 Good evening, I'm Kathy Davis. I'm president and CEO of the Lake Champlain Chamber. And it's my pleasure to welcome you all here this evening. I want to first start by thanking our partners on this event, so the Lake Champlain Chamber, the Northwest Vermont Board. You screwed me up, Ilya. I know. She made the mistake of telling me the old name of the organization. So of course, that's what stuck in my brain. The Northwest Vermont Realtors Association and the Greater Burlington Industrial Corps, GBIC. I also want to take a moment to thank Main Street Landing for giving us the space this evening and Town Meeting Television for streaming this event. This event tonight was born out of collaboration through a regional affairs committee that the Chamber hosts bringing together a group of stakeholders to work on shared goals of building housing, ensuring public safety, and supporting our region's economic development. It's my pleasure now to introduce one of our collaborators, Troy Bachman, who is the CEO of the Northwest Vermont Realtors Association. Thanks so much, Kathy. Yeah, Kathy can get applause. We are very fortunate to be joined tonight by two exemplary mayoral candidates. Representative Emma Mulvaney-Stanik was first elected to the Vermont House of Representatives in 2020. She served as the state chair of the Vermont Progressive Party and as a city counselor in the Old North End. She is the founder of EM Strategies and lives in the Old North End with her wife Megan and their two children. Counselor Joan Shannon was first elected to the Burlington City Council in 2002. She has served on the City Board of Finance and as president of the City Council. She works as a local realtor and lives in the South End with her husband Ken and daughter Julia. Thank you both very much for taking the time tonight to be with us and for your commitment to public service. So let's give our candidates a round of applause. They've been doing several of these and it's not a low threshold lift in some of these things. So we appreciate it. Next, I'm going to introduce our moderator. Our moderator tonight is Calvin Cutler. Calvin covers state government and politics in Montpelier for WCAX. He's reported in Vermont since 2019 covering a range of topics from Vermont's response during the coronavirus pandemic to the historic flooding of this past July. Before coming to Vermont, he spent two years reporting in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Calvin is an independent journalist and his participation in moderating tonight's forum is not an endorsement of the Lake Champlain Chamber, Northwest Vermont Realtor Association or the Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation. Tonight's forum will be structured as such. Our candidates will be given two minutes each to deliver their opening remarks. We decided to order moments ago with a coin flip if you were lucky enough to see that. The winner chose who will speak first. We will ask five questions and then give our candidates one question to ask each other. Candidates will have 90 seconds to respond to each question. Our moderator Calvin can at any time give 30 seconds to a candidate to respond if the other candidate mentions them, their policy or something that otherwise necessitates the other candidate's response. The moderator also has the ability to extend a question to address a component that they wanna dive deeper into and give about 30 to 45 seconds' response for that. At the end, each candidate will have two minutes for closing remarks in reverse order from the opening remarks. Throughout the forum, we will give candidates visual reminders for when they have 10 seconds left and when you're out of time. With that said, please give a warm welcome to our moderator this evening, Calvin Cutler. Hiya, thank you very much and thank you for having me. Thank you to all the organizations to putting this on tonight. To really trying to help the Burlington electorate really try to understand who these candidates are, who their policies, what their policies are. Certainly, there's a lot of issues in front of voters on town meeting day and any time that we can be able to be directly involved with local democracy and to get to understand how these things work on the ground level in our communities, I think, is great. And I think a lot of us, we're really lucky to live in a place like Burlington where we can have these open constructive dialogues and talk about the issues. So thank you very much. I think we'll just dive right into it. So since Councillor Jones-Shannon won the coin toss, we'll start with her opening remarks for two minutes. Thank you, Calvin. And thank you to Kathy and Troy and to GBIC, the Realtors Association, GBIC and the Chamber, as well as Main Street Landing. I didn't know you all knew so much about me, so I was going to cover all of that, but I'll go with the parts that you don't know yet, which is that during my time on the City Council, I've actually served under three different mayoral administrations. I'm also a former small business owner of a small manufacturing business, and I'm the mom of a daughter who has gone through Burlington schools from Champlain Elementary to Edmunds to 2020 graduate of Burlington High School. I'm running for mayor because I feel like Burlington is at a pivotal point. And I have the demonstrated courage, leadership, record and experience to navigate the rough waters that we face. I really want Burlington to be a healthy and safe community. I want Burlington to be an affordable community, and I want Burlington to be a vibrant and inclusive community. I'm very proud to have received the three city union endorsements from AFSCME, who has 300 members across all city departments from the police and the fire unions, and the unions really know what our city needs from leadership. Our unions share our concerns about public safety, and they deal with our safety challenges on a day-to-day basis. I want our business community to know that I value you, and I value our workers, I value our downtown, our neighborhoods, our institutions, and our sense of community. I want all of us to work together to heal, restore and celebrate our Burlington. Thank you. Thank you very much. And now, State Representative Emma Mulvaney-Stanik, you have a minute and a half. Thank you. Excuse me, two minutes. I was gonna say, wait a second. No, two minutes, sorry. Thanks, Calvin. Getting ahead of myself. And hello, everyone, to all the organizers of this forum. I think it's so important to have a diverse, a number of opportunities for folks to engage with us as candidates. I'm Emma Mulvaney-Stanik. I'm a mom of two small kids who go to school in the Old North End in childcare. I'm a small business owner. I'm a State Representative, representing both the Old North End and New North End, former city counselor. And relevant to tonight, I've served four years on the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee, which is charged with business and workforce development for the entire state. And I'm proud to say I was the 2021 Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility Legislator of the Year in my very first year serving on that committee while doing COVID at the same time. I'm running for mayor because I have a deep love of Burlington. I grew up in central Vermont. This was the town that was the big bright city. And I knew when I moved back to Vermont, this was the place I wanted to put down roots because there's such a healthy level of engagement, a community of care, this vibrancy, this energy that when you grow up in rural Vermont, this was the place you wanted to be. But I'm running for mayor because there's a lot of fear and anxiety in our town right now. And that engagement, that energy that attracted me here almost 20 years ago is really unraveling. And I want our community to come back to itself. I want to rebuild that connection that drew me to this city. I also want to provide different leadership that is not divisive. This is a concern I've had watching city hall where that divisiveness is starting to permeate out of city hall into our communities. And we can do better and we need to do better to really tackle the challenges facing Burlington today. I have the unique skills to offer as the next mayor of Burlington because I have the state and local policy experiences and that the skills of collaboration and compromise from working four years in the state house and as a profession in a professional capacity being a labor organizer and community organizer for most of my career. Those are the skills that will bring back a healthy Burlington. And I'm happy to be here tonight. Thank you. Thank you very much. And so I think the first two questions that we'll be dealing with tonight have to do with public safety, law enforcement, substance use and mental health certainly challenges that Burlington is facing but also other communities statewide as well at large in Vermont that are facing. So our community is grappling with symptoms of the problem of recidivism in Vermont. An example of the problem was on full display recently in Burlington when an individual with 111 interactions, previous interactions with police spanning from identity theft to domestic assault, arson involving 18 vehicles and two attempted car jackings in broad daylight escalated their activity to an arm standoff involving two hostages inside of a Burlington bar. Councillor Joan Shannon, this first question's for you 90 seconds. How will you deal with the quality of place crimes that Burlington is facing, like shoplifting, open substance use and aggressive behavior on the streets? Thank you, Calvin. I believe that we need to treat our public spaces and our downtown like our community living room. And we have shared expectations about how we behave in our living room. We don't allow our loved ones to openly inject or act in ways that harm others in our home. And we don't accept that in our public places either. We need to set expectations for intervention. And that doesn't mean lock them up and throw away the key. But it does mean setting boundaries and saying this is not acceptable here. We also need to support victims. We need to recognize that there is a pipeline and deal with both ends, both the root causes that are leading to this behavior as well as the behaviors themselves that are harmful to others and holding people accountable. We need to improve our responses. You need to know that when you call for help that somebody will come. And I do think that despite our short staffing, I do think that we can do better there. I think that we need to also look at legislation so that people will be held accountable in appropriate ways when they break our laws. So everyone should be welcome in our community, in our community living room, and everyone should feel safe. Thank you. The same question to you, Representative Mulvaney-Stanik. How will you deal with quality of place crimes, open substance use, and aggressive behavior at times on the streets? Thank you. Everyone in Burlington deserves to be safe and feel safe. And the T-Rug's incident was right in my backyard. I was literally picking up my child outside a sustainability academy. I saw the flashing lights. I saw the paper, the yellow tape. My child was locked into that building and I was standing out on North Street unaware of what was going on. And then my four-year-old, this is how this impacts our larger community other than just the incident. But my younger child, my four-year-old, was half a block closer to this incident going down. And I had no idea if I were safe standing on North Street if my four-year-old was safe or what was going on with my eight-year-old inside sustainability academy. These incidences have a ripple effect in our community. It is much larger than just the incident itself with the folks who are also traumatized in that incident. So we need a comprehensive response system because it's more than just the perpetrator, the person causing the initial harm. But we need a system that people trust that is responsive and that comes when you call for help. So we also know that this is a really complicated issue. There's a lot of reasons and a lot of systems that are failing us that is leading to why these things are continuing to happen in Burlington. So as mayor, I would want a comprehensive approach. For example, at T-Rugs, the police responded as they should. There was an issue of violence going on. There was the threat of violence. There was hostages, et cetera. So I appreciate their response. But there's also the folks afterward who really needed the care from the community justice center, and I helped make that connection so folks could have that repair and support during that trauma. But we need a right-sized police department. But we also need a comprehensive community safety system that has a full set of professionals to respond and support people in our city. Thank you. I wanted to ask a follow-up question to both of you as well. You mentioned the need for increased staffing, whether it be for police or for support staff, people coming in after. I'd like to hear from both of you in 45 seconds separately, of course. But how you would advocate for that, how you would bring in more of whether it be law enforcement, emergency personnel, or mental health workers, people such as that? So Councillor Shannon. Thank you. We have diversified our emergency response, and we have a variety of different services. Unfortunately, we're short-staffed in all of them. We have community service liaisons who are social workers in the community. We have community service officers who can respond to lower-level crimes. But I think we have five, and we should have more than twice that number. We're short-staffed in the police and in dispatch. So all of these areas require recruitment efforts, and they require confidence in the department and the public support of the department. So I think that our efforts, some of the recruitment is, some of it is a matter of dollars, and some of it is a matter of culture. Thank you. Representative Mulvaney-Stanik. Thank you. So we do need a comprehensive approach, and we've started on that journey these last four years, but we're still not there yet. And we have to be realistic about the reality's larger than Burlington that are contributing to workforce recruitment challenges. It is not just Burlington. All the police departments across the state and across the country are struggling to recruit folks into that very hard profession. We also have a shortage of social workers and mental health crisis professionals in the state. The state has started to do some investments, but we need to tell the accurate story of Burlington in the statehouse, which we're not doing right now, about how much of a critical need this is in our city. And I'll tell you, as a labor organizer, recruiting and retaining staff is also about having a good culture and good leadership and in places of employment. And we have more work to do there as well. Thank you very much. The second question, having to deal with public safety, Councillor Shannon, could you identify stakeholders that you'll be working with to engage and to create systemic changes that would ensure continued safety in the long term for Burlington? Who would you work with? Well, thank you. That goes right to my all hands on deck theme. I think we need to work with as many stakeholders as we can. And my public safety plan involves first deterrence and prevention, and that would involve the Burlington Police Department, a presence of police does work to deter crime. It would include the Burlington schools. We need to do more work with prevention and organizations that foster prevention so that people aren't going down the path of using drugs and becoming addicted to drugs. And there are many nonprofits in our community that support both deterrence and prevention. Also, treatment, we need much better access to both mental health treatment and substance use treatment. These are things that we need more support from the federal government and from the state government, other partners that need to be brought into this effort. Housing is an element of public safety, and we need more support for shelter, supportive housing, affordable housing. We need to work with both nonprofit developers and market rate developers and community justice. We need to work with our lawmakers, our state's attorney, citizens groups, too, in the end to provide justice. So thank you. Thank you. Representative Mulvaney-Stanica, same question. Who would you work with to create long term systemic changes that would ensure the safety of Burlington? Thank you. As a former organizer, I start always with the folks who are most impacted by the outcomes of our very failed systems. And so that includes a whole myriad of folks. It includes folks who are victims of crimes. It includes folks who are the workers. For example, downtown. I've heard many stories about businesses where the actual retail workers, the folks on the front lines, are interfacing and being impacted by what's going on in our community. Of course, it also includes police. That's a very important critical part of a comprehensive community safety response. But I will also tell you, as a state legislator, we desperately need to better utilize our 11 different state representatives and six senators in Montpelier. For four years, I have felt very disappointed at how we are not pushing all in the same direction and helping to develop an agenda together in collaboration to tell Burlington's story and to advocate for the kinds of partnerships we need from state government, as well as these surrounding communities within our county. We do better when we all do better and understand what's really at stake here in Burlington. Because the challenges facing Burlington in our streets are not Burlington's only to solve. They are actually Vermont's challenges and reflect years of system failures on housing and substance use disorder and mental health care. And that is not fair, frankly, for Burlington to fund or figure out on our own. And we can do so much better when we leverage those 17 colleagues down in the state house to do more work on behalf of Burlington. Thank you very much. The next two questions are going to be dealing with housing. As many of us in this room know, housing is a huge issue here in Vermont. Burlington is in the middle of a housing crisis with a historically low rental vacancy rate, a low inventory of homes available for purchase, and also a rising rate of homelessness, as well. Now the statistics and the data surrounding all forms of homelessness are concerning, not just for Burlington, but as a state, as well as I mentioned, just a little analysis here, some data. One in four homes in Vermont were built before 1939. So we have one of the oldest housing stocks in the country. The Vermont Housing Finance Agency estimates the need from anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 more year round housing units needed in Vermont by 2030, which would require about 5,000 to 6,700 units be brought online each year over and above the current average production of new housing units in a year. This is also not accounting for population growth or the estimated 2,500 units lost to disrepair each year. Councillor Jones-Shannon, I'll start with you. What do you think you can do immediately within Burlington to address housing availability and affordability? You have 90 seconds. Thank you. I want to say, as a realtor, I've worked a lot with first-time home buyers. And when I think back to 2019, it was a real struggle to get first-time home buyers into a home. But working with the same people in 2023, it's gone to just about impossible. The cost to them for people that need mortgages, it may have increased three times to buy the same house. I also work downtown. And I see people who are living completely without shelter. They're sometimes elderly. They can be disabled. They are cold. And it is heartbreaking. We need to build more housing of all kinds. For renters, a 5% vacancy rate is what we would need to have a competitive rental environment. And we have just a small fraction of a percent. We need more housing choices. We need rent stabilization. And I would consider rent stabilization if it did not impact the building of more units. And if it also was able to assure that we can get problem tenants out, I think that there's a problem with escalating rents. We also need more home ownership opportunities, almost everything that is built is rental. And there are things that we can do to create those home ownership opportunities. And we need to preserve existing housing units. Thank you. Thank you, Representative Mulvady Stanek. Same question. What will you do in the short term the immediate to address affordability and availability of housing units? I apologize for my long name, by the way. I'm so sorry about that. Or I don't really. Affordability is an incredibly important issue. And I'm worried that the economic we're going to lose the economic diversity of Burlington, which makes it that vibrant city I was talking about when I first opened. Residents of all levels, residents of all economic levels should be able to live and work in our city. And we're not doing that right now. We're pricing people out. And even my wife and I, when we open that property tax bill, which I do because I do the bills, I hold my breath a little bit. And it's not because I don't love government and supporting our schools. Our children are headed into the school system. But we are really worried about affordability, even for ourselves, with two pretty decent Vermont incomes. So the struggle is real, as folks in my generation say. And what we have to do, though, is look at the other side of how we raise revenue in our city and as we build more housing. So we have to expand our grand list, of course. We have to have more housing. We have to expand where we are taxing and raising that revenue from. So it's not just on residential property owners. I think we should be smarter about how we look at how we structure our tax system locally. We can look at a model that's like the state's property tax system that could be an income sensitized system. It's familiar to those of us who do pay property taxes now on the state level. But that is a real way we can make the city affordable for fixed income folks and working families. And I do support rent stabilization when 60% of our city are renters. These folks are people either trying to go onto home ownership or choosing consciously to rent, but they're being priced out of and taken advantage of. And we can do more there around stabilizing those rents for folks to be able to stay in Burlington. Thank you very much. The second question, as you know, potentially being the mayor of the largest city in Vermont, you have a megaphone, essentially. You are able to have your voice heard in many parts of the state. How will you use the mayor's office to address state level housing issues affecting Burlingtonians, Councillor John Shannon? Thank you. I agree with what Emma said, that we need to work with our state legislators and get everybody pulling in the same direction. We also need to work with the governor. There seems to be a disconnect between the legislature and the governor. I've met with the governor. I had a good meeting with the governor. And I would hope to be able to bridge the divide there. I think that we also need to recognize that Burlington isn't going through this alone. When I'm trying to find somebody a home, we're not looking just in Burlington. It is a regional problem. And people, more and more, they have to go further and further away from Burlington. So we also need to address some of our regulations, like Act 250, which is duplicative in Burlington in some places, it makes sense. But Burlington has basically a parallel system. You have to go through it twice. And the legislature needs to address the problems with Act 250. Also, I think working with the Mayors Coalition across Vermont, because we are often told that people in Montpelier don't care about Burlington, which I find strange. I find a lot of people outside of Burlington care about Burlington. But the Mayors Coalition across the state can help us because they too are dealing in other regions with the same problems that we're dealing with here. Thanks. Thank you, Leb. Representative, same question to you. You can share it. Thank you. OK. So I have the experience of on a statewide level. And I think that's one of the unique qualities I bring to this race that would really help Burlington. Last May, I led a coalition of Democrats and progressives to sound the alarm when the Motel Emergency Housing Program was abruptly going to end at the end of the budget process last legislative session. And we worked in collaboration to put reasonable solutions on the table to make sure there was a humane option for folks. We were successful in working with the governor and the leadership throughout the House and Senate to put forward an extension for the most vulnerable folks in Vermont. And those folks, which was upwards to 1,000 households, could continue to be housed and not be straight out on the streets. However, we did not house everyone. And that is why we were living in the reality of hundreds of folks suffering on the streets in tents right here in Burlington and other large cities. The bottom line is when we have to talk about statewide issues, we need to make sure that we're building these strong relationships as Burlington. Because there is a culture in the state house. I've seen it for four years. And as someone who grew up in Barrie, it is definitely a culture of Burlington and everyone else. But the way you break that down is by building relationships, going open handed to other communities in our county and elsewhere in the state to find that common ground for solutions, and not going in as Burlington the big city, but really working in a collaborative approach. And I have that experience of building those relationships and being successful and making sure we take action in the state house. Thanks. I'm glad you brought up the issue of unsheltered homelessness as well. As you know, this is a really big issue facing Burlington, but also many other communities across the state. The state is still, of course, looking at what options do we have in terms of extending the general assistance program. That is still a moving target in Montpelier. But there are still many people who are camping here in Burlington. I'd like to hear specifically from both of you what your plan would be to address that challenge, given that some of the shelters that the state has already set up down at the VFW, they find themselves at capacity at times. Councilor Shanda. I go first every time. Or we can switch. I'm happy to go first. Yeah? Great. Yeah, I'll go for it. Yeah. So I want to be clear. The Montel program is not a perfect program, but we are in such a housing emergency in the state of Vermont where we have not kept up with building enough units for people to live in, that this is our actual reality. But in the short term, what I think we need to do in Burlington and in cooperation again with towns in our county and our region is to create a diversity of options for folks. Because not everyone who is unhoused is struggling with the same issues. We have some folks who are simply unhoused, and they are working full-time or more than that, and they still cannot find housing. We have folks with children. We have folks living with disabilities. We have folks who are struggling with being unhoused and substance use disorder. These are not a model of the people. They all deserve their dignity. They deserve our respect to work in partnership to find them places where they can be successful and housed. So that needs to be everything. It needs to be short-term shelter beds, low barrier opportunities. It needs to be having a clear camping policy here in Burlington so that folks know what's expected of them and have a respectful relationship with city staff who are interfacing with them. It is not consistent throughout the city with the staff who responds to these folks to check on their well-being. And when trust isn't there, then people feel like their community's not showing up for them. So I think bottom line, partnerships are important. And one important thing I want to say on the record here is incarceration is not housing. It never is housing. And we have to be honest about the structural realities of our housing emergency. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor Shannon, how would you begin to wrap your arms around the challenge of homelessness here in Burlington? Well, I agree. We do need all different kinds of options. We need shelters. We need supportive housing. I live next to Sears Lane. And I would go into Sears Lane quite often and talk to people. And I thought that it was enlightening to me that standing in a group of six men who are sharing how they ended up here, for five of the six of them, they did not have IDs. They had come out of through the incarceration system. They had come out without IDs. This impacted everything else in their lives from that point on. It's fixing things like this that leads to homelessness that is going to make a difference. And it seems to me kind of low hanging fruit. I also agree we need a clear camping policy, but we do have a clear camping policy. We just haven't been very good at enforcing our camping policy. It's very clear that you're not allowed to camp in our parks. But once you let people kind of settle in, it becomes very difficult to move them. And it's heartbreaking work for our city staff. So places that have had some success in dealing with homelessness have had open shelter beds, have had places for people to go. And we don't have that. We do need to work with our state and federal partners to provide that shelter. Thank you very much. The next topics will deal with downtown businesses and the vibrancy, if you will, of Burlington. The members of the Regional Affairs Committee facilitated by the three organizations that were hosting this forum recently heard from up here that they had moved more businesses out of Burlington in the last three years than they'd moved in in the previous three. Now, this anecdote reflects several of the questions we received from attendees and speaks to the importance of business and tourism and quality of life here in Burlington. Representative Mulvaney Stanek, what will you do to encourage the retention and attraction of businesses and consumers to Burlington? Thank you. This is obviously an important issue, especially to the folks who convened this particular event. One of the most vibrant things about Burlington is the diversity of small local businesses and how that has really built out not only in Church Street but on North Street near where I live and in the New North End and South End. And we're known for those local businesses and we have to support them. I've held three different business roundtables throughout the campaign, one just yesterday, to really hear from folks because that's important to me to listen to the stories and the realities and the ideas, most importantly, on how do we turn things around and make sure that folks are feeling they can come downtown and engage with businesses. I was speaking with one employee in particular yesterday who said, one of the things they need most is partnership with the city. But transparency about when things aren't going well, when there isn't response, when they call for help, when there's retail theft, for example, why that is the case and that leaving businesses on their own to navigate those really hard realities where people are stealing and then workers are left to enforce on their own. But there's other bigger, larger economic issues facing changing economies here and it's bigger than Burlington, it's bigger than Vermont. And so people are working remotely. The changes of local consumer habits are changing. So we have to all as a community also lean in and not expect the city to solve this all. We need to make sure all of you are shopping downtown and supporting these businesses while we also partner with small businesses in Burlington. Councillor Shannon, same question. What will you do to encourage the retention and the attraction of businesses to Burlington? Well, first we have to address our problems, which we hear regularly. I work on Church Street now. I came in to work one day and somebody was running down the street with an armful of clothes with tags on them. And I look around to see if there's somebody to call for help and there's nobody there. We need to rebuild our police department. We need that presence that both deters these kinds of crimes and can intervene when they happen. And that's not there now. And we do need to rebuild the police. But you also need to not dwell too much on that. And we need to remember to celebrate all of the wonderful things that we all love about Burlington, the reasons why businesses moved here in the first place, the reason why we all moved here and that we stay, that this is a place where you can live, work and play. It's an inclusive community. And we have shared values. We also have, you know, we have a great airport. We have Burlington Telecom. And we have a creative economy. We have homegrown businesses like Hula and Beta Technologies. But all of these businesses need housing and it comes back to housing again. That we have some great things happening here, but it's very hard to sustain without housing for the workers that we need to sustain them. Even downtown restaurants, it's hard to get servers in part because they don't feel safe, in part because they have no place to live. Thanks. Thank you very much. At this point, we'll now give each of you a question to ask each other. You'll have 90 seconds representative Mulvaney Stanek if you'd like to ask Councillor Shannon a question. Okay. You ready, Councillor Shannon? Ready or not? Okay. You come. You got it, you got it. Okay, here we go. One of the things I value most is listening and finding common ground, which I do every day as I serve on the House Commerce Committee which is chaired by a Northeast Kingdom Republican. Can you give us an example of when you found common ground and compromise on an important policy issue with people who politically disagree with you? I think that it is a testament to my willingness to collaborate with people that I have support from progressives, Democrats, independents, and Republicans. There has been a lot of times on the City Council and actually we served on the City Council together during the Burlington Telecom days and those were contentious, they were difficult and I recognized that there was not trust between the community and the City Council. There was a feeling that some of us were just trying to be oppositional and I created the Blue Ribbon Committee to help us navigate that process rather than try and just continue to call out and humiliate people and make it kind of a political arena. I tried to take it out of the political arena to bring in trusted community members and have counselors on the committee as well from all different parties so that we could find a solution for Burlington because we were in crisis in that moment. And Councillor Shannon, now you may ask a question to Representative Mulvaney-Stanek. Full disclosure. Councillor, Representative Mulvaney-Stanek knows the question. More or less. Whether you or I win on election day, Emma, one of us will very likely be the first woman mayor of Burlington. I pledge to you that if I win, I will do all I can to support you and assure your success for the sake of our city. You have campaigned against the divisiveness that we currently face in our city and I agree and I appreciate that. During this campaign, I've experienced extraordinary negative campaigning towards me. I do not think you have in any way directed or condoned any of this. Nonetheless, my lawn signs on private property have been defaced and stolen. There's a stickering campaign against me. There's social media accounts that target me. Misrepresent my positions on important issues to our community. And other organized negative campaigns against me. Some of the people pushing out information and organizing volunteers for this hateful and negative campaign are your supporters. You reached out to me by email today to acknowledge the issue with my signs and reaffirm your commitment against negative campaigning. I am so grateful to you for that personal outreach and offer to talk, which we have. We also shared, you also shared that your lawn signs have disappeared and you have also been the victim of, we both have shared personal experience with personal attacks. I do not want my supporters to campaign in negative or harmful ways and I appreciate that you have opened the door for this dialogue. In our discussion, I let you know that I was gonna ask this question so that you'll be prepared because it's hard to answer questions in 90 seconds. And I want to have an honest discussion that will extend beyond these 90 seconds. So what suggestions do you have for holding our supporters accountable, reducing divisiveness and creating a culture of respectful disagreement and collaboration in our city? Thank you, Councillor Shannon. And I'm glad that you, well, first of all, it's really unfortunate that we're living in these political times where two women running for office for the first time in the history of Burlington with a chance of winning this office are experiencing any kind of negative behavior and I'll say as a queer woman on top of that, holding multiple marginalized identities makes you even more vulnerable to these attacks and I've experienced that since day one of being in this race. And so one of the most important things as leaders whether we win or lose is to set a tone as leaders of this community where we need to build inclusive communities in a conscious way and we need to call out harm when it happens and what true allyship means is what I expressed to you, Councillor Shannon, when I heard that there was harm happening in your campaign to reach out and connect and see what I could do to help with that harm, because that's what allies do. And then allies also check in with what can I do more than that to help in a public space, to interrupt harm and to name it so that we can truly build a safer community for all. And when you run for office, there's a responsibility, responsibility to stand on your record and to stand up for the policies and the actions that we do as leaders, because that's part of the job, that's part of that accountability that we should expect. But when it crosses the personal line, especially based on just who you are and what your identities are, there's no place for that here in Burlington. So I have opened the line of communication, as Councillor Shannon said, and I will continue to want to build that relationship so that we can keep each other informed when things happen and can be those model leaders of interrupting harm in this community. Thank you very much. Thank you, Emma. And now it's a time for our last segment. The candidates will get two minutes each, three minutes each, let's say that. Yeah, I like that. Oh, I wasn't prepared for that. We're on a roll. We'll do three minutes each for closing remarks. Since Councillor Shannon went first with the opening remarks, we're going to give Representative Mulvaney-Sanuck the floor for three minutes. All right, thank you. Well, thank you again to the organizers of this event and everyone who came out for this event. This shows, again, that community engagement that I really love most about Burlington, where folks are really engaged and they know the high stakes of this mayoral race and the city council races for that matter. It shows to me that we all deeply care about addressing the challenges facing Burlington. And yet they are quite complicated and they're going to require a comprehensive approach and the right kind of leaders that have the skills we need to really lead the city forward with the hope and the vision that the city deserves. I, as a mom of two small kids, hold the same level of fear and anxiety that probably many of you do, but I am also hopeful because I know we can figure this out together. But only if we have a collaboration between city council and the mayor and an attitude where we are partners in this work together. And that includes an extension to other electives in Montpelier. I consider the business community an important and critical partner in that work. We are all stakeholders in this together. I also want to engage people who are the most impacted folks who are truly suffering in our streets to show that we are a community of care and that we have their best interest at heart and we do not want to create more harm in the long run. Sometimes in short-term solutions, we can have a knee-jerk reaction that can actually cause harm in the long run. And I want to make sure that we're truly solving the challenges in Burlington so we have a healthy and vibrant community, not only for my kids, but for your kids and everyone who lives here, who visits here today and in the future. Burlington deserves this and we deserve leaders who can understand how to build collaboration, how to truly listen, have the honesty and integrity and humility to know when we don't know the answers and then surround ourselves, not with folks who will just tell us what we want to hear or automatically agree with us, but folks who actually will bring that political diversity and different views and lived experiences that will make truly Burlington a place that is safe and livable for all of us. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Thank you. I wasn't expecting three minutes, but I cut all of this down for you. I ask for your support as mayor of Burlington, if you agree with my vision to improve public safety by rebuilding our police department and diversifying safety services and to build more housing, to bring partners to the table to address community health needs and to remember and celebrate all that is absolutely fabulous about the city where we all live. I am the candidate who has the proven support and confidence of all three city unions who have endorsed in this race so far. Our city workers are united in their concerns about public safety, functional governance and the health and wellbeing of our staff and community. Housing and affordability are critical issues for all sectors. We need more housing full stop. If it is the number one issue faced by all employers and most workers in our city, I have supported increased heights downtown, the South End Innovation District, creation of accessory dwelling units and the neighborhood code that allows more housing in every neighborhood in the city. We also need to encourage the elimination of duplicative regulation that adds to the cost of housing at the state level. Protecting and supporting our downtown businesses and growing the tax base are imperative as we restore our safe and vibrant city. Businesses pay taxes that would otherwise fall to the residents. We want to continue to be a destination for tourists to come and enjoy our downtown, shops, the bike path, our parks, the lake and spend money. Thank you to all who have chosen Burlington for your business and for your home. We value you and we want you to stay. And I want to thank Calvin and Kathy and Troy and all of the sponsors of this event for hosting us here today. And I want to thank Emma for your kindness and for reaching out. And I really, it's a privilege to be running with you. Thank you. Okay, that's thank you very much. And thank you everybody for coming out tonight. Thank you for everybody also watching at home as well. And for town meeting TV for coming out and making sure that all local voters can see this. Certainly lots of big issues facing Burlington. Lots of issues going to be on the town meeting day ballot leading up to March 5th. So once again, thank you guys very much. I really appreciate it. Thank you, good job.