SWANTON — Officials are promising reforms after a town employee wore a mask bearing a Confederate Flag to a public meeting.
The employee, Derick Billado, the animal control officer and first constable, resigned this month after wearing the mask to a June selectboard meeting, which triggered a slew of citizen complaints. In protest and solidarity, Billado’s parents, who also worked for the town, stepped down.
In a sharply worded letter to the Town of Swanton selectboard, Billado’s parents cited “personal attacks” on their family and decried the impact of “transients” in the community.
Selectboard members told a packed meeting July 21 that they would enhance educational and training opportunities for employees and also were looking into instituting policies around their use of social media.
Citizens pointed town officials to Billado’s social media posts that included the Confederate Flag and others messages they said were troubling, particularly in the wake of the George Floyd killing by police in May that has triggered national protests.
At the Tuesday meeting, however, officials only briefly discussed the topic of social media use by employees as they await legal advice.
“We are waiting to hear back from our lawyer (on) the whole issue of our town employees using social media, in the privacy of their home, and what protections they have under the law or freedom of speech and what isn’t protected,” Selectboard Chair Joel Clark told residents Tuesday. “We have not had that guidance, maybe we can do a very small policy if we want to, once we have that information.”
Selectboard Vice-Chair Mark Rocheleau said it’s hard to enforce social media limits currently when there is no policy.
For now, the board is tasked with finding replacements for at least the Animal Control Officer and the Health Officer, which was held by Billado’s mother, Lynn. His father was the assistant health officer.
Town Administrator David Jescavage said positions like those are needed but hard to fill. Clark agreed.
“There’s usually not a lot of people lining up out the door to fill them. Animal control officers— people usually don’t call you up and say that their dogs are in a good mood,” Clark said. “So it takes a special person to do that.”
Jescavage said the town has until the end of the month to find candidates for the Health Officer position or the chair of the selectboard, Clark, will have to step in and take over the role as the interim.
Additionally, one board member, Heather Buczkowski, is working on developing a potential dress code for employees to follow.
Billado’s parents said their family had been unfairly attacked on social media and said the community was “out of control” and had been overtaken by “transients.”
“When my family receives personal attacks on social media and receives no communications from the town and village fathers other than telling them what can and cannot be said on social media it’s very hurtful, disrespectful and a double standard to me and my family,” the Billados wrote in their letter. “It is in my opinion that Swanton is out of control and on a downhill slide with transients coming into a great community and slandering the ones that have given so much to the community.”
The complaints and social media posts put up by upset community members were intended, they said, to raise awareness about what they viewed as unprofessional and racist behavior of town officials, including Billado.
“I’d like to make sure you’re aware that I’m not at all appreciative of a town employee deciding to drape himself in a Confederate flag at any point, much less amid the current racial unrest,” the complainant said to the board in an email. “I was relatively unaware of Mr. Billado until the 16th, but I have severe reservations about keeping any town employee who would exercise such poor judgment while serving in an official capacity on the payroll.”
Two days later, the complainant followed up and pointed to Billado’s Facebook page.
The complainant included screenshots of several Facebook posts, the first an image of Kermit the Frog (a Muppet) that said, “So if we don’t have police anymore and we shoot a home invader what do we do with the body?”
The next screenshot was a post with a silver sedan driving into a crowd of protestors with the caption “When you get run over because you ‘peacefully’ protest by stopping traffic, ‘peacefully’ break peoples vehicle windows and “peacefully’ drag drivers from their vehicles and beat them up for no reason, don’t whine when you come nothing more than a fleshy speed bump…it’s your own fault.”
The image attached, in which you can see bodies hurling through the air, is the moment self-proclaimed neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist protestors in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017, killing one and injuring 30 people. Fields was sentenced to life in prison.
Following the submission of the complaints, multiple people reported they were “harassed” by Billado over Facebook.
Billado replied to two complainants who said they thought their information to the board would be kept confidential.
“I’m the animal control officer. You like to report everything I post so I thought I would let you know I posted the Dukes of Hazzard car showing off the Confederate flag,” Billado said in one message.
Billado sent a series of images to another complaint that suggested they were racist for elevating Black lives.
Several concerned citizens that reported Billado’s behavior told VTDigger they did not want to be identified out of fear of Billado.
Billado declined to be interviewed for this story.
Clark said the controversy that has unfolded in the last few months is unprecedented but not unique to Swanton.
“My take on the situation is that it’s unprecedented. I would be naive to say there’s no racism in this community, some of it people don’t even realize when they’re speaking,” he said. “We all have biases both conscious and unconscious and there’s a lot that we can do to improve, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as bad as it’s made to seem on Facebook.”
There has also been controversy in the Village of Swanton, where community art walls became the epicenter of conflict for many residents, once the art shifted to messages supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
Subsequently, the Village Trustees voted to remove the art walls until the conflict subsided.
