Latest from the developing 2024 campaign in Burlington: Not one, but two Progressive city councilors will not seek re-election. The departures of Zoraya Hightower and Joe Magee will leave only two incumbent Progressives: Gene Bergman, elected in 2022*, and Melo Grant, elected last March.
Yep, the most tenured Progressive councilor will have been in office for only two years.
Not that they’ll lose a whole lot of seniority. Hightower is currently the senior Prog, and she’s only been in office since 2020. And that’s the thing: the Vermont Progressive Party has a severe retention issue — not only in Burlington, but in the Statehouse as well. The result is a party spinning its wheels and having to work very hard just to not lose any ground.
*Note: Bergman may have been elected fairly recently, but he’s been around Burlington politics for a long time and, in fact, served on what was then the Board of Aldermen in the late 80s to early 90s.
Well, okay then. VTDigger has confirmed what was originally reportedeleven days ago by Guy Page of the Vermont Daily Chronicle: Miro Weinberger, the outgoing mayor of Burlington, is thinking about a run for an unspecified (but almost certainly gubernatorial) statewide office.
Digger might have had the decency to credit Page for being first, but the standards for crediting rival news outlets around here are, shall we say, highly elastic. The first and last rule seems to be, “Avoid giving credit at all times if at all possible.”
Anyway, so what about a Miro run for governor? You won’t be surprised, given my view of his tenure as mayor, that I’m not doing any cartwheels, metaphorical or otherwise.
But sure, what the hell, why not? Assuming Gov. Phil Scott seeks a fifth term, and why wouldn’t he, then the Democratic nomination will be about as valuable as an expired pet food coupon. Might as well be Miro as anybody else. Any Democrat with serious statewide aspirations is going to sit this one out, just as they did in 2018, 2020, and 2022. But in Miro’s political condition, taking that coupon to the checkout could be a gamble worth taking. He’s got nothing else going on.
Miro Weinberger announced today that he will not seek a fifth (three-year) term as mayor of Burlington. He has occupied the position for 12 years, the longest continuous tenure of any Queen City mayor, but the better part of his legacy may amount to nothing much more than occupancy. His record is mixed at best, and he wouldn’t have made it this far if not for the endemic divisiveness of Burlington’s left.
In each of his last two campaigns, he got less than 50% of the vote. Last time, in 2021, he polled just under 43% and won the race by a mere 129 votes. In both 2018 and 2021, multiple candidates running to his left split the majority of the vote, allowing Weinberger to win with mere pluralities.
Whatever you think of the achievements of his early years, it’s inarguable that the Progressives made a full comeback on his watch. The Progs held a majority on City Council for several years. It made his job more difficult to be sure, but he failed to build the city Democratic Party or enhance its allure to the voters.
Weinberger walked into his first victory, thanks to the troubled Bob Kiss years leaving a stain on the Progressive brand. At the time he was a fresh young face, widely considered a top Democratic contender for future statewide office. That never happened, and while he’s young enough to have a second political act, he’ll have to work his way back into the arena.
Well, that’s the politics. What about policy? On balance, his record is kind of lukewarm.
You know, if the Burlington Republican Committee wasn’t a bunch of hateful fuckers, I might feel a little bit sorry for them. They went to all the trouble of writing a painfully detailed resolution denying the very existence of transgender folk and complaining of bathroom incursions by people posing as trans, “authoritarian censorship” of their views on gender, “an alarming increase in violent attacks” on people such as themselves… and oh, so many other things. There’s a grand total of 17 “Whereases” and seven “Be It Resolveds.” It has the distractingly busy look of a Dr. Bronner’s Soap label.
Note: Several hours after this post went live, I got a complaint from someone in Mayor Weinberger’s office that I had mischaracterized his proposal. After multiple text exchanges, I got some additional clarity on his plan. I’ve tried to accurately reflect it with notations to the original post. Newly added text is in bold type.
However, the thrust of the piece is unchanged. Weinberger’s plan would provide for the most at-risk of the unhoused, but not nearly for all of them. Also, it must be said that while Weinberger’s plan would mitigate the worst effects of The Great Unhousing in Chittenden County, I’ve never heard him lobbying for a broader solution. He has not called on the governor or Legislature to restore the voucher program while alternative housing can be brought online. He is one more political leader who’s trying to limit the damage rather than address the whole problem.
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger has come out with a plan to deal with most of Chittenden County’s share of The Great Unhousing. His proposal is to create a 50-bed shelter and a day shelter with space for 75 in an empty state office building, and extend motel voucher eligibility for 318 people due to be evicted at the end of July until alternative housing can be found for them.165 households with significant risk factors including families with minor children, adults with disabilities receiving home health and/or hospice services, seniors (60 years+), and pregnant households.
Left off his list: Anyone already evicted on June 1 (almost 200 people in Chittenden County) or about to be evicted on the first of July.
This would include some households that were evicted on June 1 and others due to lose their motel accommodations on July 1 or July 28. But it would far from cover all of those being evicted; the total in Chittenden County, according to Weinberger’s proposal, is 354 households encompassing 512 individuals.
Even so, the estimated price tag for the office building conversion and the extended motel stays is somewhere around $4 million, per VTDigger. The source for that money, if state officials accept Weinberger’s plan? The $12.5 million allocated by the Legislature to make the end of the voucher program slightly less catastrophic.
Perhaps you can see the problem here. If the state says yes, it will have committed one-third of the statewide total for Burlington alone. For a partial solution to Chittenden County’s share of The Great Unhousing.
And according to VTDigger, Weinberger’s is one of 44 proposals submitted to the state on June 1 alone — the first day the state was accepting proposals.
We’re two weeks away from the unhousing of more than 1,000 Vermonters when tighter eligibility standards take effect on the motel voucher program, and six weeks away from unhousing another 1,500 or so. On Monday night, the Burlington City Council considered a resolution to study the city’s existing camping policy. In the end, they approved a watered-down version.
Of a study.
Of an issue that’s about to become a humanitarian crisis.
And on that textbook definition of legislative timidity, they barely managed to act.
The blame goes to the nominal Democratic majority. They feared the resolution might send a message that more city lands could be open to encampments of the unhoused.
Do I need to make that clearer? They were more concerned about a perception than they were about preparing for an explosion of homelessness.
It’s just the latest chapter in the Democrats’ complete mishandling of the voucher program and their seeming obliviousness to the scale of tragedy that’s about to unfold.
I can’t say for sure what happened in the University of Vermont Medical Center’s emergency department last August. But I can say two things: It stinks, and it makes me wonder why Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger is so bound and determined to elevate acting Police Chief Jon Murad to permanent chief.
I mean, he’s been trying since January of 2022. And the city hasn’t had a non-interim chief since December of 2019. That’s not a healthy state of affairs.
And the ER incident, in which Murad reportedly threatened to arrest a trauma surgeon who was treating a critically wounded gunshot victim, raises legitimate questions about Murad’s temperament and respect for the law.
But even worse is how Weinberger and Murad have handled the matter since. They’ve done everything they could to cover it up and minimize the consequences. That doesn’t speak to the soundness of their position.
We wouldn’t even know about the incident were it not for Seven Days‘dogged pursuit of the story. As it is, Weinberger managed to keep it out of sight until after the defeat of a ballot measure to create an independent police oversight board.
I don’t know if Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger smokes cigars. But if he does, he may have lit up a celebratory Arturo Fuente Opus X last night after the city election results came in. It may have been his best political day since maybe December 7, 2020, the day that Councilor Ali Dieng launched his bid for mayor. Dieng’s entry opened the way for a split in the anti-Miro vote, giving him an extremely narrow victory over Progressive Max Tracy.
Thus endeth the history lesson. Point is, everything came up Miro last night. His Democratic Party netted one seat to gain a plurality on City Council, and the voters resoundingly defeated the Progressive-backed ballot question on establishing an independent police oversight commission. The new Council will feature six Democrats, four Progressives and two Independents — one of whom, Mark Barlow, won the endorsement of city Dems. If you count Barlow as a Dem vote, Weinberger will have a Council majority behind him for the first time in his 11 years as mayor.
For the Progressives, last night was a disaster. The police board question lost by almost a two-to-one margin, while the party scored a single win against three losses in contested races for Council.
Every reporter loves to get a scoop — a story with some impact that you’ve got all to yourself. It’s a badge of honor, to be sure. But more often than not, it doesn’t make much of a difference.
The latest comes from Seven Days‘ Courtney Lamdin, who hit the sweet spot by uncovering a lucrative side hustle negotiated by the Burlington Police Officers Association. It made a deal with a luxury condo development to provide security with off-duty city cops.
Her story may affect the outcome of the hottest issue on the Burlington ballot: A proposed police oversight board that would exclude members of the force from serving. That idea has prompted opposition from Mayor Miro Weinberger and Interim-For-Life Police Chief Jon Murad, among others.
Well, Lamdin’s article makes me think there’s a real need for police oversight, and it would be best done without any officers on the board.
Ted Kenney, an attorney from Williston, told VTDigger he’s thinking about a primary challenge to incumbent Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah Fair George.
Under normal circumstances, this could be labeled “quixotic” but without the raffish charm of the original Quixote. Primarying an incumbent in a race that few people pay any attention to?
Why bother?
Well, I think I know why.
I think he thinks there’s a substantial constituency who prefer a more traditional approach to the office instead of George’s pioneering progressivism. And he may well be right, at least in terms of the power brokers and royal families and business-class donors in the county party.
Kenney’s run, if he makes one, is of a piece with Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger’s consistent pro-police stance — and whatever touched off the departure of Tyeastia Green, the first director of the Burlington Racial Equity Inclusion and Belonging Department (REIB) and the resignation of three of the REIB’s four managers.
If you’d like details about Weinberger’s law-n-order policies, click on the first link. Mark Hughes of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance runs down the ways that Weinberger — once he was safely re-elected with a plurality of the votes in a race against two progressive challengers — laid down the velvet glove in favor of an iron fist.
And he keeps waving the bloody flag, depicting the Queen City as a lawless wasteland whose handful of police officers dare not walk the streets. If Miro thinks that’s smart politics, is it any wonder that Kenney believes he could beat George by running to her right?
The Vermont Political Observer. 