Despite their widely different viewpoints and diverging backgrounds, there’s one thing all three candidates for Montpelier’s mayor can agree on: There are some tough choices ahead.
Three men have stepped up to campaign for the seat after Anne Watson vacated it to serve as a state senator, making this the most competitive mayoral race the city has seen in a decade.
Those men are Jack McCullough, city council president and Watson’s temporary replacement; Richard Sheir, a producer for local civic news station ORCA Media; and Dan Jones, director of the Sustainable Montpelier Coalition and former head of the city energy committee.
Montpelier, with a population just shy of 8,000, is the state capital and a relatively well-off community. Its household income is about $4,000 above the state average, and its poverty rate is about half the state’s poverty rate, according to census data.
But some of Vermont’s biggest challenges have crept into — and at times, literally underneath — the city limits.
Montpelier has reported 260 water main breaks in the past 10 years as the city’s aging pipes burst under its high water pressure, costing the city more than $1 million in emergency repairs. Homeowners, landlords and businesses have gone without water and sometimes shelled out their own money to make repairs.
Sheir and Jones cited the water issues as their primary reason for running.
“The bottom line is that the near absence of any kind of meaningful oversight and accountability has resulted in the present major crisis in under-the-street infrastructure,” Sheir said in his policy platform.
Jones also cited the city’s water woes in a recent interview.
“You actually can’t have a resilient future without a functioning water system, and ours is coming apart,” Jones said. “If I believe in this sustainable, resilient future, maybe I’m gonna want to start becoming an outside force. And that’s why I decided to run for mayor — which was not a lifelong dream, believe me.”
At the same time, all three candidates agree that the city needs some form of development to lessen the squeeze on its housing market.
Montpelier has median rent around $1,100, according to the census, higher than the state average but lower than larger cities like Burlington and Essex Junction. But Montpelier also has a notoriously low vacancy rate. As of this writing, there were only three apartments listed on Craigslist for rent in Montpelier, and a single apartment on Zillow. (About half of the city’s housing units are rented, according to the census.)
Finding ways to fix the city’s water and housing problems without raising the city budget by astronomical proportions was a key concern for all three candidates as they spoke with VTDigger.
“If you say, ‘Oh, I’m going to sit and make cuts in this budget that will make a serious difference’ — find them for me,” Sheir said.
McCullough agreed that Montpelier is going to have to look for the money.
“It’s hard to picture the people in Montpelier, the water users, being able to support (the piping solution) at any kind of reasonable time horizon,” he said.
The establishment versus the iconoclasts
All three mayoral candidates are Montpelier residents of more than a decade. In fact, Sheir and Jones share a similar journey to becoming Montpelierites. Each fell in love with Montpelier while on a visit and bought a house in the capital with their spouse. All three are homeowners.
McCullough can claim the longest tenure in the city, having lived in Montpelier since 1983. He first joined the city council to fill Watson’s seat when she became mayor in 2017.
Housing has “always been one of my main areas of advocacy,” he said. He’s worked as an attorney for Vermont Legal Aid to represent renters, protecting them from eviction and challenging substandard housing. He served as head of the Montpelier Housing Authority for 25 years.
Yet few major housing projects have progressed during his time as city council president. Along with cost, he said the main roadblock is “a long history of neighbor opposition to housing development.”
There have been a number of times where a property owner has put forward a proposal within zoning rights, “and neighbors came out and mobilized to say they don’t want it there,” he said. “And that sometimes is enough to get the developer to get up and go away because who wants to be forcing themselves into a neighborhood where the people around them don’t want them?”
One exception so far seems to be the former Elks Country Club property, located a few minutes from downtown along Route 2.
In 2022, voters supported a measure to purchase the property for $2 million. It’s now undergoing a public discussion process for housing, along with recreation options and nature preservation.
But the three candidates disagree on what to do with the property. Sheir supports creating housing but wants a six-month deadline for planning put in place to rush things along. Jones believes the purchase was a waste of money and would look into selling the property so Montpelier could stop making new bond payments of about $100,000 a year.
McCullough still has faith in the process. He said he’s encouraged by community feedback for two of the three models the developers have put forward, which would include some sort of new housing development.
He said there has been some progress on other developments, like a housing project on Isabel Circle, and spaces above downtown businesses that have been converted into apartments.
McCullough is also hopeful about the slow, steady progress the city is making on fixing its water issues. Montpelier is under a 50-year, $83 million plan to replace all of its piping, including the ductile iron pipes that appear to be more likely to burst.
In the process, it also plans to repave the city’s bumpy, worn-out roads, which are one of residents’ top complaints, according to a survey from The Montpelier Bridge. First on the list is East State Street, which is slated for a two-year project that would replace both the pipes and the roads they lie under.
Jones and Sheir were far more skeptical about the city’s ability to finish the water project.
“It’s obvious the administration … would like to avoid that kind of expense because the voters are going to be more than upset with them,” Jones said. “Well, we don’t even have a good picture of what’s required, don’t know where the pipes are. We don’t know where the weak points are.”
Jones is a self-described “sustainability advocate.” Almost every issue he discussed led back to the city’s need to rethink its systems from the ground up to build in more resiliency for the future of climate change-related extreme weather, energy shortages and limited resources.
He’s previously worked on a design plan to rip up the city’s parking lots to build denser housing — which hasn’t really gone anywhere, he said — and the experimental public transportation system MyRide, which he said was a “good idea” that went “to the state (agencies) to die.”
As mayor, he said he would plan for a more comprehensive, systems-based approach to tackling the different issues the city is facing while also taking a hard look at city spending and seeing if the administration is “overburdened with personnel.”
The city budget is slated to increase more than 7% in the next year, leading to a similar rise in residents’ property taxes, according to city documents.
When it comes to overcoming potential opposition to his ideas, Jones said he would like to open up city meetings to hear a wider variety of voices with town halls on major issues.
“As a small town with the right values, and I do believe we have the right values, we could mount an adaptive response (to climate change),” he said. “But that means we actually have to have a conversation about it.”
Sheir’s plan for running Montpelier is similar. He would triage the city’s piping problems and set up a “day of reckoning in September” when plans for both the Elks Country Club property and the city’s pipes would come due.
“I’m on the clock. If I’m mayor, I promised my wife and son to be there for one year,” he said. Montpelier mayors generally serve a two-year term.
Sheir also wants to limit the power of some of the city’s other institutions. He said the city manager, Bill Fraser, should be taken off of city planning on infrastructure projects.
“Just taking care of addressing the infrastructure is more than enough for the city manager,” Sheir said. “But it’s a direct conflict of interest when they’re setting the planning schedule as well.”
Fraser declined to make any comments regarding the mayor’s race and said the office would work with whomever is elected.
Sheir said he would put new steps in place to create some distance between the city council and two social justice-related committees: the Homelessness Task Force and the Civilian Police Review Board.
He said the task force should have to consult interest groups such as business owners and faith communities before it presents any proposals to the city council. Ken Russell, leader of the task force, called Sheir’s plan “absurd,” pointing out that those interest groups have already been consulted in plenty of task force meetings.
Sheir said he also would repeal the city’s homeless encampment policy, passed in the summer of 2021. The city allowed people experiencing homelessness to camp on public property under certain circumstances, including in Hubbard Park, which previously had a total camping ban.
“A lot of people who are regulars are frightened” by the prospect of people camping in the park, he said.
It’s unclear how many people are actually taking advantage of the city’s leniency. Russell said a “couple dozen” people slept outside somewhere in Montpelier last summer, but no one is tracking where they actually end up. “Most people are just trying to … find a peaceful place to be left alone,” he said.
McCullough defended the city’s handling of homelessness so far. “Montpelier was never going to end homelessness,” he said, but he thought “we’ve done about as well as we could.” The city has worked to expand shelter space and hired a peer support worker to connect with people sleeping outside.
“We’re talking about people who are members of our community,” he said.
Despite the grand plans of the candidates, Sheir pointed out that the mayor’s powers are actually pretty limited. Montpelier’s mayor doesn’t even have the power to set annual priorities. Instead, they are determined by consensus at an annual retreat.
“The mayor is one co-equal voice among seven in the room,” Sheir wrote in his voters’ guide.