The controversy that tore Barre City’s Diversity and Equity Committee apart started with a few minutes of chitchat at the end of its meeting on Aug. 15.
“You want to do a roundtable and see how people are feeling about life?” said Joelen Mulvaney, chair of the committee. “William, you got anything to say?”
“Well, I was the talk of the town, I don’t know if anyone saw that,” said committee member William Toborg, referring to a column in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus that highlights local news.
“Why don’t you say what it was about?” asked Ellen Kaye, vice chair of the committee.
Through questioning from committee members, Toborg revealed that his van had been targeted and backed into by another van at a polling station, where he was campaigning against Proposal 5, the ballot item also known as Article 22 that would cement the right to abortion in the Vermont Constitution.
Several members of the six-person volunteer committee reacted with fury, lambasting Toborg for his anti-abortion beliefs and the sexist ideology they said it represents. After the meeting, Mulvaney emailed Toborg, demanding he resign and threatening to mute him at future meetings, according to the Times Argus.
The committee’s reaction has divided Barre residents. At two multihour debates at recent City Council meetings, residents were split between supporting and criticizing the committee, arguing over whether Toborg’s free speech rights were violated and whether anti-abortion beliefs should disqualify someone from serving on a committee devoted to promoting racial and gender equity.
But multiple committee members have said their issues with Toborg go beyond his work opposing Proposal 5, and that he has a history of bringing his ideology into the committee.
Despite recent work to implement equity measures citywide — such as trainings and policy evaluations — many of the committee’s efforts have been stymied from the beginning. The very reason for the group’s creation was to create a policy on flying the Black Lives Matter flag, but the City Council voted down its recommendations.
Barre City is not the only Vermont community where struggles involving municipal diversity, equity and inclusion bodies have spilled over into public debate. In June, St. Albans voted to remove a committee member who questioned whether the body was even necessary. Burlington’s director of racial equity, inclusion and belonging, a paid position at a city department created in 2020, left the job in February, several months after the mayor in March 2021 faced criticism for attempting to remove her from oversight of a study on policing.
On Oct. 4, Barre city councilors abandoned a measure that would have disbanded the committee, instead opting to suspend the committee’s work for three weeks for a “timeout” so tempers could cool, as city councilor Thom Lauzon described it.
The City Council plans to vote Tuesday on whether to ratify the suspension.
A long journey to suspension
Barre City formed the Diversity & Equity Committee in June 2020. The city passed a resolution citing the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and condemning systemic racism, and said the committee would “combat these social injustices” and review the city’s policing policy.
Almost immediately, the committee was asked for a recommendation on whether the city should allow the Black Lives Matter flag to fly on municipal flagpoles. In November of that year, the committee voted in favor of allowing the flag to fly.
“In a City of granite resolve built by immigrants on lands of the Abenaki, we are confronted with a long national history of injustice against the Black Americans that reverberates in every community and heart across this great country following recent events,” the policy said.
But the city council did not adopt the committee’s recommendation. At first, the council planned to hoist the Black Lives Matter flag in tandem with, or back-to-back with, the “thin blue line” flag that demonstrates support for law enforcement.
Ultimately, the issue went to voters. Barre residents decided on Town Meeting Day that only official flags — such as the American, state and city flags — could be displayed on city property.
“It’s kind of a disappointment how it all turned out,” committee member Christopher Roberts told VTDigger.
The committee has expanded to other aspects of equity efforts in the past two years. It created an “equity assessment tool” based on a statewide rubric that would allow city officials to consider new proposals through the lens of equity and inclusion.
Emily Wheeler, a recently added member of the committee, told VTDigger the group has been working on equity training for city leadership and a community reading program that would have middle schoolers read “March,” a graphic novel by the late civil rights advocate and former U.S. Rep. John Lewis.
“The committee has planned and organized a lot of work at a lot of different levels,” she said. “And being suspended for three weeks, it’s very challenging to see the momentum of our work going forward.”
When the committee was formed, there were no criteria for joining it, Roberts said. Interested volunteers just had to submit a statement to the City Council for review.
Now, the committee has created a mission statement and defined terms such as “diversity” and “equity” to help direct its focus.
“Most of us are in agreement about the goals of the committee, but not all of us are, and that’s led to the problems that we have now,” Roberts said.
Toborg told the City Council on Sept. 27 that he does believe in the committee’s goals of combating systemic racism and “fighting for the disadvantaged.”
In fact, “what brings me to my conservative and my pro-life beliefs is fighting against the powerful,” he said at the City Council meeting.
But minutes from the diversity and equity committee’s meetings suggest that he has a history of making comments that other members viewed as provocative.
In 2020, Toborg called the Black Lives Matter movement divisive and said it was connected with rioting, according to the minutes. He was the only committee member who did not vote in favor of the flag policy, instead abstaining.
When Kaye shared stories of people of color’s experience with racism in Vermont, including accounts of Confederate flags being displayed, Toborg said he had never seen a Confederate flag around and suggested people might be misinterpreting actions they experience as racism, according to the minutes.
In January 2021, Toborg said the committee should consider issuing a statement in support of people who have not been vaccinated against Covid-19, saying that they have been unfairly persecuted and oppressed, according to the minutes. Committee members said that fell outside the organization’s mission to focus on historically marginalized communities.
In response to an interview request, Toborg told VTDigger that because the committee was suspended, he would not comment on any committee matters during the suspension.
Toborg has been involved in city politics outside of the committee as well. He lost his bid for the Barre City School Board in March 2022. Toborg started his career as a teacher, then worked as a state employee for more than 20 years, according to the Facebook page for his campaign.
And he has repeatedly spoken out against Proposal 5, the abortion rights amendment, in the past few months, including at the most recent City Co uncil meeting on Oct. 4.
To committee chair Mulvaney, that viewpoint is incompatible with the stated goal of the committee to promote fair treatment and participation of all groups in society. “There is no reconciliation between upholding women’s rights to privacy and penumbral rights to health care, and removing those rights,” she said at the Sept. 27 City Council meeting.
Roberts said he didn’t object to someone being personally against abortion, but was concerned about having a committee member who thinks the government should ban abortion and control “half the population’s bodies.”
At City Council meetings about the controversy, members of the public spoke about how the committee needed a diversity of opinions and beliefs. But Roberts said that criticism is disingenuous.
“The right has been very, very clever in hoisting progressives by their own petard by using this wedge — saying ‘oh, well, you’re not really for diversity, because you don’t believe in other opinions,’” he said.
But the committee’s purpose is to promote “folks in Barre who have not really had a voice,” he said, and Republicans calling themselves the true victims is “kind of intellectually dishonest.”
Across the state
There’s no comprehensive list of communities that have diversity and equity committees, but the Vermont League of Cities and Towns links to 11 committees, from Essex to Glover to Middlebury to Putney.
Ted Brady, executive director of the league, said it provides resources and best practices to places that are looking to do more work on “Justice, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging,” the league’s preferred term.
Brady said that it’s very common for such committees to play an advisory role, meaning their proposals may ultimately be voted down by councils or selectboards.
“Welcome to municipal government,” Brady said. “There’s absolutely no issue that a town needs to act on unless a majority of the selectboard members, city councilors or village trustees agree. That is just the nature of democracy.”
Equity issues can come with a certain amount of “passion” behind them, he said, which can expose “one of the imperfections of democracy, which is that progress is slow, progress is at best imperfect.”
“And when you’re dealing with something that people feel so passionately about, that has centuries of complexities attached to it, it certainly does seem to expose some of the shortcomings of our systems,” he said.
He pointed to some signs of progress, such as the fact that about 70 communities have adopted the Vermont Declaration of Inclusion, an official statement that a town or city “condemns racism and welcomes all persons.”
Brady said he didn’t know the details of the Barre situation well. Asked whether he believes that diversity committee members need to meet certain requirements in order to join, he said the league’s equity committee charter has a requirement: “You have to believe that doing this work is important.”
“That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want a diversity of opinions on how to do that work,” he said. “You want the person who is going to challenge you as to how this work should be done. But hopefully there’s an agreement that the work should be done.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the Burlington mayor’s removal of the city’s racial equity director from an oversight role.