour week. On top of that they are frequently called in early or held over and kept for overtime, particularly so right now when we're at a historic low. You know we're down 40% on where we've been historically. We're down about 60% from where we've been in terms of patrol officers, the officers out on the beat. And so Burlington police officers in 2022 worked something like 21,000 overtime hours on top of their base duties. To put in comparison where does this controversial River Watch contract fit in? That was a total over several months of about 200 hours. I think there's a concern that did we like divert a lot of resources that could have been used for broad public safety to this one condominium association. And I think that starts to show that no, this is a sort of a drop in the bucket in terms of like what the overall hours are and what the overall need is as well right now. Extra duty contracts are very common in our system. They're very common across the country. Something like 70 to 80% of police departments in the country allow their officers to work extra duty hours like this. In 2018 we did see the possibility of there being some problems with these extra duty contracts and so we put a new section in to the contract that put some limitations on those extra duty contracts that they needed to be for special events and for construction. And what went wrong here is this River Watch contract came through in October. And, you know, Chief Murad had delegated to a lieutenant the review and approval of these contracts and they didn't immediately picked up that this wasn't really consistent with the language of our agreement with the Burlington Police Officers Association and was different than what we've done in the past. And then that was renewed once. This issue is now resolved. Once I dug into this and Chief Murad, we agreed this is not consistent with our contract. This River Watch contract hasn't been renewed and the direction has gone out we're not going to sign any more of these. I gave that report to the Burlington Police Commission. And they made clear as well that they think this issue is resolved. As we move through here I think what's been a little bit lost in this is why is this issue coming up now for the first time? Why did a contract like this get signed? And it's because we are in this very different situation where there's a high level of anxiety about public safety in Burlington, where we have a situation where because the police department has been cut back so dramatically, because we are down so far, there's a lot of anxiety about overnight public safety, and this kind of request has come forward. And you know that shouldn't get lost here. That's the ongoing scandal really is that we don't have enough resources right now to police and protect this community the way we historically have and that's creating all sorts of anxiety and pressures and we got to stay focused on addressing that issue. And I am. Chief Murad is. That is what is consistent with our position on this Community Oversight Board. All that will do is make it harder to provide the public safety that people of Burlington expect.
Some of the Progressives on the city council because of this situation have become a little bit more hardline about voting to promote Acting Chief Murad to become chief and there's apparently some of the others who are varying whether they would do that. Are you concerned because you've been supportive of promoting him at some point in the future to full chief?
At some point I do anticipate bringing Chief Murad forward. There do seem to be some councilors who are pretty locked in to voting against him, you know, regardless of this recent River Watch issue. We recently put out a public safety plan that needs council approval for many items. We're focused on that right now. And we'll come back to the question of a permanent police chief at some point in the future. I'm not sure exactly what the timing will be.
The POD community on Elmwood Avenue is set to open. Why did it take so long?
It will be just a little bit over a year from when this was first conceived to when it's operational, which in terms of new housing resources is actually extremely fast by Vermont standards. In a lot of ways it has been frustrating for the last couple of months to have the shelters standing and done but to be waiting on these important larger structures that were being manufactured off site that were really necessary for us to be able to operate this successfully for kind of common areas, bathrooms. Those are now on site. And this will be an important new resource for addressing our housing crisis, our homelessness crisis. This is going to give us the ability to really take what some people call kind of a public health approach to homelessness. It is going to offer up to 35 individuals some level of independent living within an emergency shelter, which is rare. They're going to have their own space. And we are going to be able to focus a great deal of social services and other resources on this community. And really start working with people from the day they arrive on site to work through whatever challenges they are facing that are resulting in them being unsheltered and help people get into permanent housing, get into jobs, get into drug and mental health therapies. I see this as a real tool for us to achieve our medium term goal of ending homelessness. It's very exciting.
With the Elmwood Avenue shelter POD community, it's a temporary community for I think it was three years. Because of the delays, some of which you couldn't control, does the deadline, does that extend?
We envision this being in place approximately three years. So there's no like precise moment. But we are already in conversation with the Champlain Housing Trust, which is operating the emergency shelter, about what it would look like to take this piece of city owned land and build some kind of permanent affordable housing on it long term. It is my hope that at the end of a three-year period we're in a very different place than we are right now with respect to homelessness. I really think Burlington can become one of the places in the country where homelessness is rare and brief and we've kind of functionally ended it. That's our goal. By the time this emergency shelter is about three years old that we wouldn't have a need the way we have right now for this level of emergency shelter.
Mayor Weinberger, a couple of weeks ago the state auditor said that there were problems with the Burlington TIF (Tax Increment Financing) district and you countered that. Is that settled or are you still working on that situation?
The auditor found there were many, many, many errors that have been made by the city over the 11-year period that this audit covered going all the way back to 2010. A lot of the major errors were in the early years of the audit. It was widely known when I came into office in 2012 Burlington's financial systems were a mess. You know, we had a terrible annual audit back in 2012, a couple weeks before I came into office, saying basically that our financial systems were in disarray. There's $24 million in deficits that various projects owed the general fund. We went about cleaning that up. It took nine years but we did that and we got back our Double-A credit rating, eliminated all those material weaknesses. We got rid of all those deficits and built up a very substantial surplus. So we've come a long way. Sadly, it's not a shock to me that in those early years especially that we would have made some significant errors. I think what's important for people to understand is the net result of all this is that the city had some money in the wrong accounts. They were all city accounts. But instead we had money in the general fund that really belonged in the city's TIF district. And so we are now, with this audit done, taking steps to shift the money back into the TIF district. Because we are in such a strong financial position now, because we have built up these reserves, we can make a six figure, even in some sense a seven figure, adjustment like this without it causing any real kind of significant operational, you know, there's no impact on operations. This isn't going to trigger a tax increase. This isn't going to have any impact on the growth of downtown Burlington and the waterfront. If anything it will actually kind of put a few more resources back into the TIF district to continue that work. I, you know, I regret the errors. This city should not make mistakes like that. I think we have what the CAO Catherine Schad has said is we've taken many steps even in recent years to ensure that these kinds of mistakes are not made again. We have more accounting capacity within the city than we had earlier. We have a new consultant that we're working on to manage the TIF districts and we even have like a trustee in place. The trustee kind of manages the money in the TIF district to make sure that there aren't mistakes made about how money is being allocated. So this is not going to create any immediate problems and we've taken a lot of steps to make sure that we don't experience these kind of issues in the future.
The state took almost a dozen years before it audited it. You would think that they would audit this much more frequently.
Well, this is a funny issue. The Waterfront TIF District actually has been audited before. This is the second time in my 11 years that Waterfront TIF District has been audited by the state auditor. The state audits are on top of annual audits that are done by the city on all of our funds. And so our own independent audits that we commission had found many of these issues before, had said this system here needs to be improved. So yeah, no one should think that this state auditor is the only sort of check on the system.
Anything else in the city that folks should be aware of?
Oh, gosh, there's a lot of positive things happening in the city right now. Even in the teeth of the winter we see progress being made over CityPlace. Never seen so much construction activity happening in the city as is going on right now with the construction of new housing. It gives me a lot of optimism and hope that we have made some real needed changes and that we are starting to build ourselves out of this housing crisis that has plagued Burlington and Chittenden County for decades. I'm hopeful we're headed in a different direction now.
Burlington voters will make a decision on the Community Control Board and other ballot items on March 7th, Town Meeting Day.
