As the first open race for Burlington mayor in 12 years enters its final phase, the two party-endorsed candidates — state Rep. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, a Progressive, and City Councilor Joan Shannon, a Democrat — are each working hard to spread their message.
They’ve appeared at back-to-back candidate forums and touted recent endorsem*nts at press events, while campaign volunteers canvas Queen City neighborhoods.
The message they’re spreading appears, on the surface at least, quite similar.
Recent campaign materials from both candidates list public safety as a top priority with seemingly parallel talking points. Mulvaney-Stanak’s campaign wrote, “Everyone deserves to feel and be safe in our city. Right now, that standard is not being met.” A mailer from Shannon lists a plan to “Invest in public safety systems and rebuild community trust.”
But in interviews and candidate forums, Mulvaney-Stanak and Shannon have shown that their plans for making Vermont’s largest city safer do diverge in several key areas — beginning with word choice. While Shannon has emphasized an “all hands on deck” approach to public safety with strong support for policing, Mulvaney-Stanak prefers the phrase “community safety” and said on her campaign website that Burlington’s problems show that people are “suffering across our community.”
The Progressive and Democrat are joined on the ballot by two independents, Chris Haessly and Will Emmons, who both gathered the 150 required signatures to appear on the ballot.
In terms of fundraising, Mulvaney-Stanak and Shannon have a sizable head start. The first campaign finance filing deadline passed last week, revealing that Shannon had raised the most — over $133,000 from 651 contributors. Mulvaney-Stanak brought in about $70,000 from 514 donors. Haessly and Emmons did not file reports, which are only required if a candidate raises more than $500.
Public safety has been front and center of the mayoral campaign from the start. And from the beginning, Shannon has seemed to identify the advantages of emphasizing her vote in opposition to a 2020 City Council racial justice resolution that included a reduction in police officer staffing.
At a candidate forum hosted by Seven Days last week, Shannon said the resolution was “led by the Progressive Party” and “led to some of the public safety challenges we have now — not all of them.” (Shannon has clinched the endorsem*nt of all four unions covering city employees, including those in the police and fire departments.)
Mulvaney-Stanak previously served on the council, but not when it voted to reduce the police force. She does, however, share a party affiliation with the majority of those who voted for the measure — and has found herself accounting for this fact on the campaign trail.
In an interview last Friday, Mulvaney-Stanak danced around the question of how she would have voted on the controversial measure. She noted that 2020 was an “intense” period of reckoning over police violence and treatment of Black people in America. But she also described herself as an “evidence-based” decision-maker and she would have wanted to see what could realistically be implemented in Burlington.
“I don’t think all those questions were asked,” she said.
Mulvaney-Stanak also pointed out that two Democrats voted for the 2020 resolution, and that it also called for “shifting resources to actually begin hiring social workers so we had a more comprehensive community safety response.”
The Progressive, for her part, has tried to show her appeal to Democrats on the campaign trail. Last week, she held a “Dems for Emma” event that featured endorsem*nts from former Democratic mayoral candidate CD Mattison, among others.
Outside of policing, a common public safety topic in the lead-up to the March 5 Town Meeting Day election is substance use disorder.
Shannon said in a different candidate forum last week that the city needs to set “boundaries” on open drug use and drug dealing by arresting more people. Mulvaney-Stanak struck a softer tone, saying those with substance use disorder are particularly vulnerable and need a safe place to go, such as an overdose prevention center.
The Vermont House advanced a bill last month that would fund an overdose prevention center pilot program. Burlington is the most likely location for one of the two locations called for in the bill.
Both Mulvaney-Stanak and Shannon have said they support overdose prevention centers. Mulvaney-Stanak voted in favor of the recent bill in the Vermont House and said in an interview on Friday that the centers would be an important tool to save lives. She also said that with a rise in open drug use, particularly in downtown, the overdose prevention centers could help give people with substance use disorder a safer place to use rather than out in public.
Shannon also said the centers would save lives and offer a path to treatment, but she wants the idea to be studied before a permanent location is opened.
“We need to look carefully at how it works in our community,” Shannon said during one of the candidate forums. “The examples that we have are in communities very different from Burlington.”
The two independent candidates’ responses showed they were split on overdose prevention centers. Haessly supports the idea, but added that more should be done for people who experience repeated overdoses by “establishing a compulsory program for compassionate custodial care.”
Emmons does not support overdose prevention centers, saying the model “invites more drug addiction to our neighborhoods.”
City officials have attributed part of the rise in public drug use to the higher number of people experiencing homelessness in Burlington following the sunset of parts of the state’s emergency hotel housing program last summer.
Both Mulvaney-Stanak and Shannon agreed that the Queen City is shouldering a significant portion of the problem.
“Burlington cannot support or shelter all of the people becoming homeless throughout Chittenden County and the rest of the state of Vermont,” Shannon said in an interview on Feb. 7.
Shannon said she understands that the state’s hotel program was expensive to run, but she criticized the state for not doing more to prepare for the pandemic-era program’s phase-out.
Mulvaney-Stanak, in turn, suggested that Burlington could do a better job making its case for resources. She said many people experiencing homelessness come to the city from smaller towns, seeking social services and public transportation.
The city “has to be better at making its case and telling its story,” she said. “Not in some way where we are more needy or more deserving than the rest of the state, but to tell an accurate story that, actually we are holding a lot of Vermonters who come from a lot of other smaller towns.”
So far the exchanges between Mulvaney-Stanak and Shannon in candidate forums have been cordial. Out on the ground, however, there are signs of things turning more negative. Shannon has been the subject of a stickering campaign and has had her campaign signs defaced. Mulvaney-Stanak said some of her lawn signs have disappeared, and she faced sexist questions from a caller during a radio appearance early in the campaign.
During a candidate forum on Feb. 6, the two women had an opportunity to ask each other a question near the end of the event. They both addressed the negativity.
“We both have shared personal experience with personal attacks,” Shannon said. “I do not want my supporters to campaign in negative or harmful ways.”
Mulvaney-Stanak offered similar thoughts.
“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 the chance of winning this office — are experiencing any kind of negative behavior,” Mulvaney-Stanak said.
