The Burlington City Council plans to convene remotely until further notice, in response to a record-shattering spike in Covid-19 cases across Vermont.
The change was made Monday by council President Max Tracy, P-Ward 2, in consultation with Mayor Miro Weinberger.
“The mayor fully supports Councilor Tracy’s decision to hold virtual council meetings while we are experiencing the Omicron surge,” Jordan Redell, a Weinberger spokesperson, said in an email.
The council president told VTDigger he received no pushback from other councilors when he told them about the decision.
Councilors have been meeting in a hybrid format since last summer, allowing members of the public and councilors to opt to join in person at City Hall or via videoconference. Before the hybrid format, pandemic-era meetings were held fully online.
But now a fully remote meeting is not legal since Vermont is no longer in a state of emergency, Tracy said.
To comply with the state public meeting law, officials plan to set aside a conference room in City Hall where members of the public can sit and watch the remote meeting, though all of the councilors except Tracy are supposed to tune in remotely.
If they are able, members of the public are strongly encouraged to participate remotely via a Zoom link, Tracy said, rather than coming to City Hall.
A joint meeting on Thursday between the Burlington School Board and the City Council was already planned as a remote event before the council shifted course, Tracy said.
When asked when the council might return to hybrid meetings, Tracy said the council would continue to assess the situation.
“We’re going to need case counts to drop significantly for us to go back there,” he said.
At two of Burlington’s three wastewater plants, the Omicron variant accounted for more than 95% of the coronavirus detected, according to city-provided data, with the Delta variant making up the rest of the samples. The third plant, in the city’s northern neighborhoods, saw Omicron in 75% and Delta in 25% of its coronavirus samples.
The prevalence of Omicron in the city’s wastewater doesn’t give officials any insight into how many residents the variant has infected, Redell said.
Councilor Jack Hanson, P-East District, applauded the move to online meetings, calling it a reasonable response to the surge in cases.
“We want people to participate, and if you do it in person, there’s going to be a decent number of people in the room for hours on end,” leading to potential transmission, he said.
Hanson, who told VTDigger he currently has Covid-19, said he hopes the shift to remote meetings is short-lived.
“I think the hybrid meetings, from an access point of view, have been great,” Hanson said. “That’s the gold standard.”
State legislators debated Wednesday a draft bill that would allow towns and cities to hold meetings completely online, without an in-person location where viewers can watch from, even though there is no state of emergency. The proposed waiving of state open meetings law would last until the end of April.
Kurt Wright, a former Republican City Council president who has criticized councilors for attending hybrid meetings remotely, said he respects the decision to hold meetings remotely. Still, he said, the council should move away from using Covid-19 case numbers as a metric for planning how they will meet.
“We’re going to get to a point soon where it’s not so much about the case counts,” Wright said. “It’s important to be meeting in person.”
