This story by Corey McDonald first appeared in The Other Paper on March 16.
South Burlington’s charter committee, by charge of the city council, has over the past year been exploring new governing models for the city, including possibly expanding the number of council seats, creating a local ward system for council elections, and adding a mayoral seat to city hall.
The conversations, which began in earnest last spring, were spurred by a city council resolution in late 2021 asking the committee to investigate whether a ward system or more councilors would provide better geographical representation to a city of more than 20,000 residents.
Now, the charter committee is set to begin a public outreach campaign to generate more conversation around how citizens want to be represented.
“Five city councilors are representing 20,000 people. Is that enough city councilors to represent all the residents of a big city?” city manager Jessie Baker said. “In all the conversations I heard with the council, it wasn’t that they said, ‘We want to have X,’ it was that we should have a conversation in our community about governance and what we might want in the future.”
South Burlington is currently governed by a city manager and council chair form of government, with five councilors elected at-large to represent the city’s population and the city manager appointed by the council.
Andrew Chalnick and Tyler Barnes were this month elected to three- and two-year terms on the board, respectively, replacing Vermont Sen. Thomas Chittenden and Matt Cota. They join current councilors Tim Barritt, Meaghan Emery and Helen Riehle.
Five individuals, meanwhile, are elected to the city’s school board.
But over the years, concerns have arisen about whether this provides equitable representation. Chittenden, who recently stepped down as city councilor, wrote in The Other Paper in 2018 asking whether the town should expand the size of the city council.
“It seems to me that our current (South Burlington) constituency ratio dilutes the quality of relationships with our citizens,” he wrote. “If South Burlington increased the number of councilors to seven, that would be two more people to make connections throughout South Burlington and two more people to bring those connections into city hall.”
“Alternative models with a mix of ward and at-large seats could mitigate this by keeping our local elections ‘local,’” he continued.
Of South Burlington’s five city councilors, four live in the city’s southeast quadrant, a more rural and affluent area of town. Both Cota and Chittenden also lived in the southeast district.
“One of the other things that spurred this conversation was just a general conversation about equity in society, and equity in governance,” Baker said. “There was potentially a perception that when you have four counselors that are all from the same area of the city, are we equitably providing representation for all?”
Residents in the southeast quadrant may have their own set of issues separate from issues present in the Chamberlain neighborhood, for example, said Paul Engels, a member of the charter committee and former city councilor who this month lost in his bid for reelection.
“It’s a question of equal representation,” he said.
The question of campaign and election financing is also present. This year’s city council election saw more than $20,000 in campaign contributions for the five candidates. Four of the five candidates, Engels included, raised at least $3,000.
“As more money is becoming part of the city council election, people who live in the southeast quadrant, who have money or have access to money … are the people who are candidates,” Engels said. “That’s the way it’s evolved.”
Creating a ward system, he said, would be a “solution to the cost of running citywide elections” and would ensure a more equitable representation on the council. He said in meeting minutes that it was the most important thing the committee could do.
Emery, the only sitting councilor not from the southeast quadrant, said she first ran in 2008 to ensure that her part of town did have representation.
“Elections are expensive, and increasingly so because there are wealth disparities between the different candidates,” she said. “There are some real moneyed interests here that can throw their weight behind candidates. By having a ward system, I could see perhaps more obstacles to that kind of uneven playing field. That would be a benefit.”
But she cautioned against thinking “that a councilor from a specific ward is only responsible to that ward.”
“I think that opens up the kind of faction building, ‘I’ll do this for you if you do this for my district’ thinking,” she said. “We really have to think of the city as a whole and let people’s strength of their arguments and the strength of the public’s arguments really be the persuading factor.”
There’s also long been calls from the public to elect a mayor, Emery said. “I can’t say that this is a broad call, and I think that’s what the charter review committee is going to actually be able to measure.”
It’s these pros and cons that the charter committee has been weighing, having spent the last nine months researching the various governing models in Vermont.
Since May 2021, the charter committee has interviewed Montpelier city manager Bill Fraser, Winooski mayor Kristine Lott, and Rutland City mayor David Allaire, exploring the “pros and cons” of each form of government.
The city council, in its 2021 resolution, asked that the committee finish its work by July 2023.
The committee has, as a result, created a public document exploring several governing models: a “strong mayor” system, like Burlington’s; a “weak mayor” system where the mayor would serve as city council chair but has no executive function, similar to Winooski; and the city’s current city manager and council chair model — as well as an expansion of seats on the board and a ward-based electoral system.
Any change to the city’s charter is still months, or years, out. The committee will shape its recommendation based on public feedback. Members plan on sending out a survey to residents and will have several forums to take feedback and solicit ideas from residents based on their pros and cons list.
“If 90 percent of people say they like wards, it could drive us in that direction, regardless of what any of us might feel about it,” Peter Taylor, chair of the charter committee, said. “That’s what the council wanted, for us to get this out to the public and get feedback.”
The committee hopes to formulate a recommendation by the fall and would present it to the city council, who would then have to have its own set of public hearings and then approve a measure to be voted on by residents. Officials have tentatively suggested a possible vote in either March or November 2024.
“We could very well say, from the committee’s perspective, we’re going to advise that you keep it the way it is, and then the council could say, well, we disagree,” Taylor said. “So, it really goes back to the council, and then they determine the direction of how it goes forward.”