Burlington is the only municipality in the state without voter-initiated popular referendums.
Burlington voters can elect a new mayor every three years and vote on city councilors every year, and the city council can approve ballot questions for residents to vote on come Town Meeting Day.
But the voters themselves can’t put something directly on the ballot — or remove from office the officials they disagree with.
A group of Burlington residents is trying to change that.
The group, which calls itself Proposition Zero, hopes to put those two measures on next year’s Town Meeting Day ballot, in what they say is a nonpartisan effort to expand direct democracy in the Queen City.
“It’s long overdue,” said FaReid Munarsyah, one of the movement’s organizers. “I think Burlington has a reputation for democracy — I mean, it’s Bernie Sanders’ hometown — but that’s so far in the past that we don’t even know what it means anymore.”
Munarsyah got involved with the movement while working on Infinite Culcleasure’s alternative mayoral campaign in 2018. He said the ballot-items idea excited a lot of people on the campaign because it was an example of how people not in power could still effect great change.
“It’s just something we accidentally came across,” Munarsyah said. “If we weren’t going to win because we didn’t have enough money, we thought, how do we still make an impact in these elections? And this is one of the things that kept coming up.”
Most of the Prop Zero organizers are aligned with the Progressive Party, but they said they’re trying to focus on building partnerships with issue-focused groups — such as the Battery Park movement and the Burlington Tenants Union — rather than political ones in order to get away from the partisan divide between Progressives and Democrats.
“We’re backing this proposal so we can say, ‘This is our town, these are our terms, this is our housing,’” said Christie Delphia of the Burlington Tenants Union. “It’s the only way to actually get anything we want done, done.”
Their primary opposition? People already holding elected office.
“I would say nine out of 10 people I’ve talked to are supportive of this idea,” Munarsyah said. “The one out of 10 who don’t support it? They’re usually an elected official. My two city councilors, who are Dems, and the mayor looked at me like I’d grown a second head when I first mentioned it to them.”
Rep. Brian Cina said the classic excuse he hears from people opposed to the movement is that if these measures are enacted, it will allow big-money lobbyists to influence the issues. But he said that’s already happening, maybe even more than if Burlington had a more direct democracy.
“To say this is some wild idea that’s going to destabilize our community and that we’re dangerous ideologues for wanting people to have more power, let’s just look at the rest of the state,” Cina said in an organizing meeting last week.
All of the measures the group proposes would require large margins to take effect.
“There would be requirements where like 66% of people have to participate [in a recall election], and the vast majority would have to vote ‘yes,’” Munarsyah said. “It’s not a trivial thing to remove somebody who’s been elected, but two years is a long time, and there’s a lot of damage that can be done.”
He said voter-initiated ballot questions would come in two forms, both likely requiring 5% of eligible voters (about 3,000 people) to petition in less than 60 days to get a particular issue on the ballot.
The first would be a “referendum,” in which voters could decide to undo a decision made by the city council. He said the sale of Burlington Telecom is a great example of where something like this would have come into use.
The second would be an “initiative”: Residents propose a policy and get enough signatures on a petition to place it on the ballot. Right now, that could happen only through the city council.
It’s not the first time the issue has come up in Burlington. Ten years ago, when Progressive Bob Kiss was the mayor, then-council president Kurt Wright and current South District councilor Joan Shannon sponsored a resolution calling for a charter amendment allowing voters to initiate a recall of the mayor and city councilors. It never came to pass.
But Munarsyah said this year’s election made the value of what they’re pushing for clearer than ever. Voters overwhelmingly supported progressive ballot measures, but Democrat Miro Weinberger still beat Progressive Max Tracy in the mayor’s race.
“It feels like Burlingtonians have less and less control of issues affecting our lives,” Munarsyah said. “There’s only one time that we get to vote, and it’s usually to delegate our power to a representative who may or may not have our interest at heart.”
The petition to get recalls and referendums on the ballot has gathered a little more than 450 signatures. The goal is to collect 3,000 by this time next year.
