Board members of Vermont’s state employees union said they have long battled to support racial justice and denounce alleged abuse in the Department of Corrections — but have faced opposition from board leadership and top staff.
The divide has prompted multiple board members of the Vermont State Employees’ Association to resign, including Brett Pierce, who stepped down last month.
The Department of Public Safety employee said he spent years trying to convince the union to condemn alleged abuse by staff at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility and the now-shuttered Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center. He said the union’s executive director, Steve Howard, kept the board from critiquing Corrections, and that the board’s president, Aimee Towne, would scream at board members who strayed from the party line.
“It just felt like I was wasting my time,” Pierce said. “I felt like there wasn’t much I was accomplishing other than making my own life worse.”
The state employees union represents about 6,000 members.
In 2019, Seven Days first reported on allegations of sexual abuse and drug use at Chittenden Regional, the state’s only prison for women. A law firm contracting with the state later corroborated the report. After Woodside was closed, a lawsuit filed last year alleged systemic abuse against juvenile residents by staff.
According to Pierce, Howard “would continuously come out and, like, deny or downplay that stuff.”
Pierce said a small but vocal minority of Corrections staff had aggressively rejected efforts to condemn colleagues or support progressive advocacy groups such as Black Lives Matter. He described the board’s president, Towne, screaming at members in person and over Zoom — even ejecting them from the video calls if they disagreed with her.
Jacklyn Hickerson, who served as the board’s treasurer and works as an auditor in the Department of Taxes, described similar experiences. She stepped down from the board in September 2021.
“The abuse at the women’s prison — we as a board tried to put out a statement condemning that behavior, but also supporting workers. And there were board members that would not support that,” Hickerson said.
“There is a very strong push to censor anyone that is not in line with Corrections, basically. Until that changes, I don’t think anyone who’s progressive or liberal or green or whatever you want to label them will have a very productive time on the board.”
In December 2020, board member Josh Cox resigned, he said, after the board refused to condemn an incident of hate speech. Like Pierce and Hickerson, he also cited the board’s failure to criticize the Corrections officers accused of sexual abuse at Chittenden Regional.
All three pointed to what they characterized as coordinated verbal abuse and written threats against another former board member by certain Corrections staff when she vocalized support for Black Lives Matter. The former board members said that the union’s leadership, namely Howard and Towne, allowed that harassment to occur.
The former board member, who requested anonymity to avoid further abuse, described receiving persistent threats from current and former Corrections staff over Facebook.
“At every (board) meeting, every possible chance, they would just get up and defame me over and over and over and make underlying threats on the VSEA Facebook pages,” the former board member said.
“There’s just such a major conflict when you have workers who are dedicated to human services and then you have workers who, you know, call their clients animals,” she said, referring to some Corrections staff. “That conflict shows up in our union all the time. The way it’s handled is bullying and harassment and silencing.”
Asked about allegations of verbal harassment at board meetings, Howard denied the accusation while acknowledging that some meetings get intense.
“I have seen, you know, very vigorous debates about issues. I have seen meetings that are, you know — they’re contentious,” he said. “I do not recognize anybody being shouted down because people disagreed with their point of view.”
Howard also said that any generalizations about Corrections staff are misguided.
“I wonder if people who have general ideas about folks at Woodside or folks in Corrections, how many hours have they spent actually sitting in the break room with these men and women and getting to know who they are?”
Asked about the board’s decision not to condemn alleged acts of abuse by Corrections staff, Howard pointed to the need to protect workers from unjust actions by management.
“It’s sort of the basic premise of ‘just cause’ that unions fight for,” he said. “You can’t take allegations and just assume they’re true because you want them to be true or because your political philosophy says they must be true.”
Towne, the board president, said she could only recall one instance of removing a member from a Zoom executive session, a decision she said the other present members voted to sustain.
“Every board member that raises a hand to be recognized is called on and is able to speak without limitations,” she told VTDigger in an email.
Since becoming president of the board, Towne said, she has prioritized transparency.
The divide described by left-leaning former board members is not one-sided. Last year, members of the Department of Corrections sought to leave the state employees union for the more conservative New England Police Benevolent Association, a law enforcement union.
That vote failed by a margin of roughly 2-1.
But despite that thwarted initiative, recently resigned VSEA board members such as Hickerson believe their goals are incompatible with the goals of a vocal faction of Corrections staff.
“Does law enforcement really belong in a union with others?” she said. “I mean, their agenda doesn’t mesh with the average person.”
