Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak called on Gov. Phil Scott this week to do more to help the state’s largest city respond to homelessness and curb public drug use. But Scott and his administration argued the city needs to be the one to step up first.
The back-and-forth across different forums underscored how some state and local leaders have been at odds over each other’s role in addressing persistent social and economic challenges that, while not unique to Burlington, have nevertheless subjected the city to statewide scrutiny.
“The city has made their bed, and they are going to have to ask for specifics to help turn the corner,” Jennifer Morrison, Scott’s commissioner of public safety, whose job includes overseeing the Vermont State Police, said at a press conference Wednesday.
At one point, the commissioner — who was Burlington’s interim police chief in 2020, when protests prompted city councilors to cut the size of the police force by attrition — characterized visiting the city right now as a “terrifying” experience, though did not explicitly say why she thought that. She had interjected during an exchange between Scott and a reporter from WCAX News.
“The problems in Burlington did not occur overnight. They will not be fixed overnight,” Morrison said. “And it requires that everybody commit to principles of accountability — shifting the pendulum back to the middle so that the use of public spaces is just as important for law-abiding people and businesses to thrive as it is for service-resistant people who make others afraid or commit crimes.”
The WCAX reporter had asked Scott, a Republican, what his administration was doing that could help Burlington address concerns raised at a Tuesday meeting the mayor’s office held with local business owners. According to WCAX, a number of attendees told Mulvaney-Stanak, a Progressive, that drug use and dealing in downtown was hurting their businesses.
Joe Magee, a spokesperson for Mulvaney-Stanak’s office, said the mayor’s response in that virtual meeting echoed what she wrote in an op-ed published in VTDigger last week.
In that opinion piece, the mayor said Vermont municipalities “do not have the staff or resources to adequately respond” to what she called a combination of homelessness, substance use disorders and mental health crises. She said the governor’s decision to allow a sweeping round of evictions from state-sponsored motel rooms to proceed on July 1 — a move that specifically impacted families with children and people with acute medical needs — put more pressure on social services in and around Burlington.
In a statement to VTDigger Thursday, Mulvaney-Stanak also said she took issue with the governor’s and his administration’s comments at the press conference a day prior.
“I continue to hope for stronger collaboration with the Governor and his team, and I was disappointed that they decided to take an adversarial tone in communicating to Burlington through the media,” the mayor said.
Scott said at the Wednesday briefing that he was not sure what additional help his administration would be willing to provide the city unless local leaders took steps to boost enforcement of existing laws, including cracking down on public drug use, he said.
The governor acknowledged Burlington businesses were facing numerous challenges including a well-documented decline in Canadian tourism spurred by blowback from President Donald Trump’s sweeping trade war. But regardless of that and other factors, Scott said, it was wrong for the mayor to suggest his administration is not doing enough to help.
“I think it’s easy to blame others when some of your strategies are failing,” he said.
Some Burlington leaders have called for the city to bolster local law enforcement, too. On Thursday, City Council President Ben Traverse, a Democrat representing Ward 5, wrote an open letter calling for a police presence “during all open hours” in downtown’s City Hall Park, which has become a hot spot for drug use and dealing.
Traverse also called for the park to be cleared overnight — when it is closed — of people sleeping. That’s not allowed under city ordinances, though in reality, many people regularly use the park for overnight shelter.
Traverse wrote that his letter — which was sent by the city’s Democratic Party — was in part a response to recent news that a man died after being assaulted and injured near the park.
“I call on my friends in the Progressive Party, and all political persuasions, to join me in collectively building a more resilient Burlington by focusing on the issues voters elected us to tackle,” Traverse said in the letter, which was first reported by Seven Days.
Traverse, who represents the city’s South End on the council, said in the letter he planned to discuss his requests at the upcoming council meeting on Monday.
In a separate email to Burlington residents Thursday, Mulvaney-Stanak emphasized that the city could not address what she called “complex and overlapping public health crises” on its own. The Progressive mayor urged her constituents to use a contact form on Gov. Scott’s website to make a plea for greater state support.
“I am urging Vermonters to contact Governor Scott to tell him that municipalities and many of our local businesses are at a breaking point,” the mayor wrote, “and that it should be a State priority to develop a coordinated response to our collective public health, housing, and mental health crises.”
