 I've already moved on to my right, so I thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you. Hi everyone. We're going to give everyone a few more minutes to file in and then we're going to get started. Thank you guys for coming to the payroll today. I want to say thank you to everybody that helped put this event on to everybody on the Student Government Association for all your support in this. DC events staff and tech for helping to get all the technical stuff ready for the candidates and their campaign managers for being in contact with us and just being so flexible with everything. And bear with me, I do have to read a brief statement from the university because this is a political event. So this event is sponsored by the UVM Student Government Association. The use of the University of Vermont's facilities for this event does not constitute an endorsement by the university. The University of Vermont does not endorse any candidates, organizations or affiliates in connection with this or any other political campaign or election. So we're going to have about an hour of set questions that we have written up and then starting at 8 and going on to 8.30 we're going to have space for audience questions. So thank you. Thanks for coming folks. My name is Justin Morgan Parmet and I will be moderating tonight's event. Hi, amongst many things and also the co-director of the Lawrence debate union as students. If you haven't heard of us, you should check us out. And if you haven't heard of us and haven't checked us out, you should check us out too. All right, enough about that. I'm here to moderate a debate between four folks running for mayor of your city. So this is really important. I'm so glad to have you all here. Talk about a few rules and then I will introduce the candidates and we'll get started. So first rule was the candidates have agreed to keep their phones away for the entirety of the debate. And then the second rule is they agreed to allow me as moderator a little bit of power to intervene if needed. And just to be clear that is including to stop a candidate when they run out of time or if they're talking over another candidate or if they are trying to avoid answering the question I can intervene to try and bring them back to the question. I'm sure I won't have to do that. And other than that, we'll start with opening statements for each candidate. We'll have three minutes. And then after that, we'll have a series of questions that are pre prepared by the student government association. And each candidate will get two minutes to answer that question. We will start with one candidate and move forward. And then the next question start with a different candidate and move forward. We'll do it in order of seat one, two, three, and four. Seat one being the furthest from me and seat four being the closest. We'll rotate through. After everyone speaks for two minutes, we'll give everybody a one minute follow up opportunity to give a little bit of road bottle to what was said in regards to their statements. And after we're done with our nine questions, we'll move into a half hour of work. After we're done with certain non-questions, we'll move into questions for you all. Any questions about that? All right, I'm going to start by just introducing the four candidates and then they will introduce themselves in their opening statements. So in seat one we have Emma Mulvaney-Sdanek. In seat two we have Chris Hastley. Hastley? Hastley, sorry. In seat three we have Joan Shannon. And in seat four we have Will Evans. So let's start with candidate one and their three minute opening statement. Great, and I don't know where you are, so in terms of flagging us we'll make close to time. So I'm going to try to keep an eye on you over there. I think it's going to be a tough one. I'll kind of do this when you're close and then I'll say time at three and that gives you like 10 seconds. It's a little hard to see way down here, so I don't know if there's someone who can sit. You can, that'll be a little easier. Okay, thank you. You ready? Yes. Okay, go ahead. Hello everyone, and thank you to the SGA for organizing this debate tonight. I'm excited to be with all of you. My name is Emma Mulvaney-Sdanek. I'm a mom of two small kids. I lived in the Old North End for nearly 20 years. I run a small social change consulting company today, and I am a former city councilor here in Burlington. He's represented both parts of the Old North End, and currently I'm a state legislator who represents half of the New North End and half of the Old North End. I'm proud to be sponsored, I was sponsored, endorsed, in other words, by four unions representing many of Burlington's frontline workers, including social workers, health care providers, and folks working in the service industry downtown. This includes SEIU, CIR, which is the Committee of Interns and Residents who work at UVM Medical Center. It includes asking local 1674, which represents the mental health professionals who work at Howard Center. It includes a UE Local 203 at City Market, and most recently, UFCW, which the Scoopers United, the most recently organized union in Burlington, which represents the Ben and Jerry's workers. I'm proud to be back on campus. One of my first jobs out of college was directing the Vermont Liveable Wage Campaign, and I spent many hours up here working with UVM students at the time, fighting for liveable wages and dignity for the UVM staff, clerical staff, and professional staff. Folks were organizing hunger strikes and taking over Waterman, and there was great, I love the activism and vibrancy here on campus. I came back a little bit later when I was a union organizer and helped support one of the first organizing drives of the professional clerical staff to organize a union finally here on campus. And I'm proud last week to have been here now and sponsored by a debate by that union that is now organized and representing those workers. And most recently, I've been back on campus to support the graduate students who are currently trying to organize a union to make sure they have a dignified workplace, respect here, working conditions, and decent liveable wages. I deeply love Burlington. This was the town when you were a kid who grows up in Central Vermont or anywhere in rural Vermont. This is the big town that was vibrant and energized, the place you wanted to live. And yet, I have great deep concern for the health and well-being of our city. There's a lot of fear, there's a lot of anxiety. As a mom of two small kids, I feel that as I bring my kids to the park or even walk them to school down North Street every morning. There's also a lot of divisiveness in City Hall, and that does not work for the city of Burlington, especially when we have so many complex challenges facing us and so many people suffering on the streets of Burlington. I know many of you in this room have struggled with affordability. Many of you in this room probably know people and your families or yourself might be struggling with substance use disorder. Many of you struggle with the housing instability and fears and worries of finding decent and liveable and affordable housing in the city. These are the many important issues that the next mayor needs to be ready to address. They're complex, they're not easy. It will take a lot of collaboration and hard work and understanding systems for how we're going to find these solutions, both immediate and long-term solutions. And that is time. So thank you so much. I look forward to getting into it. Thank you. That's some white issues. Yeah, so of course, easily, I lived in downtown Burlington. I lived in Burlington for about 25 years. Like many of you, I'm a renter and I kind of felt like that was a perspective that had been represented here in the conversation we've had. There were a number of serious issues that were not being talked about, which is why I entered into the race. I kind of hoped that maybe someone else would do that, but it didn't happen that way. And that's kind of one of the reasons I came in at the last minute. When I think back to the time when I got to Burlington back in the fall of 1999, I was living over on Beale Street at the time. And it was a particularly challenging time, like it is now. Our vacancy rate was about 0.5%. And that's kind of where it is today. And the one bedroom apartment that cost me $500 is now going probably about four times that amount. But what has changed is the fact that our city has gone from being about 50% renters to being about 70% renters. And it's not got any cheaper. And I would say that the policies we've seen that have been enacted over the last 20 to 25 years are just simply not working for a large number of people here in our community. And I think it's time that we have a conversation about that. I look at the situation with the folks that are struggling that are actually unhoused and do not have a roof over their head that really strikes me that a number of these folks are struggling with an untreated medical condition and mental health condition or substance use disorder. And yet the best that the state can do is to put them up into the hotel program at great cost to the taxpayer at $3,800 per person per month and then not offer any kind of treatment whatsoever. And it seems to me that if we're trying to get people back into housing, we need to treat the underlying costs as to why they became houseless in the first place. So I think that what I would like to see and what I would do as mayor is I would try to engage with and work with our folks in the legislature to say, hey, we need to get a new state hospital. We need to provide beds for people who you talk to folks that are struggling and that are involved on the front lines here. That seems to be the base issue. We just simply don't have enough beds and we are relying for whatever reason on the private sector to create that and I'm not sure that that's really the best solution. So I'd like to close on by just saying that I'm really grateful to be here and really to thank everyone who supported the campaign today. One of the challenges of being an independent candidate is you don't have a political party infrastructure behind you. I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to bankroll my campaigns. I don't have a huge staff nor do I have an actual campaign manager. So it's a little bit of a challenge but we persevere and try to do the best that we can and just want to thank everyone who's come out to provide support until now. General. Thank you Justin and thank you to the Student Government Association for having us here and thanks for all the people who have taken the time to show up tonight. I came to Burlington actually as a college student but I didn't go to UVM. I was a college student at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania and my sister was here going to UVM which made it a little bit easier to find a place to live here to come for the summer and work and the plan was to go back to Franklin and Marshall and my sister set me up. I think the first night I spent here on a couch on the corner of Willard and College Street and then I was in an attic on Hungerford Terrace for the summer which is a bad time to be in an attic maybe there isn't a good time and then I was in a boarding house on North Willard Street then moved to North Street. So I have been around Burlington for a while and way back then the housing in Burlington cost me three times what my apartment cost in Pennsylvania and I've looked and that has held for all these years it's still about three times the cost here that it is in Pennsylvania which is a baseline issue that's driving a lot of our other problems. So more recently I have spent the last 20 years as a city counselor in Burlington a position I wasn't really planning on doing I was trying to recruit somebody to run for city council because I thought things could be done better and I ended up getting recruited in the process which I didn't think would happen because I had a baby in my arms when I was recruited but these women agreed to babysit for very lengthy city council meetings and I was out of excuses so I became a city counselor and honestly it wasn't really planning on running for mayor but I was persuaded by a lot of people that I have the skills that we need at this moment and it's a critical moment for Burlington coming out of the pandemic and really we have problems that maybe we're bestering for a long time but have really come to a head at this point in time and I'm very proud that I have been endorsed by the city's municipal worker unions there are four unions that represent the city's municipal unions and I have the endorsement of all four of those unions which include the police union the firefighters union asks me who represents workers in parks and public works and across all city departments as well as the electrical workers union I agree with a lot of what Chris just said about getting at the root causes of our problem and really addressing housing, public safety and town gown issues that are kind of prominent at this moment Thanks Hi, my name is Will and I came to Burlington in fourth grade you know, my family dealt with Burlington and it was me and my two sisters and brother and all my mother my parents got divorced after we moved out from New Jersey we grew up in Burlington it was a good place to grow up it was always a tough town but people found a way to get along and I think shootings were at a minimum back then and I really wanted to I'm running to turn Burlington around I think we have a lot of potential here I think working as a community I believe you know, within UVM within Champlain College within Vermont Tech and CCB and you know, other colleges that exist around the area I think that there's a student center there that can be a participant in engineering, architecture, CAD design you know, street design things of that nature I think that infrastructure needs improvement in the city I believe that education especially needs improvement and I'm going to talk about that in a second I believe public safety is a way to bring patronism and business and tax base back to the city my son was born at UVM Medical Center you know, so it's a I'm skipping a jump that way I would say and you know, also the UVM Cancer Children's Award knows me pretty well because of my son, but because I was there advocating for a patient I also did some advocacy work down at Mass General Harvard Health Care Center all of the books, I mean this was me just standing by a patient and you know, I use my union representation days to take my experiences to make sure no doors got slammed in that person's face and I think you know, it's important to have empathy and you know that's kind of where I wanted to talk about the students you know, UVM students could do a lot things that come together as a community to support the students in our high school that are struggling, I mean the dropout rate is five times the national average and we recently heard I recently heard along the path that there's some children, ever growing group of children that are becoming more at risk of becoming suicidal and just consider the fact that there's partitions in between each class if there's a student being bullied in that high school and the kids in the next class over and he's finding a place to get away that could be causing a major problem and mental anxiety and I just wanted to let you guys know that these children have to walk I'm talking 9, 10, 11, 12 year olds have to walk through a war zone to get to school in the morning and you know, I think maybe if the UVM and Champlain College and CCB students really wanted to band together and do something to support those students now would be a good time to start playing that I think that brilliant is at a point where we need that community collectivism in order to make sure that we all build out of this situation that we're in and thank you very much for your time good for that and we'll start with the first question and each candidate again will have two minutes of uninterrupted time and we'll start with Hema the first question is how do you plan to foster a sense of community and engagement amongst residents particularly integrating students into this community thank you well as I said in my opening I was a community organizer for most of my career and also a labor organizer and one of those skills that I learned over that almost 15 year career is truly about the need for community engagement and how to most importantly engage impacted people and so I think students and I know students are part of this community you add to the vibrancy and yet sometimes there can be this feeling of a separation between the campus and the communities and neighborhoods I think it's very important we have so much in common and I mentioned before around the challenges of affordability the challenges of trying to make sure that you all can also find jobs that pay livable wages and want to be able to locate here in Burlington those are the same struggles that working families are experiencing here in town I include myself in that as a mom of two small kids who struggles to make sure we can cover the child care costs as much as we can cover the property tax bills that come each year so for community engagement we have these great neighborhood planning assemblies but frankly they're almost as old as I am or they're a little bit younger maybe but 40 years of NPAs really need an update to make sure that they are reflective of how we engage today and the modern struggles of what working folks including students who either are on in class and or working jobs to make ends meet and so I think we need to go beyond that we need to make sure that they are vibrant spaces but we also need to make sure there's multiple places where folks can engage where you are so that is better communication from the city it's making sure our processes especially on big projects that will impact you and impact neighbors are easy to understand and easy to provide input to your elected leaders and I really think that things like participatory budgeting is a great idea it's done in New York City where folks are able to engage and weigh in and prioritize how we spend local tax dollars that is a great way to learn about your city government know how we're spending money and why we're prioritizing things like the memorial auditorium over the Moran plan over other needs in our city, thank you. I looked up Ewell Street for 13 years so I got to see a fair amount of college students come through my time that I was there and one of the things that struck me was just how much we had in common and what I was there in the early 2000's we actually got a neighborhood association together in conjunction collaboration with the churches at the end of the street the first congregational church and the first United Methodist church and we just basically went around and got to know our neighbors and we ended up working together to put together a community garden that seemed to work really well to break down barriers and bring people together over a shared space one of the landlords that had property around Ewell Street was kind enough to donate the space for the garden so that's one model there and I think that that's one thing we could do here and it really comes down to finding commonalities and share interests I think, treating people how you want to be treated and just engaging with them and asking them questions and try to learn a little bit more about your neighbors so I found that that's where I actually worked before and I'm hoping it will work again. Okay, let me start. I have been very fortunate to have many students involved in my campaign as student interns and it's been really interesting how we have connected both through our campaign reaching out to students as well as students reaching out to us I have a daughter who's now college age and although she doesn't go to UVM many of her Burlington High School peers come here which has given me a really nice connection to many of the students on campus which I'm grateful for. I'd like to continue those kind of internships in the mayor's office and provide those opportunities for students to engage in the real life workings of the city. I also supported a resolution quite a while back that brought students, created student positions on our boards and commissions now those are generally for our high school students to participate in that. The theme of my campaign is all hands on deck and that really is about the fact that nobody has a monopoly on good ideas and I certainly don't have the solutions to all of our problems. I really want to engage with my community and look to the experts in our community, invite them in to advise us and help us through what's really a difficult time here. One of the initiatives we're going to be taking on as soon as the former is to really engage as many people as we can in graffiti cleanup around the city and that's going to it's not something people are frustrated by that. It's not something that can be tackled just by city employees alone and so we're going to work together on kind of an adopt a block type program to try and take care of our city and bring back the pride that we have in our city. Thanks. I just wanted to say I just wanted everybody to see this and my name is Will, I design suppliers on a website. It's Will for BTV, that's W-I-L-L-F-O-R-B-T-V dot com. This is a business that most like people who are out of town. I think that community collectivism is really about people working together and I think the college is a great place to find students again. I think for engineering, for business design, zoning things of that nature where would you go if you were in a genius? Well you would probably go to the college first look for some grad students, look for some entry level students, look for some Champlain College, some UVM some CCV, some Vermont tech if you're talking about manufacturing and design of cool to contract and things like that construction. I think plumbing, pipe fitting, that kind of thing. I think building this city is something that we're kind of at a point where we need to rebuild a lot of stuff and I would be there to encourage good financial practices as opposed to poor financial practices. One thing that I did as a long time union representative and it's funny I just ran into Kelly Goulet yesterday as I was walking the streets and Kelly is one of Peter Welch's right hand representatives and she used to work for Bernie's office and I was up there numerous times representing my constituents in the past because we had an abusive manager that we had to keep going back to Bernie's office till we finally got him removed and also I was up there for a veterans rights issue so I think having a person in office that's going to inspire people and go door to door as I have been doing and finding out what their parents' concerns are for instance in the South End a lady told me before every Little League game they have to run around Callahan Park and pick up needles where are the needle receptacle cans so I think if you take a look at something that should have been done instituted a long time ago I think that it's time for the community to come together and act as one. Thank you. Thanks question number two and this time we'll start with Chris. How will you ensure that the University of Vermont is held accountable with how significant impact on the Burlington community? I think you have to do a good faith negotiation and the first thing you do is you don't start by taking the first offer that comes along and say well that's the best we can do I think it requires a different take but I think from a process perspective we need to engage more with the neighborhoods and as I understand it the current MOU the way that the process is unfolded there wasn't a lot of collaboration for me I think I'd go to the neighborhoods that were most effective go to the neighborhood planning assemblies what are the things that are not working for you what are the things that are working what are the things you'd like to see change what are the items that you think are important to include in an MOU and try to draft it up that way and continue the back and forth negotiation but right now what I see is a conversation going on between City Hall and the University and the folks that live in the neighborhoods most impact seem to kind of be something of an afterthought so I think more participation from the people who actually live here and that are affected would be both that kind of thing The City of Burlington doesn't have a lot of leverage over the University but one of the things that we have is our zoning ordinance and when the University wants changes to our zoning law ordinance provides an opportunity to leverage some of the things that the City needs from the University the MOU that we had with the University expired in 2019 and between 2019 and today the University expanded their enrollment and added 1000 students to our residential neighborhoods which is really problematic both for the residents and the students there isn't any place for students to go and I know that students are being forced to sign leases a year and more in advance that is not fair and it's not international students are even more impacted by this how are students supposed to find housing in this kind of environment I have been a leader in pushing back on UVM and their desire to get an MOU and not really give us any surety into the future that they're going to take care of their students and make sure that the students do have housing and build housing that is well into the future that is more than what they're adding to enrollment right now the MOU that we've been discussing is only a five year MOU well as soon as the MOU is over and you've built the housing that's about the point you've built the housing and now you can increase enrollment I don't think that that's fair either to the students or the community in Burlington we really need a good partnership because we are dependent on one another we're all one community here in Burlington before I was saying a knee-jerk reaction is I always want to clap for somebody when they talk so I think it's important that we kind of try to make sure that everybody acts in the best interest of the city of Burlington and if somebody doesn't and if it's a university we'll be up there talking to the administrators they'll be there much of my profession in life has been about making sure that there's accountability so I think that going forward having those conversations and making sure that you're up in those office having those meetings and making sure that people are all on the same page what the common goal is for the city of Burlington I mean when as a team we lose as a team simple as that I didn't learn that in college I learned that coaching a little league baseball and so college students and administrators I think everybody in the city wants Burlington to be successful I can't imagine that anybody doesn't I think people are generally inherently good so it's important for us to all work together as a community for that common goal a success of the city thank you so the well-being of UVM and the well-being of the city are intertwined these are two important parts of a relationship and so one of the most important ways to have accountability is when a relationship is healthy and working and ongoing and that is one of the things I've not seen done well between the city and UVM UVM's leadership over the years has run a little bit hot and cold with the city and the city needs to also prioritize staying on top of the MLU in other ways we engage the university so when we think about also what goes into MLU it's important for transparency as a state policy maker I will say when we put legislation in place it's very important that we also have ongoing transparency on how things are going so in this case how is student enrollment coming how is labor relations going how is the UVM's commitment as an employer going with the folks who work up here UVM is a very large employer and is a very important partner of making sure we're setting standards for the families we want to be able to locate and the students we want to be able to stay and locate here in Burlington and the community put a lot of things on the table including things like reestablishing the child care center that UVM closed and created more pressure on working families who work here and elsewhere in the community it's another place as other candidates have talked about about doing putting on the table what we're going to do about housing making sure it's affordable for students that they're not forced into triples or there should be doubles here on campus as well as the impact on the community around the campus also about respecting unions on campus and the right to organize these are the kinds of employers we deserve in Burlington and these are the kinds of ongoing relationships I will have with the president administration up here as the next mayor of Burlington, thank you the first question I will do that this time each of you has a minute to respond or extend and maybe talk a bit more specifically about how you'll ensure you can hold the university accountable for this you can also pass if you have nothing else to add I have nothing else to add at this time but I might have something to add after hearing what the other candidates have to say you were first this time we're going to go through the order though I can just simply say another approach that's been advocated for some folks is the suggestion of the Capitol Momentary University I think it's a conversation without me but I think again we can go back to root causes why is the university bringing in so many students it's like well maybe they're not getting the funding they need and I think the last time I checked Burma was I think number 49 in the contrary in terms of how much it supports higher education so again that's a function of the legislature the same legislature that granted you the MS Charter thank you I'll just point out that building housing on campus for freshmen and sophomores is the only kind of housing I can think of that can actually make the housing situation in the neighborhoods worse because if you're building more housing for freshmen and sophomores only to set them loose to find their own housing in the community junior and senior year you have not helped the students and you have not helped the neighborhoods and that's why I have pushed hard on this MOU to I don't want to take your mind approach to prescribe a solution but the bottom line is you have to demonstrate that you're improving our housing problem not adding to it in the MOU thank you so aside from what I just said about UVM and accountability I just want to add any time that you're adding housing if you look around the city of Burlington I mean housing in Burlington has skyrocketed over the last 10 years I was just driving on today just looking at all the new buildings that have went up and they're high density residential so if you put in new buildings then you have to have infrastructure to keep up with that and that infrastructure actually has to be in place ahead of time so in other words you don't hire an employee without a job you don't build a building without the water of the disposal ability to keep the integrity of your town town and all your neighborhoods intact and I think you see that when you have sewage overflows and it's like people think that that's just a random occurrence not all the time sometimes maybe it might be a surge in rain or something like that but other times I remember my buddy lived up on Handy Court there at the top of UVM right over this way and we walked down and every rainstorm we would be able to smell the sewage so that's infrastructure needs to be repaired thank you thank you so a little bit more on the MOUs I think it's really important to look at big agreements like this with a community benefit analysis and an understanding of what we need in our city and so one of the most important things is to think about what kind of guardrails do we need when we think about student enrollment and so what UVM I've witnessed from living here for 20 years is a continued growth of student enrollment which has an impact not only on housing but the size of classes the impact on staff, the impact on faculty there's much more than just housing one has to understand when we think about the growth of the university so we need to have a responsible growth of enrollment and to have that on this conversation as part of the MOU it may need to involve a student cap it also needs to really understand that we have a big impact right now on the number of students so the draft MOU that I've seen talks about what happens if zoning changes going forward not the current number and addressing the current number of students and the current impact it's having on our community and on the classes here on the staff here so it starts with relationships they need to be ongoing and we need to make sure there's clear expectations from day one so that we're working in partnership again going back to I can't see you so I apologize I can, this format is tricky though I will say being the way over inside the area here I feel that way I'm all alone well it seems like housing is clearly an issue that's being brought up and I know because I work around students that housing is a really big stressor and concern for them so let's focus a little bit more specifically on that one how do your solutions to the current affordable housing crisis differ from the passive policies which led us to the current housing crisis and sorry this time we'll start with Joe recently I think we're making some changes to our zoning that can make a real difference with housing and encourage housing built at a much larger scale than what we have seen in the past those include the South End Innovation District which is down in part of town where I live and we have a massive parking lot there what better place to build housing than to repurpose a massive parking lot and in that area we're going to allow housing that's up to eight stories tall and really create hopefully create really an ecosystem and a neighborhood there that will be mixed use and accessible for workers we're also right in the process now of approving something called neighborhood code which would allow more housing to be built in every neighborhood in Burlington and often allow people to build housing they've been prevented from building in the past that most people think is pretty reasonable like if somebody has a large yard and wants to put a tiny house in their yard we've prevented them from doing that because we've said you can only have one primary building on your lot and so you couldn't put a tiny house in your yard so we're making some changes now that will allow for reasonable development in neighborhoods and I will say that neighbors have rightfully pointed out some issues with this project but I think that we can address those issues and I think we can still go forward with something that does bring more housing to every neighborhood and even more intense housing to our transportation corridors also we have prevented home ownership in our city as Will had mentioned in 70% renters and in order to stabilize housing costs the best way to do that is through home ownership I'm out of time so I'll tell you about that if I get another minute thanks that said 70% renters sorry that was Chris point taken I stay away from using words like crisis I just told you guys my last answer that Burlington over the last 10-year period has put up numerous what we might refer to as high rise I mean maybe if you spend a lot of time in New York City as I also do you might think differently about a high rise so but Decker Towers was our tallest building and not to mention Decker Towers in that context because obviously there's a controversy going on over there and I refer to this in other debates SolicitorCrisis.com but there would actually be overtaken in that building right now and essentially held hostage I believe that as a city we always need to work forward and there's going to be housing development okay but also if you look at the seven towns surrounding us that are booming Williston, Colchester, Shelbert Milton, Winooski Essex Junction and I'm leaving one out right now but I'm so used to naming those towns they're booming and if you're a UBM student I mean we want you to live in Burlington for sure but also there's housing in the county area and Burlington I believe needs to start gainful employment encouragement and local business incentives to stop the businesses that are leaving here on almost a daily basis I think that's one of the major controversies I'm completely against rezoning all these commercial places that are leaving into residential not as a whole but just Burlington was famous for having mom in pop shops I mean what city do you know that a McDonald's left town and a local farm to table took over and ran it successfully so you know I think that in a thriving city where we're talking about small businesses and a former union representative you know union representatives you can't even use that word without representative workers and I think that those local businesses are in support well one of the ways we do things differently is acknowledging that the status quo has contributed to our housing emergency and I do use the word emergency because it is a crisis we've been building towards this for years and we have to acknowledge that the status quo included having single family zoned parcels throughout the city for decades that made it really difficult for anyone who didn't have the economic privilege and wealth to be able to move into those homes and it made it really difficult for us to have enough rental housing for the kind of need that we have today so we do things differently by adapting and making sure we have a commitment to affordability showing up and making sure we're updating things like our inclusionary zoning ordinance when we do our neighborhood code work which I've talked about since the beginning of this campaign the need not only to be truly committed to affordability with the new housing we're going to do as we densify throughout the city consistently throughout the city but a commitment to climate which means aligning our densifying efforts along the corridors so we can people can access public transportation and truly get out of cars and live in the biggest city in Vermont and not have to rely on cars. I also think that we really have to be committed to renters that's another deep and important way we change and do things differently but we do have so many renters here in Burlington and what that looks like is really understanding what rent stabilization means that includes rights for workers and finally getting just cause eviction ordinance in place that needs working with the legislature to finish that process and starting the ordinance process here locally and also working with property owners who are landlords who are doing the right thing to keep rents stable by thinking about initiatives or incentives within the property tax system to encourage the right thing which is keeping rents stable instead of charging them the same property taxes that a landlord who's viewing housing as commodity and charging rents and getting a massive profit out of it we should be treating landlords differently in terms of who is truly committed to renters and stabilizing that part of our economy. Thank you. City let many folks live a long time ago that higher taxes equal higher rate of rents and there's a number of factors that have contributed to the affordability and one of that is the fact that the city council whenever it needs more money continues to raise taxes and if you're a renter those increases on the commercial properties just get passed right along. We don't have the benefit or they become sensitive like homeowners do. When I'm out there talking to people who live or work downtown friends of mine they tell me yeah you don't pay you have to live with roommates to be able to afford to live here in town my partner and I split up we're still together because neither one of us can afford to bring our own place so that's one thing there two we've also seen with the policies that are in place again we have a 0 25% vacancy rate how the same as it was 25 years ago so what that tells me is what we've been doing clearly isn't working and what we've seen in recent years is whenever single family homes come on the market they're purchased by investors and usually a great cost and that's creating an issue for folks that actually want to stay here I heard from folks that are in their 20s and 30s say I'd love to stay and we're like I just simply can't afford it. And last but not least since I'm coming up on time I simply say that when it comes to the houselessness part of housing we need to completely re-engineer approach. Right now people have to be on the streets to get to any kind of problem and we need to actually reorient and go from trying to fix houselessness and trying to focus on trying to prevent it. And one way that we can do that is to look at actually a universal basic income where we're taking the money that have been allocated to the hotel program and splitting that up to say among eight different individuals or eight different households give them an extra $475 a month that they can put towards the rent for their food or you know have a fund for buying their own home so you know that's another way that we can address the issue. In this next round I'd love to hear a little bit about how your proposed solutions are going to resolve some of these housing issues. I'll just say as a faculty member with a partner who's a faculty member we can't afford to live in Burlington and it's a thing. So let's hear about the different ideas starting with Joan. What are we getting? Yeah, I wanted to speak to some of the ideas that were put out there. First on the property taxes I actually did pursue that because I think you should get a break on the property taxes if you're charging less for rent. I own the duplex next door to me. I charge a little less than $2,000 for one unit a little more for another unit and I have three bedroom units. So way under market value but I pay the same taxes as somebody who's charging $3,000 or $3,500 a unit for that property. The problem is with the legislature. It's not something that can be done by the city of Burlington because the legislature requires us to tax them at market value. And I also want to say that the big driver of rents is not taxes. As somebody who is keeping my rents down I will say that the taxes can be passed on to the tenant but the biggest driver of increasing rents is the market. The fact that there's such a housing shortage. So we need to build more housing. Thank you. Well, I think in my opinion where Burlington has failed is quality of life. I think it's clear if you look around and I'm not if you look on my website you'll see SolicitorCrisis.com. I'm not one for that. I think the major crisis in this city is the threat of kids stepping on the needle. But as far as housing goes I want people to be housed. I sold my house on the registry because I couldn't afford the taxes in this town. Before I sold my house I had about five homeless people living with me. Actually I went down and did an interview with a homeless person A. Has anybody came down to talk to you? B. Anything you want to talk about? I put that interview up on my website and I think that I think that as a city our main concerns need to be students education 27% drop out rate 5 times the national average that needs to be attended to. We spend one of the $10,000 per pupil, approximately $10,000 more per pupil than the national average. So something's not working here. We need to support our students. We need to support our teachers. We need to be as important as infrastructure. Those are municipalities responsibilities. Thank you. Thank you. The next mayor needs to understand that they have an important job to do to work with our legislative delegation. So if there are things that we bump up across that we know we need a charter change or we know that state law perhaps isn't written in a way that is responsive to the housing emergency that we need, that's when you work as a team and you put proposals together and you advance the leadership understands how do you get to solutions that are immediate and needed and we know that rent stabilization would not only benefit Burlington, it would benefit everywhere in this state. There's a housing emergency in the entire state. The other piece I would work on is making sure that we look at home ownership here in Burlington and model some similar income sensitized tax structure for folks on the local municipal tax. That will help folks on fixed incomes, working families be able to weather the property taxes to make sure that we can still operate our city and that is again another opportunity partner because we'll probably require a charter change to support to work with our legislative delegation as a team to really get to the bottom of what can make our town more affordable. I've had some talk in recent years about having the no-cause eviction but it's one of my younger friends that well there's no-cause eviction when you can't afford to live here. So I think again going back to a UBI approach where we can provide people with assistance to make their own decisions and how they want to spend their money and I think that that would be one way to do it but before I go on, do we have any math majors up here? That's unfortunate. You're about to get a math lesson. Trigger money. So yeah, so here's the deal here. Affordable housing is typically defined as being no more than 30% of your take-home pay. So if you're making about $15 an hour, which I think is common for a lot of folks, that comes out to about 30,000 a year at give or take. So that means that you can spend out-of-pocket on rent is $10,000. If anybody here can find me a place that you can rent for an entire year for under $10,000, you found something, you found the unicorn. Question before we go into audience questions and we'll you'll get to start this one. What preventative measures will you implement to address the root cause of homelessness and to protect individuals at risk from becoming homeless? So ladies and gentlemen, again, go on my website take a look at the homeless interview that I did last night. I know a lot of these people that are living on the street, especially the ones that are from Burlington and I can name those people on two hands. You know, I was sarcastic in the first debate, said one hand, but you know a lot. It was very, very interesting because the first question I asked was, you've been a main topic of this conversation during these debates. Has any other candidate came down and talked to you? No. Okay, so before I sold my house on a block of street, I did have five homeless people living with me. I do care. I don't think it's a taxpayer responsibility to house homeless and solicit people from across the country because that is exactly what's happening. You'd be enlightened to see what that homeless person had to say about the issues and I strongly suggest that you go and watch that because because I think that bringing gainful employment back to the city and businesses, you know, the small mom and pop shots that we have run out of town with this creator crisis dot com that we have here and soliciting drug addicts to the city. I'm the only candidate in this race that's against public injection sites. I think we need to stop soliciting people from across the country to be homeless here. Not all homeless people are using drugs. That's clear. But also it is bringing in a lot of drug users and I'm not going to be that guy that's going to call it a sickness. I've known a lot of people that have had drug problems growing up and actually one of the guys I talked to last night is a kid that I grew up with from elementary school and he said, I'm on the needle and I need to get clean. I need to go to rehab. I said, okay, anything I can do to help you. It's about empathy. It's about putting in your personal assistance on that. It's not about using the taxpayer dollars. I mean, we talk about throwing tax money at this. It's actually bankrupting our city and your city is not supposed to, your leadership is not supposed to engage in four financial practices. That is in turn largely used in the union as driving away business. A gainful employment proper financial practice. And when I say poor financial practice, I mean a practice designed to drive away business. The taxpayers are leaving our city. The businesses are complaining to me. I mean, one of the local bars said they've got slashings like every week. So the crime is up and they can't even call the cops in some of these situations. We really need to focus on success as a city as one community. Thank you. Thank you. So folks who are unhoused in Burlington deserve dignity. They deserve respect. They deserve acknowledgement that these are Vermonters. And we know because the state interfaces with a lot of these folks that these are Vermonters coming from smaller towns. I grew up in Berry City which is a town that has no grocery store no public transportation downtown and it would be very difficult to survive on the streets of Berry if I were unhoused right now in Burlington to try to be able to survive here. It's a little tiny bit easier. And with recognizing that we have the reality of not enough affordable housing not enough housing period, we have to be humane in our understanding of this emergency we have for folks who are unhoused. A year ago I led a coalition of Democrats and progressives in the Vermont Legislature to sound the alarm when we were going to abruptly end the GA Emergency Housing Program. This was the motel program. While imperfect there was a period of time where we re-housed the bulk of unhoused people in our state. That was a dignified way to treat people the people who live here in the state they are again the majority of folks are Vermonters. We were able to get most of those folks re-housed the folks were most vulnerable by July 1st last year but hundreds of people were still pushed out into the streets and that is what we're living with here today in Burlington. We need a diversity of options on the table because not all unhoused folks are a model of the people with disabilities or folks who are elderly or many folks who are working full time jobs and simply cannot find a place to live. So that is the reality that we're living with and it is unethical in my mind and my moral compass would not allow me not to find solutions as a community member and as the next mayor of Burlington. So bottom line we need to work with partners that includes local communities around in and around Burlington and the state to come up with solutions to bridge people for the next couple years and we have actual housing built. We're on the way, I'll tell you as a legislator we're building a lot of housing in historic investments but it doesn't happen overnight. So we have to have a humane bridge to get people from today to tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you Chris. So we'll say again our approach clearly isn't working and we need to fundamentally re-engineer how we approach the issue of housing here in our community and I think even in our state and you know to my friend's point there's little to no assistance available you have to be out on the streets to get any assistance and if you're out on the streets you know it's much more costly to put someone back into housing after they've lost it. Never mind the fact that it generally leads to worse outcomes for the individual who is on the house. So again we need to re-engineer, go back and start to focus on preventing houses rather than trying to fix it and again splitting you know some funding away all the people to help them keep the housing that they have I think it's one way to do that. What I distinguish here in the conversation is there are generally two kinds of houselessness there's situational houselessness and chronic houselessness and situational houselessness is typically someone loses their job their partner passes away unexpectedly they have to fight for bankruptcy because I'm paid medical debt any number of reasons but these folks generally are pretty healthy individuals and if you put up at a hotel for a few months they can generally get back on their feet you know within 90 days well the chances of someone getting back at a housing kind of drop off quite precipitously which leads me to the next group of people those are the folks that are chronically unhoused and most of the folks, or at least a number of them anyways are struggling with an untreated mental health condition or substance use disorder and they're not getting treatment so in addition to saying well you know we need to give people housing to provide them with dignity and respect we also need to provide them with medical treatment when it's appropriate and for a number of these folks that is the underlying condition that caused them to begin with and so it seems to me that we ought to be focusing on treating that and if we can do that we'll make great strides but again this is a larger issue than outside of Burlington it's a community issue it's a statewide issue and we really need the state legislators to step up and start doing something like to provide us more beds and one way to do that would be to have a conversation about establishing a new 100 bed hospital who would be focusing on individuals that are struggling with mental health conditions or substance use disorder and we put people up and don't offer any kind of treatment to solve the underlying issue thank you it's the job of the state to provide a social safety net for all of our residents and that's completely failed us the hotel program was not a sustainable program it's far too expensive to sustain and that's why there's these ongoing arguments about whether to shut it down or continue it we needed beds for people you can't just put them out on the street but at the same time you have to do it in a way that is affordable we need more shelter for people and as far as the root causes of homelessness I agree that it's not a model there's a lot of different causes for how people end up without housing and you know the baseline is the cost of housing we need more housing that's affordable there's also as Chris just said substance use disorder mental health and we had a major encampment right next to my neighborhood at Sears Lane and I would go in and talk to the folks who were there to understand better how they ended up there and what they needed to get out and it was surprising how many people had come out of incarceration without IDs how do you get housing how do you get a job when you're coming out of incarceration without IDs so I followed I've been following this to try and figure out like why do we have this problem and corrections says we give them ideas and I finally have recently come to understand that the disconnect here is that the ID that they get is a department of corrections ID that's not really helpful we have we have a non-drivers ID that we could be providing people we know who they are that we have their fingerprints so there's a lot of different reasons I think we can do a whole lot better for people coming out of incarceration to help them be successful help them find jobs find housing people coming out of treatment need more support to be successful and we need the state's help and it's surprising to me that nobody's talking about the other homeless in campus that are popping up this is the Manhattan Drive in Kent and I don't know if anybody's been down there recently I know at least one person in here used to coach sports or participate in Little League and has kids in this town are you walking through these parks with your children are you letting them run through there a miracle like we used to at Oak Lege Park I'm not and how many of these homeless people are housed in Burlington hotels that nice downtown ever see a homeless person there so why should Burlington be the ones to shoulder a bunch of influx that's actually driving away business and I'm not all about humanity trust me but if it's ruining your city and it's not the homeless people because if you watch the interview that I did last night you'll see this gentleman made a lot of great points and I think he has a bright future and he talked about the crisis that he's had to endure and I totally understand it but you know also you have to move as one and support the success of the city and understand what taxes are supposed to support and especially the students guys the students applause thank you one of the many things I've had over the campaign I was meeting with some folks in Cathedral Square and one of the folks was formerly unhoused and he said when you are unhoused you want to be invisible you want to be invisible and it really struck me because it is one of the hardest times in your life when you're simply trying to survive and get yourself back up on your feet and we have to recognize that there are structural things we can do to help people maintain that economic security that would keep them from becoming unhoused and that includes things like protecting renters with just cause eviction rights and includes making sure that we are protecting and supporting unions to organize in our town so folks have a chance a legal chance to organize and negotiate local wages and decent health insurance a lot of folks also find themselves losing jobs and going again into homelessness because of healthcare and lack of healthcare or illness or the medical bills and medical debt that people accrue when they have a chronic illness so we have to think about this again with a commitment to understanding the needs involved. Thank you Chris. With respect to the folks that are out of house right now I think you look around the room and here we are so maybe one of the first things we can do is bring me on house to the table to ask them what their really needs are like will I have made a point to get out and talk to some of these folks in downtown and it's pretty interesting about the experience they have to go through how they have to fill out multiple applications and how they're treated in a very degrading dehumanizing way with the services you know it's just we all get to go home at night if we have a rough day we can sit down and have a beer well that's not really an option for a lot of these folks because they can go to the dry shelter where nothing happens or they can go to one of the low barriers where everything happens there's no real in between so again it's that binary choice that we have there one thing that came out of the conversation I don't know where I'm at all the time so having an everyday worker program where we could focus the work for help with that as well thanks getting back to the root causes of homelessness and which is quite different than what do we do once people are homeless I really think we need to focus on getting people the mental health care that they need when they need it rather than when they they have escalated or spiraled so much that they need much more intensive treatment than if we had just addressed the problem in the beginning same thing goes with treatment beds we don't have enough treatment beds and when we finally get a treatment bed we're not offering quality or quantity of treatment for people to be successful nor are we offering them the supports that they need when they get out we need more sober houses we need more supportive housing and I have gone and talked to our living in encampments people who are using the resources at COTS and there are a lot of different reasons but we're really we are really failing people in how we provide treatment and support costs let's just give one more round of applause to all the candidates to ask the audience for questions and folks with mics will be going around the room I see hands up just really quick one thing I want to say well two things I want to say one we're not going to do second rounds during these so we can get to a few more questions and second I think we've covered housing and homelessness issues pretty well so only if I will say I'm sorry but that question has been covered if you're asking a question that has already been covered too much so we can get out of other ideas yes hello my question it is too bad but before I start my question I want you to know that I love Vermont I live here since 1996 I believe and Vermont for me I am like fish if I leave the water I will die but the question what you cannot do with new immigrant because the immigrant when they come I used to tell my kids if they get sick don't go to UVM don't call doctor call taxi because when you call taxi you will find the driver he is a doctor you will find one like me mechanical engineering in my back home and when I come no one look to me and I have to drive taxi what you cannot do with the new immigrant or you cannot make them to feel this is my home the second question we're talking about housing I didn't hear anyone talking about education the education should be the first part because you need to build the house you have to have engineering and the engineering has to come from UVM you are sick you have to have a doctor and the doctor will come from UVM no one talking about education I'm sorry thank you so much for all of you thank you for the question and we'll start going back with seat number one Emma and we'll just go down the line up to two minutes to answer these questions thank you I heard two questions I want to try to do both really quickly really important questions because immigrants and refugees are a critical part of our community and so in terms of employment really being conscious about pathways to employment to making sure that we again work with the state local government needs to work with state government so making sure that folks when they come with certifications and degrees and licenses from elsewhere in the world that we can have some respect for the folks education and training and skills to make sure you can have that opportunity here in Vermont I also think that we need to work on making sure our communities are inclusive in a place where people feel they really belong that requires cultural competency training of folks who are who work for the city includes cultural competency for our police for our medical providers and also within our schools and our schools as a mom of a four-year-old in April our schools need a lot of support right now it's been a very difficult time for the last several years and especially in our middle school and high school for two similar reasons but also in fact we don't have an actual high school our young people are really struggling and we have to make sure that we're thoughtful about programming after school hours which is the riskiest time for young people we have to consciously partner with the city to bring back a vibrant youth programming because when we had 242 Youth Center there was at least a conscious partnership with the city and we've lost that so I think bringing that back together it's an intervention and prevention moment to really support young people in the city and to also make sure we support all of the families but especially immigrant and refugee families to make sure they have the support they need to navigate things that might be new because the states are different than places where folks are relocating from we have a real struggle with a lot of guns in our communities substances, things that their children are getting exposed to and we have to show up in community with folks it benefits all of us when folks can feel they belong here and that this is a healthy community for everyone, thank you that we've been able to be home for a number of new Americans here I feel that the folks that come here from elsewhere really bring a level of diversity and really help make us what we are as a city here as for the new American experience I'll speak a little bit closer to home my wife is Hungarian, she's first generation American and her father fled Hungary in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution and he was nine years old his brother was seven and they were fleeing their home with suitcases, what they could carry on their back they could hear gunshots soldiers, dogs in the distance knowing if they had been stopped people likely have been killed and Andrew probably would have never seen his brother Steven again so America has always been a beacon for those looking for something better and I think the one thing we can do is to keep that door open and allow people who want to be here to come here and to be successful in America and I think that education has been something that's important to me, I've served on the school board my wife is a middle school teacher I think education is the great equalizer and it's something that we really don't hear too much about these days in the mayoral race and for me, I understand it's particularly been the purview of the school board but we should be asking ourselves what can we do as a city hall to better support the work of the school department to provide kids with a quality education and right now we have a crisis of literacy in this state it's another big crisis that we're not really talking about and we need to have a conversation about that so I think that I think that there's more that we can do here as a city and really begins with rolling out the welcome mat and making people feel welcome and provide them with opportunities to get an education and to move on and I'm very grateful for the folks that have come here and done exactly that they make our community vibrant and they make it stronger thank you thank you for raising the question and I have a lot of experience working with immigrants in different ways my daughter was when she was an infant, she was in a home day care of a Cambodian family who came here as refugees and I saw their struggles they had four kids I saw their struggles in the schools and I saw their struggles really with American culture and understanding how to both blend with and try to preserve and understand American culture which is hard to find boundaries from where she came from I also more recently I housed a group of Afghan refugees it came here on very short notice and struggled with them with things like how to get transportation how to get a license there's not a lot of support coming for refugees when they arrive here and it's reliant on the system doesn't really work it's reliant on individuals doing everything we can thankfully we do have a welcoming community here in Burlington and I think a lot of individuals trying to make up for where the system fails I also had a business and I employed many refugees from Bosnia as well as from Asia and I saw how their families stick together and I have such great admiration for the sense of family that I saw in these immigrants and I reached out to the King Street the King Street Youth Center where many immigrant families go and held a meeting there of city leaders to hear directly from the immigrants because quite honestly we don't understand what all of your struggles are here and they were quite different than what we were projecting because we need to hear directly from immigrants we need to reach out to them so thanks for raising the issue yes sir and I also I totally agree with you that we need to improve our education I think if you my opening statement Burlington has a 27% drop on rate that is 5 times the national average it's actually so bad that in Courtney for 7 days she actually tried to deny it I said man I think that the students need our support I think these students are walking through stepping over needles on the way that's not something I grew up with in Burlington I should say I have seen that in low income units growing up because I was a product of low income housing you know but I interviewed the leader of the Somali Bantu community the other day his thoughts on public safety and the Somali instead of becoming victim of the crime in this city it was very interesting and you should watch that also the first family that I met when I came over it was also Cambodian there was a close family friends of ours recently my uncle took in a group of Ukrainian refugees when those three Palestinians got shot my cousin was the first responder that took that phone call so I think as a community we all care about new Americans and I'm spending my time in the Nepalese community I'm finding out that their population has dwindled from I think 3,500 to about 1,400 and today I was down at Shahar Indian cuisine talking to that gentleman that owns that business and you know so I think that a lot of these communities we don't understand sometimes that everybody's really feeling the heat in Burlington and again I mentioned gainful practices that benefit the community not just businesses but taxpayers that are leaving you know what's absorbing them and I think that what we need to do is start supporting all of our communities new Americans, old Americans Native Americans currently it's Black History Month I think it's time to start educating our youth and maybe taking some out of town trips for education and raising our graduation rate and coordinating with other cities sister cities making new sister cities whether poor or rich thank you but 0 will get people to ask I think we'll have time for maybe two more questions I'm a student that lives downtown and I know nobody's asked about criminal justice yet but I'm curious with our current state's attorney Ms. Sarah George what your guys' thoughts are on her trends of non-prosecution I'm a first-hand witness of multiple crimes that have happened to myself and my roommates at our house no further investigations were launched on non-prosecution to those involved I just want to hear your thoughts if you're just pleased at all or worried or if you're going to continue trends with that when one of you takes the seat in the house alright thanks we'll start with Chris with that question so I live in downtown New and I've had some similar experiences here I don't know that I necessarily agree with the state's attorney George Minister Eleanor for Flossid but I will say is that she works incredibly hard to do what she has to do and like many industries they are facing a resource issue in this case in addition to a lot of physicians retiring during the pandemic we had a lot of judges retired so when they have violent crime that's what they're going to prioritize on a lot of the lower level things like the simple assault since some of the shotlifting tests kind of pushed to the side I'm more personal now my vehicle was burglarized a couple years back I had $5,000 taken out of it in a similar manner they did an investigation and it was closed within a couple weeks and the perpetrators were never identified just a few months ago in October my wife here was driving to work just before 7am right outside here and another vehicle was approaching driving the wrong way down Main Street and you know caused an issue there and then just a few weeks later my stepson who's a third year student here at UVM who works at the library was violently assaulted responding to a noise complaint on the second floor and ended up sustaining a concussion and missing several days of work in an entire week of school so I get it and I think that there are things that we could do as a mayor and one of those is to set the tone and when the mayor said in the tone don't arrest people just move them along there's consequences for that so I think at the end of the day we need to look at folks that are struggling and understand the concerns as to why their behavior is being motivated again by untreated medical condition then we need to look at getting them treatment and I think that that's where we're falling down and where there's more of an opportunity but to be clear we need to recognize that when someone has a medical condition they have a legal right to refuse treatment and a number of these folks have done that and it's what I think the clinicians referred to as being service resistant so if someone decides to... there we go the end of my seat waiting for the end of the sentence but okay y'all can finish your sentences I don't know you did not know that question was coming but by chance I did bring with me a police report that we got yesterday where a woman 28 years old was picked up at Dekker Towers and there was a warrant out for her arrest it tells us since December 2023 alone she has had 45 law enforcement encounters and 13 arrests most of these recent law enforcement encounters are associated with complaints about vehicle theft this is a kind of issue I think that you're referencing and I don't think that we can blame this all on Sarah George there's actually it's more complex it has to do with the entire justice system it has to do with judges it has to do with Vermont law and we do need changes but my approach as mayor is one we need to work with partners we need to work with Sarah George we need to work with the legislature to change the laws and meanwhile as I think Chris was saying we do need to arrest people when they are openly using and dealing drugs in our public spaces we do need to arrest people when they are stealing stealing cars and breaking into homes and in Burlington we need to do our part of the job to bring about justice there are real victims when these crimes happen we have to recognize that the people committing crimes may be victims as well but you cannot victimize the rest of the community we need to keep people safe and this kind of action is not keeping people safe so I am admitted to working on that I always forget to turn on my mic that's a great question I think you should we as a community as a state on that one we should really get together and run somebody else for that office I think it's about time if you call 658-2704 right now I won't patronize you guys who actually make it to phone call but I really want to what you're going to find is in progress theft, attempted theft, graffiti vandalism, threats of harassment we need to have lost property suspicious activity deregulate activity legal dumping we talk about being a net zero city well if you dump illegally some toxic waste in this city you'll get it right away with it guys hit and run no problem so yeah on my website I'm the only candidate this race calling for 112 police officers I think you've got to be careful of the big ambiguity so I'm putting a number on it it's two and a half or a thousand citizens city residential we need a police force to encourage business, patronism, tourism that's where our tax money comes from also tax payers are leaving this city on a regular basis right now they're being absorbed by Essex Junction Wilson and all those other towns that I mentioned earlier and I think that in a gainful practice would be to support the police because they are supporting our community on our children to walk to school in peace well our twenty-seven percent dropout rate is very reflective of the fact that we don't have safe streets and I think it's time for us to treat Burlington what should be in the state of Vermont which is actually a powerhouse Burlington should be academically achieving at the highest possible level and that would bring our athletics up as well I mean you know I believe in academics I also believe in athletics because that's team building that's where you teach your children to win as a team lose as a team that's better than the other and one of us is less than the other it doesn't matter what country you're from you know or what language you speak or whether you're a Muslim Christian Hebrew it doesn't matter and you know I think one of the great interviews that I did was the dude from the Somali Bantu community he spoke about public safety and he had some very interesting things to say I think you guys should check that out thank you we need a community safety system and our current system is simply not working when you call for help you need help to come and you need the right kind of help we also need leaders amongst our community safety system that actually work together to solve solutions and not get entrenched in positions and blaming and pointing out who's more to blame in this situation that gets us nowhere and we also need to make sure that our state's attorney Sarah George our police leadership as well as the other aspects of our community safety system which is the community justice center for example in the city we're all working comprehensively together sharing information filing timely police reports and working on getting through what we all know is a serious backlog that has been a backlog of cases since the pandemic we also have a shortage of judges so it is a structural reality that we are not able to clear as many cases so these things compound the problem that we're all living through but we also have to be very strategic about the use of our resources and making sure we're focusing on the folks that are causing the most harm in our community when we talked to law enforcement leaders they know who are the folks in our community causing the most repeated harm and I think one of the candidates mentioned this for example so that's how we strategically use our police that's how we strategically use and partner with our state's attorney's office everybody wants a safer community so let's work in that direction to make sure we are handling the folks causing the most harm and then not creating more harm by locking folks up and struggling with substance use disorder jail is not treatment it creates more harm and that is the last thing Burlington needs when we are trying to get to the bottom of community safety thank you all if you all don't mind one more question do you mind sticking around for a bit folks good one more question yeah there was one now I'm kind of proud of that it's as far I would like to speak on the recent one you're waiting for the video perfect sorry I would like to speak on the part city resolution that was shot down recently I'm not looking for your personal opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I don't feel like that is extremely relevant to Burlington as a city but I do have to wonder what are your thoughts on a citizen-led referendum being shot down by the city council what are your thoughts on the fact it was not even allowed to go to the ballot it was not even allowed to be voted on in the first place alright thanks quicker you can comment totally great but you have two minutes let's start with you thank you this was a question that was proposed and my initial reaction to it is that I would put it on the ballot because people got the signatures that are required to put it on the ballot but as I got more input from the public it became clear to me that there was a minority group that was being really negatively impacted by having it on the ballot and I think you have to be cognizant that you can put a question on the ballot that causes harm to the community and there is a requirement that we consider the common good when we put a question on the ballot there's a reason why it does have to pass through the city council there was a similar case or we can argue similar dissimilar but the rebel name was considered to be racist and they decided in south Burlington to not use the rebel as their mascot anymore and there were people that got the signatures and they wanted to put the question on the ballot it was deemed to be harmful to the community and so they chose not to put that question on the ballot and I think that that's a reasonable consideration for whether or not we put put something on the ballot it may be that the majority agrees with the question but we have to think about how that impacts our local community and this is I know that people wanted to weigh in on an international issue there was many ways to do that there's many ways for us to use our voice and I have to be respectful when people share with me how it harms them thank you thank you Will thank you for the question I think and also to the gentleman sitting there right now I have a question about what are you going to do about change with the criminal justice system it's uh use your vote right now is the election so if you don't like the way the city council operated in that situation I would suggest that you pick somebody on this stage that wasn't part of that and thank you for that you vote for me my name is Will I think William is the way to put it on the ballot alright thank you Will thank you I support the direct democracy aspect and the residents collected enough signatures so the item the question at the time for city council and mayor was whether or not that those parameters those rules were met within the city charter and they were what happened though was the conversation was at the city council level which caused even more harm and there are multiple minorities multiple marginalized it's a better word I use marginalized communities impacted by this very critical question and some were heard and some were not heard and so there are folks in the Palestinian community their folks in the Jewish community is critical to understand the impact that this has all the way around and making sure that we're not gatekeeping as folks whose only question was whether or not this what they had met the charter change or sorry the charter rules are putting this on the ballot and then the proper place for that conversation hopefully in the most safe and constructive and real way was then going to be allowed to be in the community the question was able to be put on the ballot but it wasn't so that was a real disservice to all of you in this community who clearly care about global issues clearly folks live here who are impacted directly by these global issues and you were not allowed to have that larger conversation and that was a real harm to all of you as it here grows the first time that's happened so the city charter is quite clear about this advisory questions which fall within the purview of the city council ultimately has final authority on whether or not those questions get on to the ballot they have a veto power there if you will so in terms of process if you're not happy with the way you're person voting as will it say you know get out there vote and make your voices heard I would just simply say to me personally as a candidate I'm running for mayor of Burlington I'm not interviewing for a job at the state department if I wanted to get any questions before policy I'd run for congress I'm not when I go around I talk to people here at town I hear a lot of feedback we've got real serious issues here in town the city's become unaffordable housing is out of control we've got major public safety issues why is the city council engaging in foreign policy discussions about halfway around the world and the reality is it's nice to take the pulse of the community and we can weigh in on the issues but what we say and do here in Burlington is going to have very little impact on what the forces in that part of the world are going to do so again if you're unhappy with the process I would say make your voice heard at the ballot box let's give one more big round of applause for everyone and regardless of who you vote for I agree with that last sentiment make your voices heard at the ballot box thank you all for coming this was a really great debate there's so much information that's spinning through my head now and I'm honestly glad I'm not a Burlington resident I'm glad that you all showed up and that the candidates all showed up for you