Burlington residents are set to vote on five ballot items in the city’s March 1 election, including a bond question that would raise property tax rates if passed.
City councilors gave their blessing to three of those items — a raise in the municipal tax rate, a bond to upgrade downtown streets and Mayor Miro Weinberger’s second attempt at a bond for other infrastructure projects — at their Monday night meeting.
Councilors also gave final approval to the language of a fourth item, which would bar the city council from regulating sex work. The fifth item, the Burlington School District budget, was approved by school commissioners at their Jan. 18 meeting.
Along with casting ballots on the five questions, the city’s annual election will decide who represents Burlington’s eight “wards” on the City Council. Wards make up eight of the body’s 12 seats, with “districts” (the combination of two wards) accounting for the other four.
While all four of the measures the council addressed Monday night received broad support, none of them passed unanimously. Some of the council’s more fiscally conservative members opposed or expressed concerns about Weinberger’s proposals to increase the municipal tax rate and pass a $23.8 million capital bond. The mayor floated a $25.9 million price tag at the council’s Jan. 10 meeting.
If approved by a two-thirds majority of voters, the capital bond would raise property taxes for residents across the city (not to be confused with the other bond on the ballot, which would raise the taxable value of some properties downtown but would not show up on a tax bill).
Yet, even if voters shoot down the measure, they still could pay more in taxes than they’re used to — a consequence of Burlington’s reappraisal last year, which caused the value of some homes to skyrocket.
The prospect of an increased tax burden on top of the reappraisal led Councilor Ali Dieng, I-Ward 7, to vote against sending the capital bond to voters.
Dieng said the proposed capital bond, which would spend $23.8 million on projects ranging from buying fire trucks to repairing sidewalks, was too expensive, though he would support a smaller version. The mayor’s previous ask of $40 million was shot down by voters in a Dec. 7 special election.
The $23.8 million bond would increase property taxes for the next 10 years. This year, owners of a home listed at the city’s median value of $379,100 could expect to pay an additional $35.77 in annual property taxes and an extra $88.73 at the bond’s peak in 2024, officials said.
Dieng was joined by Councilor Mark Barlow, I-North District, in voting against Weinberger’s request to raise the municipal tax rate by 5.5%.
While Weinberger’s budget plan would increase the municipal tax rate, officials did not project a rise in the property tax rate, which is a combination of the municipal tax rate and the education tax rate.
Since the school district is asking voters to approve a budget that would lower the education tax rate by 7% slimmer, the mayor’s proposed city budget increase would still result in the property tax rate being 2.76% less than last year, officials said.
The city’s elevated operating costs, a consequence of historically high inflation, were a significant driver of the proposed tax rate increase, Weinberger said.
But Dieng and Barlow cited inflation as a reason not to back the rate increase.
“There is a sense of urgency to build a high school,” Dieng said, referring to city officials’ effort to replace the former high school building, where cancer-causing chemicals were found. “And in order to get there, we have to make sure that our belts are tight.”
Barlow, meanwhile, proposed using a portion of the city’s American Rescue Plan Act funds to keep the tax rate down.
“Ultimately, we might have to raise the municipal tax rate, but given where we are right now and coming on the heels of the reappraisal, where many taxpayers are already paying more and feeling inflationary pressures, I don’t think now is the time,” Barlow said.
Weinberger, however, pushed back on Barlow’s idea, saying the city could not dispense the pandemic relief funds for normal city expenses.
“The intent of ARPA dollars is not to just pay for inflationary costs,” Weinberger said.
The mayor also signaled his opposition to cushioning the blow of a reappraisal-plus-tax rate increase by spending money from the city’s unassigned fund balance.
“It is not good financial practice to deal with ongoing costs by using one-time monies,” he said.
Yet, part of Weinberger’s tax rate increase is an effort to make up for doing just that. The rate increase phases $1.9 million in “equity investments” — allocated after the national reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020 — into the city’s regular budget. The efforts, which included adding more staff to the city’s Department of Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, are currently paid for using federal dollars.
When pressed by Dieng about spending the federal money on recurring costs, Weinberger defended the moves, saying they were necessary.
“We were clear that we were making this very substantial expansion and that we would need to work together to figure out … how we would fund these new commitments longer term,” the mayor said.
Weinberger’s plan also would earmark $2.35 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to account for uncertainty around how Covid-19 will impact the city’s non-tax revenue streams, such as the money brought in through parking meters and the local meals tax. If the revenue streams don’t run dry, the unused cash would go toward other initiatives.
Separate from the capital bond and tax rate hike, voters also will be asked whether the city should borrow $25.9 million to improve streets and stormwater systems along lower Main Street and a section of South Winooski Avenue. That debt is part of a device called “tax increment financing,” which uses increased property values — and thus increased tax revenue — to pay for upgrades to city infrastructure.
The tax increment financing bond, or TIF bond, would not raise the property tax rate, but instead would collect more tax dollars from new construction and redevelopment projects that were done because of the infrastructure upgrades.
Councilor Perri Freeman, P-Central District, was the sole opposing vote, saying they disagreed with the philosophy of the TIF model.
Sex work charter change
Also on Monday night, councilors maintained the language of a proposed amendment to the city’s charter that would take away the City Council’s ability to “restrain and suppress houses of ill fame … and to punish common prostitutes and persons consorting therewith.”
After a public hearing that stretched on for more than an hour and featured impassioned testimony from advocates for and against the amendment, councilors backed their original language in an 11-1 vote, with Dieng dissenting.
While proponents of the charter change — including Freeman, its sponsor — say it would destigmatize exchanging sexual acts for money, scores of remote and in-person attendees pleaded with councilors to, if they removed the charter’s outdated language, replace it with more contemporary language that still gives them authority to outlaw sex work. To not do so would lead to a rise in sex trafficking, the attendees said.
Initially, Councilor Joan Shannon, D-South District, said the testimony from victims of sex trafficking and interest groups convinced her that removing the council’s ability to pass ordinances about sex work was rash.
Yet the input of other councilors — who pointed out that prosecutors rely on state law, not municipal ordinances, to charge defendants with sex trafficking and sex work crimes — led Shannon to reverse her position again and support the amendment.
Seven of the state’s more than 150 municipalities specifically mention sex work in their charters, according to City Attorney Dan Richardson.
“Prostitution, for example, hasn’t become a booming business in Colchester, South Burlington and Essex,” Councilor Sarah Carpenter, D-Ward 4, said, listing municipalities near Burlington that have no mention of sex work in their charters.
The city already struck the word “prostitution” from its ordinances in October, effectively removing the city’s largely unused ability to punish sex workers. As written, the charter change would prevent the council from reinstating any local rules about sex work.
City redistricting
Also on Monday night, councilors heard from members of the Ad-hoc Committee on Redistricting, which was charged with gathering input on how the city should perform its once-a-decade precinct reapportionment.
According to a report produced by the committee, Burlington residents disliked the current strategy of apportionment, which cuts the city into seven wards that roughly follow neighborhood boundaries as well as one student-dominated ward that the report called “perhaps gerrymandered.”
Residents also had little appetite for the district system, which they said splits a constituent’s political representation in half, according to the report. Some who gave feedback said that wards should be represented by two councilors each, with the possibility of adding more seats to the 12-member body.
While residents favored eight wards, they wanted the precincts to be more compact, the report said. Residents of downtown told the committee that having their own ward, and thus their own spot on the City Council, would better represent their experience of the city, which they say is different from life in surrounding neighborhoods.
The process of city redistricting now goes to city councilors, said Richardson, who will draw up proposed maps. Whatever changes the council makes likely would appear before voters for approval in November, he said, and be taken up by the state Legislature in 2023, with an expected implementation in March 2024.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the margin by which city voters must approve the capital bond question. It is a two-thirds majority. The story also referred incorrectly to the tax impact of the proposed school district budget. Through the allocation of federal money, the plan would result in a 7% education tax rate decrease. The earlier version also mischaracterized how revenue is collected in tax increment financing. Under TIF, tax money is accumulated through the increased property value of new and redeveloped properties that come to the area as a result of infrastructure upgrades.
