MONTPELIER — Last summer’s flooding shuttered businesses, displaced residents, and left the city government with a massive budget shortfall due to damage and lost revenue. It’s now shaping Montpelier’s upcoming mayoral race — particularly since one candidate is a longtime climate activist in the city and another is the mayor who led the city through its current crisis.
Climate activist Dan Jones has announced his second candidacy for mayor, running against current Mayor Jack McCullough as well as artist, musician and poet Carlton Anderson.
McCullough is a former city councilor, a lawyer and a longtime housing advocate who easily beat Jones for the mayoral role in 2023. The two agree on what the city of Montpelier should focus on: mitigating future floods, improving the city’s aging infrastructure, and addressing its expensive and tight housing market.
But they have very different visions of how to achieve those goals.
“I’m not running against Jack McCullough per se,” Jones said. “I’m running against the kind of status quo that says we keep doing what we’ve been doing and hold up for a different outcome.”
McCullough, by contrast, asked voters to be patient and wait for the existing plans of the city government to bear fruit.
“Our mindset was not that this is going to be a one year thing (that) we did for one year and everything will be back to normal — because we don’t think everything necessarily will be back to normal,” he said.
Anderson, a former truck driver, has a similar attitude to Jones. He believes that the government system is due for an overhaul. Anderson is a member of the city’s Planning Committee.
Anderson cited four priorities for his platform: the flood, the unhoused population, affordable housing and cognitive diversity, or as he describes it, “working with all people, from boots on the ground to the privileged perch.”
The issues that are driving the mayoral race are also playing out in the sole competitive City Council election for District 1. There, current Councilor Dona Bate is being challenged by Adrienne Gil and Nat Frothingham.
Old gripes, new urgency
The 2023 Montpelier mayor’s race focused on two of the key issues at the time: the city’s aging water system and disagreement over the future of a property on Country Club Road, newly purchased by the city.
Those issues are still line items in the city budget and the subject of heated debates between residents on Front Porch Forum. But now they’re sitting alongside key priorities that the city needs to address in the wake of the July flooding.
In the seven months since the flood, McCullough and the City Council have faced a double-sided challenge. On the one side is the expense to repair municipally-owned flood-damaged buildings; on the other, lost property tax revenue of abated properties. Combined, they have put a hole in Montpelier’s budget.
The city cut several positions and changed other employees’ schedules to reduce overtime and keep the budget increase below the rate of inflation, McCullough said. But the council was able to fully fund the capital improvement plan, which includes money for roads and other infrastructure improvements, he said.
On Friday, the city also announced that it would continue to fund a 10-year plan to replace critical water lines. The city has suffered from frequent water main breaks from a combination of aging pipes and high water pressure.
McCullough still believes that there’s enough money in the budget to continue work on the Country Club Road property redevelopment, which would include new housing that he said the city sorely needs. The city has commissioned initial plans for the site and is working on amending zoning laws to allow the development.
He estimated that shovels could break ground in late 2025 or 2026.
“This is a long-term investment,” he said. “It was always going to be a long-term investment, and it’s gonna pay long-term benefits for the city.”
Jones and Anderson were critical of the city’s progress on these issues. Jones is a supporter of new housing, but he doesn’t think the Country Club Road project is the best way to go about providing it.
“We’ve now spent another $350,000 on planning for Country Club Road this year,” and the city hasn’t even finished the engineering study yet, he said.
He believes more money should go into urgently replacing the water pipes. Just before the July floods, he helped form a group called Resilient Montpelier to advocate for a more comprehensive response to that problem.
“We were about to go to the City Council to say, ‘please, you’ve got to start finding the resources to do this. We’re getting dangerous,’” he said.
Anderson said the city already has the framework it needs to address critical changes, going back to the 1996 master plan. It just hasn’t had the leadership and initiative to actually go about doing it, he said.
“It’s about drawing the linear narrative of all the stopping blocks in a way we can look at them together and deem what really is important for action,” he said.
Separate from the mayoral race, Montpelier residents are also tasked with another decision related to the housing crisis: Whether to limit evictions in the city to “just cause” evictions. The measure is similar to ones passed in Burlington and Winooski that have stalled at the Statehouse, where changes to municipal charters must be approved.
Although McCullough doesn’t have a direct say in the referendum as mayor, he said that he supports it in general.
“I have spent a considerable part of my professional life defending tenants against unjustified evictions, including fighting for just cause eviction in the Legislature,” he told VTDigger in an email. “We are now in a crisis of housing undersupply, high rents, and homelessness, and evictions without just cause can be life threatening.”
Jones wrote in an email that he supports the ordinance as “protection from a chaotic rental environment,” but that he wished residents had more time to discuss the approach.
“I look forward to leading a community discussion around what steps we need to take” to create more housing, he wrote.
Post-flood priorities
When Jones walks around Montpelier, he sees all the things about it that need to change. In fact, sitting in Capitol Grounds on a crowded weekday morning, he started pointing out things the owners might want to do to prevent future flooding, like moving the kitchen upstairs.
“And it’s going to cost money,” he said, but it’s worth it to prevent Montpelier from becoming a “ghost town.”
“I’ve talked to a number of people, merchants who say: If it happens again, I’m not gonna bother. And I understand completely,” he said.
Jones has led several initiatives to change the capital, all with the same goal — to prepare Montpelier for climate change and limit its contributions toward it. But this is the first year he’s lived through a natural disaster that experts believe was linked, in part, to climate change.
When the three candidates talk about their visions for the city of Montpelier post-flooding, they talk about three very different physical environments, from the city’s layout to its balance of homes, businesses and greenspace.
Jones’ plan would perhaps have the biggest changes. Among them are widening the channel of the North Branch River, moving more businesses to the less flood-prone areas of Court and Barre streets, and getting rid of parking lots to expand the floodplain.
That last point is a long-term gripe Jones has had with city planning. When he first began climate activism in the city, he used satellite maps of Montpelier to estimate that 65% of downtown is covered with parking, which he said limits housing development and encourages workers to commute into the city by car rather than walk or take public transport.
In McCullough’s Montpelier, most of the downtown businesses would remain where they are, but he’s hopeful that raising some buildings and renovating others can help prevent or at least reduce the damage if and when Montpelier floods.
“The new buildings that were built to those standards didn’t flood,” like the City Center, he said.
Jones and McCullough spoke on the need for a regional solution and for help from the state government to manage the watershed.
“Communicating with other towns upstream and downstream to address things like flood, floodplains, flood retention, is going to be a big activity for us, as a city and as a region,” McCullough said.
Anderson has a different focus altogether: creating projects that would draw in new visitors to generate revenue. His ideas varied from building an elevator from Elm Street to Hubbard Park for people and bikes, to creating a welcome center with a see-through floor over the North Branch for people to see the water.
Anderson was homeless for a time in Los Angeles, which he said gives him a different perspective on the plight of the unhoused residents of Montpelier. He suggested a new shelter village in one of the city’s lesser-used parking lots, similar to the pod dwellings in Burlington.
Jones and McCullough are at odds over how well they think the city handled its emergency response during and immediately after the flood. Jones said the city should have had police conduct door knocks to warn residents and gotten the National Guard to come help.
Anderson was also critical of the city’s response. Browsing through his photos of the flooding, he pointed out a picture of a tent pitched precariously between flooded areas behind State Street, a sign of the city’s insufficient services for the unhoused population.
McCullough conceded that the city’s emergency shelter plan, to send residents to the Barre Auditorium, was flawed. The roads between the two cities flooded, making it impossible for residents to access the shelter while the water was high.
But he praised the hard work of city employees to clean up after the flooding. Residents have often praised the work of Montpelier Alive, a downtown business organization, for coordinating cleanup volunteers. McCullough pointed out that city employees were working at that tent, too.
“What Montpelier Alive did was great, but I do think city employees should have more credit than people noticed,” he said.
