This commentary is by Meaghan Emery, vice chair of the South Burlington City Council.
I’m very gratified by the outcome of the election on Town Meeting Day and thank South Burlington voters for their confidence and faith in me.
I’m also very heartened because they rose to my call that we as a city urgently address two crises that we’re facing here in South Burlington and throughout the region and country: a housing crisis (and related fiscal challenges), compounded by the climate crisis facing the planet.
The voters answered affirmatively to the call for balance by electing both Tim Barritt and me so that the South Burlington City Council could move forward with these priorities, confirming that they are indeed their priorities.
During the campaign, I answered many residents’ questions with emails and phone calls and responded to comments on my social media posts. I was lucky enough to catch some of them at home when going door-to-door, which allowed me to directly hear their concerns, their feedback, and requests. Now, as a newly reelected official, I will seek to respond to them by actively working on concrete solutions.
Given the challenges we face, it will take many of us working together to reach our goals.
Councilors do not work alone. Our whole mission is to establish relationships with others so that the political will is there to meet identified objectives and realize desired outcomes. This is true on the council itself, but also in our public deliberations with our advisory committees and commissions, our city staff, our regional, state,and federal partners, and most importantly with the public.
During the campaign, it was suggested that my commitment to tackling climate change weakened my resolve to address the housing shortage, which is false. My challenger also questioned the legality behind a public endorsement that I had received from a local organization called Voices of the Environment — VOTE — which formed a political action committee this Town Meeting season. This allegation, too, had absolutely no basis, and I repudiate its implications.
Members of the public can and have organized themselves into policy-minded groups to address a specific issue, whether the need for business-friendly policies, a halt to F-35 flights, land conservation, or, more recently, climate change action steps. These groups engage with the council, as do members of the public, through emails, letters and phone calls, in addition to public meetings.
VOTE made itself known to me and all the candidates when we announced our campaigns. In addition to its stated mission of “protecting the remaining precious natural resource lands in South Burlington from relentless development pressure,” VOTE was seeking candidates who shared similar positions on 12 different issues, and it chose to endorse Tim Barritt’s and my campaigns based on our responses to the questions made publicly available on the group’s website. My challenger’s responses are there too.
Let me be clear. I consider myself a “little guy,” and I have in all seven campaigns that I’ve run been an advocate for the “little guy.” And so, I understand the concern that political action committees create the perception that candidates are bought — and that this corrodes the public trust.
For this reason, I ask VOTE members reading this commentary to reconsider forming a PAC. And yet, I am struck by this: VOTE’s mission is to advocate policy in line with the state’s climate action goals, which are designed to protect the little guy. One of the guiding principles of the Vermont Climate Action Plan is equity.
People with deep pockets will likely manage — or have the luxury of believing they can manage — the personal and social upheavals that climate change will bring. Studies show that climate change will most affect those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and ethnic minorities.
This fact makes my commitment to climate action and creation of environmentally responsible, mixed-income neighborhoods all the stronger, and so, I do wish to publicly thank the South Burlington residents who joined together in order to raise awareness about the link between local land-use policy, equity, and climate change.
I do intend to continue to lead in the city’s effort to move the goals of community building and environmental and economic sustainability forward. As the voters said, we can and must do all of this.
My central concern in writing this commentary is this, and it’s larger than this one election and so residents will hear me talk about it over the year to come. If “big money” is here to stay in South Burlington politics — for instance, a sitting councilor spent more than $18,000 on his council run just two years ago and an additional $10,000 last year for a total of nearly $30,000 — then PACs are, sadly, likely here to stay.
It’s regrettable, to my mind, and I don’t have a solution to offer other than following Vermont’s campaign finance law that requires transparency in reporting all PAC donations and a strict separation between PACs and candidates. Unless we can all agree to campaign spending limits and then apply pressure on local candidates to abide by unwritten rules, there really isn’t any other way.
Ultimately, though, if candidates for public office are not in tune with the community, we will not be very effective at what we aim to do. This is what elections are all about. They place a check on elected officials and give residents a direct say in the direction of local policy.
As I digest the level of support I received in the lead-up to the election and the outcome, I do believe that my reelection was a referendum on my record and policy positions, increasingly focused on addressing the housing and climate crises and building our economic base to keep South Burlington on a sustainable path.
People voted for me out of an understanding of the size and complexity of the far-reaching problems we face, and I am humbled that they saw me as someone ready to tackle our numerous challenges. The vote was also, I hope, an affirmation of my transparency, which is one of the reasons why I have written this commentary.
Thank you, South Burlington, for again giving me the honor of representing you. I look forward to the work ahead.
