A small group of people attended Monday night’s Burlington City Council meeting to protest Councilor Jack Hanson, P-East District, in light of a sexual assault allegation made against him on social media.
At the first in-person council meeting since the Covid-19 pandemic began, three attendees held signs and two spoke at the council’s public comment section, requesting that the body take the allegation against Hanson seriously. In a Facebook post published earlier Monday evening, Hanson said the interaction was consensual but that he takes any sexual assault accusation “extremely seriously” and welcomes an investigation into his actions.
An Instagram user named @zanevia.wilc posted the allegation against Hanson on Sunday on behalf of an unnamed person who said they experienced the alleged assault.
The person claimed the assault happened in 2017 while they were working at the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. They said Hanson was their boss at the time.
The person said they agreed to a sexual interaction with Hanson while inebriated after a party. They said they felt pressured into the interaction because Hanson was their boss and made them further uncomfortable when he asked them not to tell anyone about the interaction.
In the post, they asked for Hanson to step down from his council seat. “As people who abuse power should not be in positions of power,” they wrote.
While sitting in the audience of the council meeting, two of the residents — who declined to provide their names to VTDigger — held signs that read “believe survivors” and “abolish VPIRG.” Another held a sign that read “abolish VT Prog men.” Two of the members spoke at public comment, only identifying themselves by first name.
“Stand with survivors and call out your colleagues,” one of the public commenters said.
In his Facebook post, Hanson confirms that he was a director working for VPIRG in the summer of 2017. He said he did not have sex with the person who wrote the Instagram post but that he was “physically intimate” after a party with them.
“We established mutual interest and consent in becoming physical,” he wrote in the post. He said his supervisor was eventually made aware of the interaction and that he did not face any disciplinary action.
“I’ve worked hard to take accountability for engaging in sexual activity in a scenario in which a power dynamic existed between my coworker and myself,” Hanson wrote, “and I recognize how that power dynamic colored my request to not discuss the encounter broadly with other coworkers.”
Hanson pointed VTDigger to the Facebook post when approached for comment about the accusation after Monday night’s meeting. He reiterated that he’s taking the accusation seriously and is not considering stepping down from his council seat.
The council Monday night also passed resolutions that would allow the body to consider decriminalizing sex work and divest the city’s assets from weapons manufacturing companies.
Sex work decriminalization
Councilor Perri Freeman, P-Central District, introduced the resolution, which charges the council’s Charter Change Committee to assess whether Burlington should strike its rules criminalizing sex work and prohibiting the occupation within the city. It passed in a unanimous vote.
Freeman said the resolution has been something they have wanted to bring forward but found greater urgency to present it to the body after the mass shooting that took place in Atlanta, Georgia, in March, where a man targeted Asian women who worked at massage parlors thought to be associated with sex work.
“Sex work is incredibly — it can be — incredibly dangerous,” Freeman said. “I think at a bare minimum, for me, I want sex workers to be safe.”
The resolution also directs the Charter Change Committee to consider adding elements to the city’s charter that would aim to protect sex workers and pursue possible decriminalization. The committee is set to report back recommendations to the council by the body’s Oct. 25 meeting.
Councilor Jane Stromberg, P-Ward 8, said she thought the resolution is “absolutely a step in the right direction.” She noted that transgender people and people of color are disproportionately prosecuted and sent to jail for engaging in sex work.
“I believe sex workers deserve same protection as any other human beings,” Stromberg said.
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger said the administration is supportive of the resolution and that he wants to see the city’s sex work charter rules modernized.
Burlington Progressive Rep. Selene Colburn introduced a bill in the 2020 legislative session to decriminalize sex work at the state level. That bill didn’t move forward, but legislators propped up a committee to study Vermont’s sex work laws.
Divesting from weapons manufacturers
The council also passed a resolution that would keep the city from investing in weapons manufacturers and requests that the Burlington Employees’ Retirement System divest from any weapons manufacturing companies if any assets are currently invested.
The resolution, introduced by Stromberg, requests that the system provide an analysis of any assets it has invested into weapons manufacturers before January 2021. It passed in a 10-1 vote, with Councilor Mark Barlow, I-North District, voting against.
Barlow expressed concern that there may be large mutual fund indexes that the retirement system may be invested into that include weapons manufacturers, which would be difficult to divest from.
Councilor Chip Mason, D-Ward 5, said that following the report by the retirement system analyzing its investments, the council cannot require it to divest from any asset — that authority lies only with the retirement system.
Stromberg said she’s found $2.5 million of the city’s retirement system to be invested in a company supportive of weapons manufacturing. Chief Administrative Officer Katherine Schad added that it’s unlikely more of the city’s investments are tied to any weapons manufacturers.
Stromberg said she thinks the city should invest in assets that reflect its values.
“I feel like we can use every cent possible to invest in things that don’t involve violence, symbolize threats or terror,” Stromberg said, “but rather peace and the direction that we really, obviously, need to go in as a society.”
The council also passed a resolution that authorizes improvements on Colchester and East avenues to be added to the city’s capital project list.
It approves moving forward on adding raised and separated bike lanes on Colchester and East avenues, some short-term parking spaces along the roads, and realigning the intersection where the two roads meet with new traffic signals or a roundabout. It was approved in a unanimous vote.
The council also spent about an hour in two executive sessions closed to the public. The first dealt with mediation over the latest downtown CityPlace development project dispute. The city is attempting to obtain land from an owner adjacent to the CityPlace project — 100 Bank LLC, owned by property management company Redstone — to move the project along.
The second executive session covered a “personnel” matter that Weinberger declined to provide more detail about. He said it has been “widely discussed” over the past week in the public, indicating that the discussion likely pertained to Burlington International Airport aviation director Gene Richards who was put on administrative leave last week for an undisclosed reason, as first reported by Seven Days.