Listen to this article
Shawn Burke has been Burlington’s interim chief of police for just over a month. Two weeks into the job, he had to use Narcan, the life-saving treatment that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, for the first time in 10 years.
Driving around Orchard Terrace early in the morning, he witnessed a man he thought was sleeping and went to check on him. As he tried to wake him up, Burke realized the man was overdosing and ran back to his vehicle to retrieve a dose of Narcan.
“It’s sad,” he said, speaking to a crowded conference room at City Hall Wednesday night. “People have made decisions in life, but I really believe that ultimately, they never envisioned this.”
Burke’s experience, recalled during the packed Ward 3 Neighborhood Planning Assembly meeting, underscored what has become a new normal in the city of Burlington. At the meeting, more than three dozen people gathered with various city officials to discuss the city’s newly approved plan for an overdose prevention center and, more broadly, the overwhelming substance use crisis that has plagued the city’s downtown core.
On April 28, the Burlington City Council unanimously approved preliminary plans for the center, green lighting the project’s planning phase, which is expected to take nine to 12 months. It’s seen by many as a crucial development to curbing the city’s staggering overdose and substance use crisis.
“This is a hugely important step on this journey that we’ve been undergoing here as a community,” Council President Ben Traverse said at last week’s council meeting. “I think every one of us has either been directly impacted by the loss of someone to this crisis, or if not us individually, we certainly know someone who has lost a loved one to this crisis.”
Now the question becomes where to put it. Finding a location for the center could quickly become a major hurdle.
City officials and others close to the project say it makes little sense to site the facility anywhere other than downtown, which officials have called the epicenter of the substance use crisis in Burlington.
“This won’t work if it’s not somewhere downtown,” said City Councilor Evan Litwin, who represents Ward 7 — outside the downtown core — before voting on the center’s approval last week. “It’s not going to work if it’s in an area that isn’t accessible and near the folks who need the services.”
“All the studies around OPCs that are operating in other parts of the world … (show) it has to be where the activity is,” Central District City Councilor Melo Grant echoed at the neighborhood meeting for Ward 3, which is part of the Central District and includes the downtown core. “The Central District is the epicenter of the epidemic, not only in Burlington, but in Chittenden County and probably Vermont, given the number of incidents,” Grant said.
But for downtown residents and property owners, that idea will be a tough sell, and the prospect of locating the center downtown is already facing opposition.
Neighbors say that’s in part due to their experiences with existing harm-reduction programs like needle exchanges, where sterile syringes are provided to prevent the spread of disease like HIV or Hepatitis C. There is one run by the Howard Center’s Safe Recovery program on Clarke Street and one run by Vermont CARES on Bank Street.
The Ward 3 neighborhood group approved a resolution that “vigorously opposes” the center’s establishment in the downtown core. The resolution calls for the city to place it near a medical facility, instead.
“This is for us to draw our line in the sand,” said Zach Cummings, a member of the neighborhood group. “Ward 3 residents and downtown residents cannot take anymore pressure from unaccountable … social services.”
‘It can save lives’
The idea of an overdose prevention center has been a dream of advocates for years, before newer synthetic drugs like fentanyl and xylazine started mixing into the local drug supply.
While fatal overdoses statewide have begun to decline for the first time since 2019, overdose deaths remain well over levels in years past. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows that overdose deaths in the state have soared, from 78 in 2015 to 257 in 2023.
The idea came closer to a reality last year, when lawmakers established a legal framework and funding needed for the facility. Lawmakers overrode Gov. Phil Scott’s veto in June to pass that law.
The bill allocated $1.1 million from settlements with pharmaceutical companies that produced and sold opioids to fund the center in fiscal year 2025. The bill’s language also states that the funding for the project should continue to be available through at least 2028.
The center will be operated in partnership with Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform, a Burlington-based provider of harm-reduction treatment and recovery services.
Visitors will be allowed to smoke or inject pre-obtained illegal substances there while being observed by trained staff equipped to respond to overdoses and other emergencies. Sterile syringes will be kept in-house at the overdose prevention center for people to access.
“Somebody is there, physically present, able to reverse an overdose,” Tom Dalton, the group’s executive director, said in an interview. “That’s part of what excites me, is knowing that people are going to have an option that can help them survive.”
The center will also host a number of other services, said Theresa Vezina, the city’s special assistant on overdose prevention center implementation, including wound care and other medical services and substance use treatment options. Case managers will be on hand to direct those utilizing the center to mental health services, housing support and other social services, she said.
Vezina said the goal is to eventually have food, showers and laundry available, to create a place that can function as a one-stop shop for harm-reduction and treatment services.
“We know that this can make a difference,” she said. “It can save lives.”
But concerns and questions remain about its location, which will need City Council approval. Litwin said he expects it to be “a tough conversation.”
“There is not necessarily going to be broad agreement on the council about where to put it,” he said in an interview. “I also think we’re going to run into NIMBYism. I think some of that NIMBYism will be misplaced, and some of it will be very well placed.”
‘We already have crime’
The question of location, and community opposition to its placement downtown, represents perhaps the last major roadblock to the center’s opening.
Vezina, at the neighborhood meeting, said the new law requires the city to conduct a comprehensive service assessment for its location, with a robust public engagement process before any site decision is made.
While Vezina anticipates the center will eventually be placed somewhere downtown, she said city officials are still months away from finding a location. A major part of the planning phase, she said, will be finding a suitable building that can be retrofitted to meet the needs of the center.
She told residents that the city would prioritize engaging with the community, and noted “past mistakes” the city has made, referring to the process for locating an emergency shelter on Elmwood Avenue, known as the “pods.”
“Public discourse is going to be really important,” she said. “We don’t all have to agree. I think that there are absolutely concerns that people have that are valid. We want to make sure that we are hearing your concerns, otherwise we won’t be able to address them.”
Residents at the neighborhood meeting, however, pointed to Clarke Street, where “things have gotten worse,” Amy Kimmel, who owns property on the residential block with her partner Rob Perry, wrote in an email to city councilors. “There is constant loitering and open drug use on the Howard Center property everyday, throughout the day.”
Perry said neighbors have been at a loggerhead with the Howard Center for months over what they describe as negligence. The Howard Center has not prevented bad behavior from spilling out onto neighboring properties, nor has the center reined in syringe litter in the neighborhood, Perry said.
Perry has since garnered more than 200 signatures on a petition calling for the removal of the needle distribution program from Clarke Street.
“You talk about the drug user being the only victim,” Perry said to Burke at the Ward 3 meeting Wednesday night. “I don’t think that’s true. I think the neighborhood, the people who are around, are also victims of very clear abuse.”
The organization has operated the needle exchange program on Clarke Street for more than 20 years, “playing a vital role in advancing public health,” said Mike Glod, a senior development and communications director with the Howard Center, in a written response to VTDigger.
Glod said the site has seen a significant rise in need in the past two years and acknowledged the site has “has not been immune” to the quality of life issues, an “unfortunate reflection of the broader crisis gripping our city.”
He added that the Howard Center is committed to being a good neighbor and said they were taking steps “to safeguard both those seeking our services and the surrounding neighborhood.”
The situation on Clarke Street has drawn criticism from city officials, including both councilors Litwin and Grant.
Litwin, who commissioned a Board of Health report that calls for enhanced efforts to collect syringe litter, said, “If they’re not going to be able to operate by a standard of being a good neighbor, I don’t know how long they can operate there.”
Grant, the Central District councilor, in an interview, agreed that the Howard Center should be doing more to prevent issues on the block that affect neighbors’ quality of life.
“As a provider, they need to move people along,” she said. “Things like shopping carts and things like that, that’s not OK. As a provider, you need to take more responsibility for that space.”
But Grant noted removing the program would lead to an even more devastating health emergency. Syringe service programs have been shown to prevent the spread of diseases like HIV or Hepatitis C, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Drawing similarities to the debate over the overdose prevention center, she also pushed back against the logic that the needle exchange is causing the problem, rather than the drug epidemic itself.
“This idea that we’re going to have more crime — we already have crime,” Grant said in an interview. “We already have quality of life issues that already exist. The idea that this will make it worse is simply not true.”
‘Expectation setting’
Vezina stressed in an interview the importance of following research when searching for a location.
“We all know there are going to be community concerns, but we’re going to be following the data,” she said. “We’re going to be utilizing the hot spot data about where overdoses are happening.”
City officials have offered the prevention center as a solution not just to the overdose crisis, but also to broader issues such as syringe litter, the strain on the city’s emergency services, as well as on harm-reduction service providers.
“I don’t think anybody wants to stand up an overdose prevention center in their community, because at the end of the day, it means we have a serious overdose problem,” Litwin said. “But what I have tried to impress upon people is that they will benefit from this in many ways.”
Vezina said issues raised by residents could be addressed by the new facility.
“Some of these behaviors and things that are happening at other service providers’ locations, hopefully they won’t happen there anymore, because there will be an OPC,” she said.
That may not be convincing enough for residents. Christopher Haessly, a downtown resident and member of the Ward 3 neighborhood group, said the resolution the group passed Wednesday “seeks to strike a balance between those in favor of the OPC and those opposed.”
While he understands the importance and need for the overdose prevention center, Haessly said a downtown location will “adversely impact the Church Street Marketplace.”
During the meeting, Elmwood Avenue resident Trudy Richmond asked Burke for his thoughts on putting “that shoot-up site” downtown “that’s going to draw more people, unsavory folks to our area.”
Burke said there are “a lot of friction points here in Burlington because we are the hub for all the social services, regardless of what neighborhood we might be in.”
“If we’re going to incentivize and resource folks for success, what in turn should the community expect from the people?” he said. “That’s a bigger question than location, and more about expectation setting.”
