STRATTON — Debate here during Town Meeting season usually revolves around the budgets and ballot items tucked inside the annual report.
But this year, most of the talk centered on the report’s headline-grabbing cover — up until Tuesday’s gathering, that is, when residents were mum.
Town Clerk D. Kent Young was assembling the booklet this winter when, lacking such past cover photos as a local elder or landscape, he eyed a bulletin-board message that began, “You came here from there because you didn’t like there,” and ended, “If you want here to be like there you should not have left there to come here, and you are invited to leave here and go back there.”
Young has said the message was meant for the 230 full-time residents who consistently are outnumbered by visitors to the sprawling four-season Stratton Mountain Resort. He didn’t foresee New York Times reporter Ellen Barry sharing the resulting cover (and her response, “Holy moly”) with her 44,500 Twitter followers.
The town clerk has issued several apologies since.
“I do understand the criticism of the poor judgment on my part,” Young has written in a mea culpa on the municipal website.
“The vast majority of Stratton’s residents moved here from other areas of the country,” continued Young, who himself relocated from New Jersey a quarter-century ago, “and a majority of our residents have always supported the very many friends and neighbors who have decided to keep vacation homes here.”
The 27 residents who showed up Tuesday for this year’s town meeting — rescheduled from its traditional March date because of the Covid-19 pandemic — seemed satisfied with the response. Reports in hand, no one said a word at a gathering that unanimously approved an 11-item agenda without debate in 20 minutes.
“That’s a record,” Young said after.
The fact that the cover’s message included a disclaimer (“We are not racist, phobic or anti-whatever-you-are, we simply like here the way it is and most of us actually came here because it is not like there, wherever there was — you are welcome here, but please stop trying to make here like there”) hasn’t stopped many from criticizing it on social media.
Wrote one commenter: “It is a negative mark on the entire state that will make it hard for Vermonters to advocate for anti-xenophobic legislation nationally.”
Another: “Xenophobia? White people will do all kinds of everything to not name racism.”
And a third: “This is not about race, it’s about authoritarianism — wealthy white people moving up here from NYC and Boston, fearfully engaging in the latest round of White Flight in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, fleeing their terror of dirty, diseased brown people of the cities, and attempting to remake Vermont in the nanny state mold of NYC/NJ/MA.”
And a fourth: “I assure you, most of us are not from ‘here.’ Only the Indigenous people.”
Others have expressed support with such statements as “No apologies necessary!” and “I’m not sure I would have published that in the town report, but it is spot-on!”
Countless more comments later, Stratton town meeting seemed content to turn the page.
“It’s funny how the drive to divide is a shared impulse,” concluded one social media user. “Looking for common ground makes for a sturdier, more stable community.”
