[B]URLINGTON — Longtime Burlington City Councilor Jane Knodell lost the local Progressive Party’s endorsement Sunday to newcomer Perri Freeman for the upcoming March Town Meeting City Council election.
Knodell was first elected to the council in 1993 and has served a total of 19 years, including stints as council president. She lost some Progressive backing for supporting for the sale of Burlington Telecom, the CityPlace Burlington development and Republican council president Kurt Wright’s re-election bid to the Legislature.
Caucus-goers supported Freeman in an 85-55 vote. About 200 people attended Sunday night’s gathering at Burlington’s Sustainability Academy. Candidates were nominated for all four of the City Council seats up this March.
Knodell said after the caucus that she was unsure if she would run as an independent and needed time to reflect first.
“I’m sure I’m going to hear from a lot of supporters, and there are a lot of people who vote who are not in the room tonight,” she said. “A lot of people don’t like coming to caucuses but like the work that Jane Knodell is doing, so I’m going to keep that in mind.”
Freeman, a community organizer and home care provider, touted her work campaigning for paid family leave and climate change measures. She also worked on Democrat Bob Hooper’s successful campaign to unseat Wright. She said the goal of her campaign is to improve the lives of everyday Burlingtonians.
“People want to see a different kind of person with a different set of values representing them,” Freeman said after the vote. “For me, this has always been about how we can improve the lives of everyday people.”
Knodell argued that her decades of City Hall experience allowed her to leverage city resources to community organizations doing important work.
The Burlington Telecom sale was a hot-button issue at the caucus, as Freeman said she would have voted for the Keep Burlington Telecom Local bid. She also said that the process around the sale was not transparent.
Knodell said that while she had supported the KBTL bid from the start, it eventually became clear to her that the KBTL bid did not have a way to win the council’s approval. She said that Schurz Communications — the eventual winner — was a better choice than Ting, the option favored by Mayor Miro Weinberger.
She also defended the process that went into making the BT decision, saying the discussions that lead to the decision played out at the public City Council meeting.
“On that BT sale, the public saw it all happen right out in the open,” she said. “I believe that was the most transparent moment I have ever had in my 20 years on the City Council.”
The progressives also endorsed candidates for the three other open seats: Jack Hanson in the East District, Mohamed Jafar in the South District and Kienan Christianson in the North District.
All three will face incumbent Democrats, with Hanson running against Richard Deane, Jafar running against Joan Shannon and Christianson against Dave Hartnett. Freeman will face lawyer Jared Carter, who was endorsed by the Democrats. Republican Paco DeFrancis is also running in the South District against Shannon and Jafar.
Hanson, a UVM graduate, works for Green Mountain Power as an energy transformation representative. He was a paid staffer on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, and said addressing climate change and affordable housing were his top two issues.
“Burlington has been a leader on climate, and can be even more of a leader,” he said. “We’ve already gotten 100 percent renewable electricity, now it’s about transportation and heating.”
Jafar grew up in Burlington as a refugee from Somalia and returned after graduating college. He said addressing affordable housing and the opioid epidemic would be his top priorities as a councilor.
“If I got elected, the top of my agenda would be trying to figure out preventive measures for the opioid epidemic,” he said. “We’re not serious enough about that issue.”
Christianson, a lawyer, listed affordable housing and climate change as major issues for his campaign, saying that he supports a plastic bag and straw ban in the city.
He also said he wants to make North Avenue, the location of a crash which killed a pedestrian last month, safer.
