Burlington and its mayor have faced a number of issues this year – from crime to homelessness to construction on the city’s Main Street disrupting traffic and business.
Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak is in her first term. North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley began a conversation with the Progressive asking whether the downtown construction work has impacted tourism and tourism revenue:
One of the challenges of being a municipality in the state of Vermont is that we don't have direct access to tourism trends and economic data and whatnot. It really gets aggregated on the state level. So it is very hard to tease out any one particular issue as a cause and effect kind of moment. So a lot of things have happened in this last year or so. We have a new president who continues to use his, I guess, soapbox to be able to really attack our neighbors to the north, which has a very negative and detrimental impact on Northern states, which of course, Vermont is and northern cities, which Burlington is. We've had a significant drop in Canadian tourists. And so if we're not sending welcoming and inclusive messages as a country to Canada, it makes it much harder to break through that noise and that chaos that the President is purposely orchestrating against Canada as a little city of Burlington. So that has had a big impact on our downtowns. Tariffs have another impact on our local businesses, of course, as well. There is disruption, of course, with our construction for Great Streets - Main Streets, and we continue to adapt and have been very creative as my time as mayor to provide openings of certain intersections during the last holiday season, to make sure we book downtown, free parking incentives to encourage people to come down town as well as reopening the street as quickly as we could about a month or two ago. So that it's our main street is always open now on nights and weekends through the end of this project that will go, that will officially wrap in 2026. And if you come downtown now, you can see, you can finally see what this great street is really all about. The beauty of it, the wide sidewalks, the public art that's being installed, the additional space that many of the businesses on Main Street will be able to benefit from for additional cafe space, just additional setup space for them. And so we can see our future now, which is a very exciting component of this.
Part of downtown that was discussed for a while but I haven't heard much lately, except for a mural that had graffiti on it, is the Memorial Block. Can you give an update on what's going on there?
So we continue to work with the developers who had a pre-development agreement established with the city, right before I became mayor, to see what is possible and to continue to adapt. A lot of the factors I talked about before with national trends, inflation, tariffs, etcetera, make building anything right now 10 times harder. So we're trying to be nimble and to pivot where we can. I am still encouraged because a lot of our plans are lining up to be a strong public-private partnership, which will reactivate so many elements of that block, which are, frankly, really dead space. Spaces that have been locked up because of different people have owned different parcels for there to be a block and being able to reimagine that entire block as places for the public to engage, to reactivate even central parts of that block where there could be new green space and new public convening space, as well as helping the city be able to leverage what we can salvage around Memorial Auditorium, at least conceptually, for the sake of public assembly. We have lost an ability to have a large internal inside space for us to do that and the developers really know that's such a vital need for the city and I'm encouraged by our abilities to continue to develop ideas of what could be feasible.
The administration losses. You've got three people leaving. You've already rehired for Joe's position. Will the other two positions put any sort of additional stress on the city by not having them there?
Our Senior Advisor on Community Safety will not put added stress. That was an added new, temporary role that I brought on when I became mayor. Last fall or so it was when that position began. And as I mentioned earlier in some remarks, Ingrid Jones was able to achieve a great deal in this first year, many things that have now put the city in a much stronger position to be able to implement community safety strategies and even new ideas with our existing senior leadership team. The Burlington Police Department is a completely different place than it was even six months ago. Our fire department remains steady and strong and innovating around our community health response. And across departments, everyone is collaboratively now really thinking about community safety beyond the classic police and fire response as well as our deeper commitment and partnership with the Howard Center. So if anything, it's a really good time to be able to pivot and it was an experiment to have this role at all as a temporary role and it's a good transition moment to wind that one down and to be able to pivot those resources into other ways that could, to move the city forward. And for the homelessness position, which is another policy specialist role, that definitely will need to be replaced. It is a very both impossible job and a challenging job. So that will have an impact and so we will be working to replace that position as quickly as humanly possible.
When you realized that you had three people leaving pretty much at the same time, did you go to them and say this is going to look weird? Should you maybe shift your dates around a bit?
I didn't because as a mayor and as a leader I really think I lead with heart and humanity first. These are incredibly impossible jobs. There's great scrutiny on these public servants and the temperature has been so cranked up in terms of negative political rhetoric. Just the attacks that public employees receive all over the country, this is not unique to Burlington, that I actually only have deep compassion and appreciation for these individuals and, if anything, I just appreciate how long people held in for what has been a very difficult start of an administration and probably one of the hardest times to be the mayor of this city with all the conditions that are well outside of our control as a team and everyone working really diligently for smooth transitions and wrapping up good transitions for the work that people have stewarded so far.
You need more shelters. You also mentioned during the press conference that you've got a building that will be reopening soon and another possible shelter. How much will those help?
We have still a historic number of 200 to 300 people who are unhoused in Burlington. So even if a shelter opens with 20 beds, or even if the Community Resource Center opens for more day space for individuals to go, and even if those are all both low barrier places, that's still not enough. And that, just again, points to the historic crisis for which we're in and why we need more conversations on our region and state level, regional and state level, to really find solutions here. Because shelter is always a temporary step and what we really need to be thinking about is the full just transition for individuals who are unhoused right now or at the risk of losing their housing because there's even more who are housing insecure. How do we keep people housed? How do we build more housing? How do we sustain that and make sure that folks have access to permanent housing? That is really like the bigger conversation that we need to be having.
And I know that the Congressional delegation here has been warning that as of November 1, health insurance premiums are going to spike. Do you anticipate seeing potentially more homeless because of that?
I see a combination of things because with more health insurance expenses that's back to the housing insecure. People are already one paycheck away often around losing housing because of the even just the cost of rents. If other basic needs, like health insurance, start to spike in terms of the expense to folks on limited incomes or fixed incomes that is another crisis on top of already the loss of federal housing vouchers for many of these individuals. It is creating a perfect storm for working and low income people and leaving municipalities really in the lurch around how do you support these individuals when we don't have the resources? This is a failure of the federal government and, if anything, I'm just appreciative of our federal delegation to be sounding the alarm and making sure that we're very clear around the shutdown of government and the problematic policies that the President is advancing directly harms the most vulnerable people in our community.
That was Burlington, Vermont, Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak discussing city issues with North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley.
