[B]urlington’s Progressive Party scored significant gains at Tuesday’s Town Meeting Day with the election of newcomers Perri Freeman and Jack Hanson to the city council and the defeat of a controversial downtown business proposal that the party had fought.
Freeman defeated longtime incumbent Jane Knodell, who was running as an independent in the Central District after having lost the Progressive Party endorsement to Freeman. Hanson defeated incumbent Democrat Richard Deane in the East District.
Longtime Democratic incumbent Joan Shannon cruised to re-election in the South District, easily defeating Progressive Mohamed Jafar and Republican Paco DeFrancis. In the North District, Democratic newcomer Franklin Paulino defeated Kienan Christianson, who ran as an independent but had been endorsed by the Progressives.
Freeman and Hanson — two young Progressive organizers — are replacing two more moderate councilors. Their election will make it more difficult for Democratic Mayor Miro Weinberger to continue to advance his agenda. On the 12-member council, eight votes are needed to override a mayoral veto.
With wins from Freeman and Hanson, the council will become evenly split between councilors who are generally supportive of Weinberger, and those who are more oppositional.
“This is a historic night in Burlington. We’re going to reshape the city,” Hanson said Tuesday night. “This is a Progressive city, the East District is a Progressive district.”
Josh Wronski, the executive director of the Vermont Progressive Party, said that the Progressive councilors will be able to hold Weinberger accountable.
“We’re going to have a city council that is more willing to challenge the incumbent in decisions affecting all of us,” he said. “I think the mayor is going to have to work with us going forward.”
Wronski said the party was planning on building on its momentum toward the 2020 Town Meeting Day election, when eight council seats will be on the ballot, and the 2021 mayoral election.
“You look at what we did tonight, we unseated two incumbents who are more toward the center and replaced them with young Progressive activists,” he said.
Wronski said he was not surprised by the large margins Hanson and Freeman won by. (Results show Hanson won 837 votes to Deane’s 546; Freeman won 928 votes to Knodell’s 643.)
“Both Jack Hanson and Perri Freeman engaged in grassroots organizing, which their opponents did not,” he said. “When you engage in that type of grassroots organizing that people really look for in this city, when you go out and knock on doors and talk to every resident … this is what you end up with.”
Progressive candidates addressed a large crowd during a victory party at Ri Ra, a Church Street pub.
Freeman was visibly shaking with exhaustion and excitement after her win.
She attributed her victory to a strong grassroots campaign and said her issues, including climate change, resonated with voters. She also said Knodell’s controversial votes had hurt the longtime incumbent.
“The district itself was ready for a change,” Freeman said.
Freeman pointed to Knodell’s support of the downtown development project, CityPlace Burlington, her vote to sell Burlington Telecom and support of the basing of the F-35 fighter jet in South Burlington as factors in her defeat.
Freeman had defeated Knodell, a longtime Progressive, for the Progressive Party nomination at a caucus in January. Following that defeat, Knodell ran as an independent.
“I think it was a medley of reasons,” Freeman told VTDigger at the studios of Channel 17/Town Meeting Television. She added she believed her campaign brought in people who felt otherwise disenfranchised.
“People have been feeling frustrated for some time,” she said. “You can also just look at the general tone of how the city has been going. People, they don’t just want a change. They want a specific kind of change. They want to be heard. They want to be able to participate. They want us to be putting out policies about values they hold about equity and fairness and everyone having a seat at the table. Especially with what’s going on at the national level. We need to start here first … that’s where the resistance is going to start.”
City councilor Shannon said she was “surprised” and “shocked” by Knodell’s loss. “I thought she had deeper support in the Old North End,” Shannon said.
Knodell said she was disappointed. She said her opponent won in large part by making lofty promises that would be difficult to deliver on and by distorting Knodell’s positions with “extreme scenarios” that oversimplified nuanced proposals into non-existent black and white options.
“There are a lot of ways to very artfully distill complex issues into simplistic choices that were never actually in front of us,” Knodell said. “These nuances and details I’m guessing were not really shared with people.
“I think I was cast in a pretty negative light,” she added.
Knodell said she was “relieved” to be freed of the Progressive party and would consider a run for mayor in the future.
“It was a weird campaign running against Progressives,” she said in an interview at Butch and Babe’s in the Old North End. “I feel kind of relieved to be free of my relationship with the Burlington Progressives.”
“It’s been a very difficult relationship with them for quite some time,” Knodell said because the party opposed some of her votes. “I feel like I needed to run and put myself out there and it’s clear their candidate won. Now, I’m a free agent. I don’t feel bound to help Progressives. My commitment is to the City of Burlington.”
Knodell said she will watch to see if Freeman can deliver on what she promised.
“So in two years did you bring us free buses, publicly owned deeply affordable housing owned by the City of Burlington? Did you bring us those things? Because now that’s on her. That’s on the winner,” she said. “They are very big promises.”
A jubilant Hanson said that his message of addressing climate change and housing resonated with voters in the East District.
“I know that we worked incredibly hard, I know that we built a lot of connections and built a lot of excitement,” he said.
Hanson said as a councilor, he would work to get Burlington off fossil fuels by 2030 and that he would be a champion of renters struggling with housing costs and housing conditions.
He said there would be a “fundamental shift” in the way the city government operates, and the Progressives would ensure City Hall was working for working people in the city.
“This is a Progressive shift,” he said. “We are going to reflect that on the council, make change, and move it in a more Progressive direction.”
Deane, Hanson’s opponent, said he wasn’t surprised he lost. He said Hanson targeted progressive-leaning renters in his ward who may have felt they were underrepresented on the council.
Deane said he believes the city has been moving in the right direction by seeking to attract more businesses and prioritizing affordable housing developments. He worries that with Progressive gains on the council it will be more difficult for Weinberger to achieve economic development initiatives underway.
“I have a feeling that the mayor who’s been a spokesman for that agenda is going to have a harder time moving that forward,” Deane said.
Weinberger said Democrats won’t lose influence on the council, and the outcome of Tuesday’s election doesn’t change his ability to advance his agenda, he said.
In his seven years in office, there have only been two months in which Democrats have had a clear majority, and he stressed that working across party lines has been essential to enacting policies.
“We’ve always had to cobble together coalitions to get anything done,” he said. “We’re still in that position and need to do that and we’ll continue to do that.”
Weinberger said he wasn’t surprised voters didn’t approve the Downtown Improvement District given that the proposal was new, and would have been the largest change to the city’s downtown marketplace in 30 years.
Although he supported the proposal, he said it would not be a top priority of his office going forward, and that it was too soon to tell whether it would be back on the table in the near future.
But he said he believes the city still needs to think about how to assist businesses close to, but not on Church Street.
“Maybe tonight’s formulation wasn’t exactly the right way,” he said of the DID proposal.
“I do think it will be ongoing conversation about how we strengthen the side streets and strengthen some of those businesses off Church Street,” he said.
Jafar, who lost to Shannon, said that although his race was difficult, his party picked up ground across the city.
“Moving forward we made the progress we need to make, we flipped the seats we needed to flip,” he said. “So from here on out we move forward.”
Christianson said he was proud of his campaign, and said that he almost won on a message of bringing people together.
“I encourage everyone to lean in because the time is right,” he said. “We are ready for change, and it is coming.”
One of the loudest cheers of the night at the Progressive gathering was celebrating the defeat of ballot item #4, the Downtown Improvement District.
Progressive opponents argued the DID would raise rents, make the downtown a hostile place for the city’s homeless population and “privatize” the downtown. The proposal would replace the city’s current Church Street Marketplace department with a new, private nonprofit.
“What we showed today is across this city, there is a broad and deep yearning for justice, and it was manifested in a crushing defeat of the neoliberal agenda,” said Gene Bergman, the former senior assistant city attorney who ran the campaign against the DID.
Xander Landen and Mark Johnson contributed reporting.
