When Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger first asked City Councilor Jane Stromberg to sit on a committee that would help select the city’s next police chief, the Progressive Ward 8 councilor said she thought it would be an opportunity to work with a political rival on an issue she felt passionate about.
Months later, her outlook on the appointment has changed.
“I think that this was probably one of the most corrupt things I have ever seen this city take part in,” Stromberg told VTDigger. “I feel used.”
As Burlington’s two-year, on-again, off-again quest to find a permanent police chief reaches what could be its home stretch, some members of the city’s “police chief search committee” — which was created to advise the mayor as he selects a police chief candidate to present for City Council approval — say Weinberger sidelined the body and used it as a prop to validate his eventual pick for the role.
Progressives and Weinberger, a Democrat, have been increasingly divided over the city’s recruitment of a permanent police chief since September, when a job posting for the position netted 21 applicants, none of whom were women. Two of the applicants were deemed worthy of an interview by the mayor’s administration and search committee.
While both the mayor and Progressive councilors have said the pool of candidates is undesirably small, Stromberg and some others charge that Weinberger has shown a lackluster effort to remedy that dynamic in an attempt to select acting Chief Jon Murad as the final candidate.
Weinberger strongly rebuts those claims.
“If the Mayor’s goal at the beginning of this process was … simply to appoint acting chief Murad, he would have saved himself and everyone else a lot of time and effort and appointed Murad in May,” said Jordan Redell, Weinberger’s chief of staff.
“Councilor Stromberg’s criticism of the search committee process is a misguided, partisan attack by a Councilor attempting to shift responsibility for the small pool away from the obstructionist actions of the Progressive Party,” Redell said in a separate statement.
In addition to Stromberg, Melo Grant — a member of the city’s Police Commission — said the committee was not given the opportunity to properly do its job.
“People need to know that this is an above-board process that has integrity,” Grant said. “That is not the case at this time.”
In a Dec. 24 Twitter thread, Stromberg said that Tyeastia Green — the city’s director of racial equity, inclusion and belonging — resigned from the committee because she felt it was not legitimate.
“I deeply regret not resigning from the committee when I started to feel the process become more invalid. I would not have been alone in doing so, as REIB Director Green, had resigned,” Stromberg wrote.
Redell denied Stromberg’s characterization of Green’s exit.
“Director Green made a choice to withdraw from the interview process when it became clear that one of the two finalists was her direct peer,” Redell said. Murad and Green are both department heads for the city.
Green declined to provide a comment on the matter for VTDigger, saying she is not authorized to speak with the media.
Among the concerns Grant and Stromberg voiced were a tendency by Weinberger’s office to hold meetings at inaccessible times for committee members and with inadequate notice as well as a lack of transparency and record-keeping associated with the process.
Redell disputed both of those allegations, saying that committee members were told ahead of time that the body would meet during business hours and that the process was as transparent as the city could make it given privacy constraints surrounding personnel actions.
Friction between Weinberger and Progressives began in September, when the mayor first proposed raising the posted salary of the police chief position. Weinberger told councilors that two national police search firms had informed him the wage was lower than what comparable cities offered and was unlikely to attract top candidates.
Weinberger’s proposal met resistance from Stromberg and fellow Progressive Council President Max Tracy, P-Ward 2, who asked the mayor to re-advertise the position at its previous wage. Weinberger agreed but said that his administration would move ahead with interviewing the two candidates that were deemed qualified.
Among members of the search committee, however, the prospect of interviewing only two candidates did not sit well. At meetings in late October and early November, the committee convinced Weinberger to attempt expanding the pool before interviewing candidates.
While Weinberger suspended the search, he said his decision not to move forward with the two candidates relied on city councilors taking five actions, which he outlined in a Nov. 12 memo. Top among them was raising the position’s salary, though he also requested that councilors kill a Progressive-led effort to reduce the police chief’s authority over officer misconduct.
At a Dec. 20 meeting, Progressives introduced a resolution backing one of the actions: hiring a recruitment firm to find more candidates. While the measure passed, Weinberger effectively killed the resolution by announcing he would not spend the money it set aside since councilors declined to raise the police chief salary.
Progressives decried the move, saying they were willing to back a pay bump had the recruitment firm recommended it. Democrats defended Weinberger’s action, saying a recruitment firm was a waste of money without a salary increase.
The administration now plans to interview the two finalists and present one to the council at an unspecified meeting. Search committee members are invited to attend the interviews, ask questions and offer their input to the mayor, Redell said.
The 11-member committee — it had 12 members before Green’s resignation — includes two representatives from the Weinberger administration (Redell and human resources director Kerin Durfee), two city councilors (Stromberg and Karen Paul, D-Ward 6) and two police commissioners (Grant and University of Vermont professor Suzy Comerford).
Other members are Christina Nolan, the state’s former U.S. attorney; Tim Bilodeau, police chief at the University of Vermont; Oren Byrne, a member of the Burlington police officers’ union; Cathy Davis, president of the Lake Champlain Chamber; and two members of the public who applied to serve on the body: Milton Rosa Ortiz and Scott Waterman.
While Grant and Stromberg agreed to sit on the committee at its inception, Stromberg said she now feels the mayor duped her into joining the committee.
“It was almost like he wanted it to seem like there was this bipartisan group of people backing him up, when there was actually a lot of pushback,” the councilor said.
While Stromberg told VTDigger she “basically resigns” from the committee, Grant said she will remain a member in order to fix the problems she called out.
“I stay because I want to fight for this process, fight for the city of Burlington,” Grant said.
Other committee members told VTDigger they did not see a problem with the search process.
“I thought that the process and the way that the mayor engaged with the search committee was thorough and appropriate,” said Davis, the Chamber president.
Waterman, who served on the committee as a Burlington resident, echoed Davis’s statement, saying it was “inclusive of all folks’ points of view.”
Still, Waterman said Democrats and Progressives have made the hiring of a police chief too political, potentially warding off strong candidates.
“The police chief’s got to run a department based on law enforcement and public safety, not politics,” Waterman said. “If you look at policing in Burlington right now, it’s all politics.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Tim Bilodeau’s surname.
