Next Tuesday, Burlington voters will choose among seven candidates for mayor — the largest field since incumbent Bob Kiss beat four challengers in 2009.
Much of the focus has been on the “big three” — incumbent Mayor Miro Weinberger, City Council President Max Tracy and Councilor Ali Dieng who have waged the most prominent campaigns.
The other four candidates — Haik Bedrosian, Will Emmons, Kevin McGrath and Patrick White — are running as independents. None of them have filed campaign finance reports as of this week.
Here’s a look at the experiences and priorities of the four independent candidates for mayor.
Haik Bedrosian
Politics are in Haik Bedrosian’s blood.
He attended his first political rally at age 11 with his mother, a former teacher and local teachers union member. Bedrosian’s father, an Armenian immigrant, lived through both the Bolshevik Revolution and World War II. He came to America by way of Ellis Island in 1950 after surviving the war and several months in a Nazi concentration camp in Ukraine.
Bedrosian, 48, is a single parent with two children and lives in the New North End. He’s the only one of the other four independents to hold municipal office, and he got an early start in electoral politics. He ran for mayor of Burlington when he was 18, in 1991, and placed second in a field of four with 11 percent of the vote. Incumbent Peter Clavelle won that race.
In 1995, Bedrosian, then 22, became one of the youngest-ever members of the Burlington City Council, representing Ward 3 for a single term.
This year Bedrosian gives himself and the three other independents a “zero” percent chance of winning, and he thinks Weinberger will win.
“The anti-Miro vote is obviously going to be split between Tracy and Dieng, and I don’t see Miro’s base of support eroding beneath 40%,” Bedrosian said.
A candidate must receive 40% or more of the vote to win election and avoid a runoff.
Under Weinberger, questions have been raised about the handling of the Burlington Police Department. Former police chief Brandon del Pozo resigned in December 2019 after it was revealed he had created an anonymous Twitter account to attack a local activist.
Bedrosian had a social media exchange with del Pozo in the summer of 2017, when the former police chief commented on Bedrosian’s Facebook post about reforming the police department’s logo. The incident left him feeling “personally targeted and cyber-harassed.”
“I told Miro for years that [del Pozo] is someone who doesn’t have self-control when it comes to social media, and he’s going to do this thing again,” Bedrosian said.
Bedrosian still feels as though the department’s current logo is too dark and menacing, and would like to see it changed to something that gives the police a more friendly face.
He also wants to foster public works projects that would give Burlington “a richer sense of identity and promise.”
Examples include a proposed staircase and ramp system connecting Battery Park with the waterfront, and transforming the former Moran coal plant into a greenhouse and botanical garden. (Last fall, the city broke ground on plans to turn the property into an open-air park, with the coal plant stripped down to its steel-frame skeleton, which would be painted red).
Bedrosian is encouraged by progress on reviving the stalled CityPlace downtown development, which left a big hole in the ground near Church Street that critics call “the Pit.”
“I think we can be confident that we are a great city, and land like the current ‘Pit’ is prime real estate,” Bedrosian said. “We’re in the stronger negotiating position to get more for the people of Burlington when those deals are on the table.”
Will Emmons
New Jersey-born Will Emmons, 38, has been an active member of the community since he moved to Burlington in 1992. He has a young son and lives in the Old North End.
While he was an arbitration advocate for the American Postal Workers Union, he estimates he filed more than 1,000 cases in support of livable wages, reasonable hours and good working conditions.
More recently, Emmons has brought attention to conditions at hotels outside Burlington, where some people experiencing homelessness are being housed during the pandemic.
“To me, they’re being run like prison camps,” Emmons said. “You go there and you’re going to see a sheriff parked out front. I have no problem with the sheriffs; the problem is the way things are being run.”
Emmons alleges corruption and mismanagement in city government are the major obstacle to change in Burlington. He points to a fake Instagram account in his name, which he claims appeared only after he filed as a candidate for mayor; he also points to a since-deleted Twitter account that he says mocked his advocacy work.
If elected mayor, he says, he’d accept compensation only for rent and food, and would work to stimulate local business and would fight for individual rights.
“Burlington has the ‘Titanic syndrome’: The lower class is locked in a basement, and I intend to dig us out of that,” Emmons said.
Kevin McGrath
Kevin McGrath describes his hometown of Springfield, Ohio, as “the poster child for a failed community.” He sees a similar fate for Burlington, his home for 26 years, if things don’t change soon.
“It has to be more about processes than just leaders,” McGrath said.
McGrath, 62, works for Subatomic Digital, a graphic design firm, and says he recently received an offer for a quality-control job at a Vermont-based manufacturer. He lives in the Old North End. While he’s never held public office, McGrath says he’s been involved in politics his whole life, and was a solid waste planner back in Ohio.
One of McGrath’s top priorities is a ban on sending Vermont prisoners to for-profit out-of-state prisons. He wants city council positions elevated to full-time posts.
The council “has been dysfunctional for 20 years; there’s a historical and statistical narrative of their inability to solve problems,” McGrath said. “It’s common knowledge in Burlington that the city council is a failed institution, and the city government has failed.”
Though he campaigned and voted for Weinberger in 2012, McGrath is now critical of his leadership.
“The CityPlace thing was just one big economic blunder, and another one was Macy’s,” McGrath said, referring to the retailer’s exit from its former Cherry Street location. “They’ve shut everything down; there’s nothing to do in the city.”
Patrick White
Patrick White, 30, is a political newcomer with a background in insurance, where he’s worked as an underwriter and more recently in sales and production. He describes himself as “the guy people call for advice,” with hands-on problem-solving and management experience.
White grew up on a dairy farm in Panton and attended Johnson State College with hopes of becoming a doctor. Financial pressures cut his education short, but White says he found in the world of insurance the same “non-stop educational process” that drew him to the medical field. He lives now in Burlington’s South End.
White said he was motivated to run for mayor after watching politics in Vermont and Burlington “continue to fail its citizens.”
“I keep seeing so much infighting, as well as well-meaning promises that inevitably do nothing but hurt citizens,” White said.
In recent debates, White has frequently pointed to unsolved problems with chemicals and untreated sewage polluting Lake Champlain.
White also took issue with the way the city handled the controversial Church Street Marketplace mural.
“All I’ve heard is, ‘We’re working on it, we’ve got some money, don’t worry.’” White said. “It’s been a 10-year problem. It should’ve been fixed after year one, but the city council has been more focused on the mural on Church Street.”
The CityPlace project is another priority for White, where an effort to revive the development was stuck on a dispute over union labor.
“For me, it’s less about ‘Is it union or not union,’ it’s ‘Can we keep these jobs local, and make sure that people who live here in our community benefit from the creation of a project and the project itself moving forward?’” White said.
Clarification: This story has been updated to more precisely describe the period Haik Bedrosian’s father spent in a concentration camp.