Tag Archives: Emma Mulvaney-Stanak

A Band-Aid on a Broken Arm

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Welp, Gov. Phil Scott has unveiled his 14-point “short-term action plan” (his words, underlining the lack of sustained commitment) to improve public safety in Burlington. And, unsurprisingly, it’s a combo platter of disappointing, punitive, and cheap. It’s more political than policy, aimed at demonizing Vermont’s biggest and most important city and avoiding his administration’s culpability for the problems that beset all of our communities.

Kudos to Seven Days’ Courtney Lamdin for spotlighting, near the beginning of her story, the most crucial shortcoming in Scott’s plan:

Conspicuously missing from the plan is an expansion of homeless shelter capacity in Burlington or elsewhere in Chittenden County, despite the dire need for it. The plan also ignores specific asks that Burlington city councilors made of Scott in a resolution they passed in August.

Yeah, ignoring dire needs is kind of Phil Scott’s jam. Remember in June, when I headlined a post about his veto of H.91 “Phil Scott Doesn’t Give a Fuck About the Homeless”? His Burlington “action” plan validates my point. He is, quite literally, the Levite averting his eyes as he walks by a wounded traveler. His plan is heavy on the punitive and light on the humanity. The goal is to remove the unfortunate from his view shed, not to actually help them. The best outcome for Scott’s plan is some short-term cosmetic improvement while the underlying economic and social causes of our problems continue to exact their toll.

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Well, of Course It Was “a Change of Posture”

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Gov. Phil Scott made a move this week that promises to pay off big time in purely political terms. If it actually accomplishes anything in the real world, that’ll be a bonus.

After insisting for weeks that his administration wasn’t making any plans to help the city of Burlington with its intertwined problems of homelessness, substance use, public safety, and perceptions of the city’s health, Scott announced at his Wednesday press conference that his administration is holding meetings with various Queen City stakeholders with an eye toward unveiling just such a plan “over the next couple of weeks.”

Vermont Public’s Peter Hirschfeld asked if this wasn’t “a change in posture” for Scott and his team. The governor replied that “maybe the perception” of his posture had changed, but the posture itself remained the same.

Which is obvious bullshit, but did you really expect him to openly acknowledge “a change in posture”? Of course not.

I mean, look. A few weeks ago he was brushing aside a reporter’s description of Burlington as “the economic engine of the state” and couldn’t recall the last time he walked down Church Street. Last fall, when his administration brought its dog-and-pony Capital for a Day to Chittenden County, the governor attended some events in the suburbs but skipped the ones in Burlington. And now he’s holding a series of summits with city luminaries? Yeah, that’s a change in posture and a pretty dramatic one.

Setting aside that bit of casual mendacity, it’s a really smart move. And it positions him to pull off a masterstroke that will cement his reputation as a practical centrist. Especially to the Burlington area’s donor class. You know, the Barons.

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Scott (and Burlington Democrats) to City: Drop Dead

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It’s no surprise that Gov. Phil Scott is turning a deaf ear and a jaundiced eye toward the Queen City, rejecting any idea that his do-nothing administration has contributed to downtown Burlington’s troubles. It’s somewhat more surprising that Democrats on City Council are effectively taking the governor’s side in the argument. Well, perhaps more ill-timed than actually surprising. Because talking like Republicans is what Council Democrats do best.

Let’s take this from the beginning. On August 13, VTDigger published an opinion piece by Burlington’s Progressive Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, in which she slammed the Scott administration for dramatically increasing the number of unsheltered people and failing to offer Vermont’s cities any help in dealing with the ensuing humanitarian crisis.

The governor’s response, delivered at a press conference last week, was akin to then-president Gerald Ford’s response to the financial troubles of New York City in the mid-1970s, as reflected in the greatest tabloid headline ever written. LIke Ford, Scott didn’t actually say that Burlington should Drop Dead, but he did argue that the city needed to step up and address its own problems before it could expect any outside help.

Even worse were comments made by Jennifer Morrison, Scott’s commissioner of public safety and former interim police chief of Burlington. According to VTDigger’s Shawn Robinson, Morrison described the city as “terrifying” without explaining what she meant by that, and sounded like someone carrying a grudge from her brief tenure as chief:

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News You Should View (Or Listen To)

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The title of this weekly feature is never entirely accurate, since I often include audio content that you really can’t “view.”. But I’m amending the title this week because we have a really great audio piece in the leadoff spot. And, for those monitoring their Trump-related consumption, you’ll find a relatively moderate number of stories about That Manbaby in the White House.

A day in the life. From Vermont Public, a tremendous 20-minute audio documentary about a rare animal in modern times: the do-it-all rural primary care doctor. Producer Anna Van Dine’s voice only appears at the beginning and the end. In between, your narrator is the documentary’s subject: Dr. Bob Primeau, the only primary care doc in the Northeast Kingdom town of Island Pond. This must have taken a ton of time and effort, but it gives you a real sense of what it’s like to be a doctor, and a patient, in rural Vermont.

Also what it’s like to be a cog in a machine. “These days, it feels like the health care system has begun to disregard the most essential part of what it means to be a doctor,” Primeau says, citing ever-more-stringent demands for data entry that takes time away from stuff like talking to your patients. I spent many years working in public radio (never in Vermont), and the opportunity to produce this kind of content is what made the job so challenging and so rewarding.

Vermont’s health care system, teetering on the brink. VTDigger and Seven Days each delivered vital stories about financial troubles in our health care system. They spotlight different aspects of an issue, which is the kind of coverage we’ve largely lost in our teeny-tiny media ecosystem. We used to get a lot more of this when there were several strong outlets competing with each other, and we rarely get it anymore. Digger’s Peter D’Auria focused on Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, which (a) insures roughly one-third of all Vermonters, (b) is the only in-state health insurer, and (c) has spent most of its financial reserves to cover a surge in claims.

Seven Days’ Colin Flanders, meanwhile, took a broader but equally sobering view of our health care landscape.

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“The Days Grow Shorter, the Nights Grow Colder”

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Well, another press conference today about our ongoing, self-inflicted homelessness crisis. This one featured Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak (above), who gave us the title for this post, along with a crew of The Usual Suspects including Brenda Siegel of End Homelessness Vermont (left, above), Falko Schilling of the ACLU of Vermont (right, above) right, Frank Knaack of the Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness, and Julie Bond of the Good Samaritan Haven.

They made the familiar plea: Hundreds upon hundreds of vulnerable Vermonters are being exited from the General Assistance voucher program, while available shelters and support services are at or beyond capacity. You can find more comprehensive reports on the presser elsewhere; I’d like to emphasize a few key points.

First, the situation was already critical even before cuts in the voucher program began taking their toll on September 15. It has gotten worse since then, and will continue to get worse for at least the next two weeks as recipients hit their maximum stays. The pain has only just begun. And all of those affected have been classed as vulnerable. There are no able-bodied freeloaders here.

    Second, the speakers emphasized their desire to move beyond the blame game. “We must set aside our political and policy differences,” Siegel said, in order to craft a humane resolution to the crisis.

    Third, there is one and only one person who can get this ball rolling: Gov. Phil Scott.

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    It Was Supposed to Be an Emergency Drill for Students, But Now It’s the Adults Who Are Ducking and Covering

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    Far be it for me to imply that the Burlington Police Department doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing, but in this case they clearly didn’t.

    The BPD is in hot water, possibly to be joined in the pot by the Burlington Public Schools and Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, whose recent reappointment of Police Chief Jon Murad, over the objections of her fellow Progressives, now seems like maybe not such a great idea.

    On Wednesday, a group of 20 Burlington High School students were on a field trip to One North Avenue when screams rang out and two women ran into the room, pursued by a masked gunman. Who opened fire.

    It was a drill staged by the BPD with the apparent goal of scaring the shit out of the kids and maybe giving them PTSD. “I’m shaking and crying because I’m like, Oh my god, I’m gonna get shot,” one student told Seven Days. “It felt so real.”

    In an utterly inadequate press release blandly (misleadingly) entitled “BHS Scenario Response,” the BPD called this a “roll- playing scenario” (sic) that “was not directed at any students or faculty.”

    Pardon me, but what the actual fuck? The masked gunman was in the room with the school group and gunshots rang out. How in hell were they supposed to know that it “was not directed” at them?

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    Man Who Claims to Be Above Politics Does Overtly Political Thing

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    It may have adhered, by the tiniest hair on its chinny chin chin, to the letter of tradition, but it absolutely blasted the spirit of tradition right to the moon.

    I speak of Gov. Phil Scott’s decision to appoint a Democrat to the seat formerly held by the chair of the House Progressive Caucus. The Progs are furious, and they have every right to be.

    Scott’s flimsy rationale is that Emma Mulvaney-Stanak ran for House in 2022 as both a Prog and a Dem. Okay, sure, but c’mon now. Mulvaney-Stanak’s political identification is clearly Progressive. She served on Burlington City Council as a Prog. (For a time, she was the only Prog on City Council.) She ran for mayor of Burlington as a Prog. She served for four years as chair of the Vermont Progressive Party, for Pete’s sake.

    I don’t care if she ran for House that one time in the Democratic primary. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak is a Progressive through and through, and her replacement in the House should have been a Prog.

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    …Or Maybe Everybody Just Hates Joan: A Deeper Dive into the Mayoral Numbers

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    My recent post about the Burlington mayoral election drew a fair bit of intelligent response. Even on Twitter, which used to happen all the time but never in the post-Elon hellscape of X. Much of the discussion came from Democrats with fact-based arguments against the idea that Burlington is a Progressive town. Some good information, which makes me think that Burlington is less a Progressive town and more a swing town that can go either way depending on circumstances and candidate quality. And inspires me to write a follow-up taking a closer look at some telling statistics.

    Let’s start with defeated Democratic hopeful Joan Shannon, seen above commiserating with campaign manager and soon-to-be-ex-councilor Hannah King. The failure of Shannon’s campaign was partially masked in the overall vote totals. She did draw 500-plus more votes than Miro Weinberger in 2021, but she badly underperformed Democratic council candidates in wards where there was a Democrat on the ballot. Shockingly so, in fact.

    One more thing to emphasize up top: It wasn’t the student vote. Democrats can stop complaining about that. The numbers say quite the opposite; Progressive winner Emma Mulvaney-Stanak performed strongly in non-student areas of the city.

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    Maybe Burlington Is Just a Progressive Town

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    Before Town Meeting Day, I was bracing myself for what could have been the most reactionary election in who knows how long. Conventional wisdom had it that Burlington Progressives would be punished for being “soft on crime,” and Vermont voters would revolt against rising property taxes by voting down school budgets.

    As it turned out, none of that really happened. Sure, roughly one-third of school budgets lost. In a normal year, no more than a handful of budgets go down to defeat. But one-third doesn’t exactly constitute carnage. It definitely sends a message to state policymakers that something needs to be done, and if legislators are smart they’ll pass something significant before the session ends. What it says to me, in total, is that Vermont voters really like their schools and are willing to dig pretty deep to support public education, but their patience and resources are not unlimited.

    In Burlington, meanwhile, the expected backlash to Progressive crime policy didn’t materialize. Councilor and Democratic mayoral nominee Joan Shannon, pictured above with Councilor Hannah King, who lost her bid for re-election and managed Shannon’s losing campaign), was seemingly on a glide path to the mayoralty after years of media drumbeating over CHAOS IN THE QUEEN CITY. But it turned out that voters weren’t there for an enforcement-heavy response to public safety concerns.

    The campaign centered around the issue, but Mayor-elect Emma Mulvaney-Stanak promoted a comprehensive agenda that addressed the causes as well as the consequences of the public safety situation. Shannon emphasized boosting the police force (and ragging on the Progs for their 2020 vote to cut the BPD, and it might be time to retire that talking point).

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    Burlington Democrats Yearn for a Golden Age That Probably Never Existed and Definitely Never Will

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    The suspense evaporated quickly. Democratic City Councilor Joan Shannon, a realtor who represents an affluent section of Burlington, eked out a first-ballot victory in the party caucus Sunday afternoon.

    Her win is a disappointment for those who think Burlington is some kind of small-p progressive hotbed, but it’s not a surprise. Not when the media are banging the drum for the city’s alleged crime wave and when many residents feel a new sense of insecurity that’s not borne out in the crime statistics but does reflect Burlington’s shabbier feel of late — more a result of petty vandalism, littering, and out-of-control social ills than of actual crime.

    But that’s a hard thing to look at and promises no easy solutions. Instead, let’s throw our hands on the Shannon deck, whose leader promises “to restore” the Queen City of hallowed memory.

    Ah, the good old days. As Otto Bettmann would say, “they were terrible,” but our memories turn toward the past when present reality is too much to bear.

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