Winooski residents will elect the city’s next mayor on Town Meeting Day.
Two city council members are running for Winooski’s top job in a special election after the city’s previous mayor stepped down part way through his term.
Both candidates are running campaigns based on their professional experience — Eric Covey as chief of staff for Secretary of State Jim Condos, and Kristine Lott as a business analyst.
The new mayor will replace Seth Leonard, who resigned in January, one year into a three-year term, to avoid a conflict of interest with his new job as managing director of community development at the Vermont Housing Finance Agency.
A central issue in the race has been affordability in Winooski — a topic that both Covey and Lott think they’re uniquely poised to tackle.
“Right now, affordability is the number one issue for our city,” Covey said. “We need budget responsibility, and to manage the assets in our aging infrastructure. It’s just about living within our means, like Winooski families do.”
Lott said she thinks the conversation around affordability has been too narrow, especially when it comes to housing. She thinks the focus around low-income subsidized housing is important, but that she’s also concerned that options for people with middle-class incomes are shrinking.
“The biggest thing I hear is about taxes being high, and we’re doing what we can to get to a point where we can mitigate some of the increasing we’re seeing,” Lott said. “Of course there’s going to be inflation and cost of living increases, but we can get ourselves into a position to avoid spikes.”
One thing Lott thinks differentiates her is her focus on the process of decision making and community engagement.
“I don’t want to bring in an agenda of policies,” Lott said. She’d emphasize collaboration with city council and schools, she said, “to make sure if we’re going to move forward with a new policy, that we’ve spent time to allow citizens, businesses and stakeholders to be engaged with it.”
Meanwhile, Covey said his experience in government at the state level sets him apart. In addition to his job with the secretary of state, he also founded a nonprofit organization to train emerging leaders in the state, who he said could be very useful connections to have at the mayoral level.
Both candidates are running without any party affiliation, as is the case in all Winooski municipal elections.
“I don’t think that party politics play any role in municipal decision making,” Covey said. “Local government is really about quality of life, it shouldn’t be at all about party power grabbing.”
Both candidates plan to spend the final stretch of the campaign listening to their constituents and knocking on as many doors as possible.
Parking Garage
Winooski voters will also be deciding whether to allow a $9.7 million, 300-car parking garage to be built on Abenaki Way.
The project would be fully paid for by the users of the parking garage, and would come at no cost to Winooski taxpayers.
The development coincides with plans for a hotel to be built in Winooski’s downtown tax increment financing, or TIF, district. Original plans for construction alongside the Winooski River, adjacent to the rotary in the town’s center, were quickly opposed by the public, with opponents voicing concerns about blocking views to the river and the town’s historic Champlain Mill.
But a new proposal to locate the project a few blocks down the road, where the hotel and parking garage would replace what is currently a gravel parking lot, quieted those concerns.
Town Manager Jessie Baker said she hasn’t seen much opposition for the project, and that with the new location, people are generally excited about the prospect of new parking spaces — something she said the downtown district desperately needs.
“People are much more pleased with that location, at that corner than at bottom of the rotary,” Baker said. “They’re really interested in that positive move.”
