This commentary is by Ron Jacobs, who lives in Winooski.
Now that Burlington High School will be returning to its previous grounds in a new building, the question is what will happen to the building formerly known as Macy’s.
Developers are proposing a variety of possibilities. One is a developer who contributed significantly to the failure of the former CityPlace mall project, Donald Sinex, the owner of the Macy’s building.
In 2016, Sinex and then-Mayor Miro Weinberger persuaded voters to approve tax increment financing, a means whereby public funds are raised through a specific tax and then used to upgrade a particular area of a town or city. Usually, funds are loaned to the developers managing the project with an understanding that the money will be repaid once the project is completed.
However, if something changes during development or construction is halted, taxpayers are often left footing the bill. Projected property value increases may not materialize or the development may fall through, leaving municipalities to pay back bonds, potentially harming their credit rating or requiring them to cover debt. Tax revenue from the increment may go to the project rather than to general funds for schools, libraries or public infrastructure. TIF projects can raise surrounding property values, leading to higher taxes for existing residents and small businesses, which may lead to displacement through gentrification.
In the case of CityPlace — now Burlington Square — Sinex left the project, which was then sold to the mega-corporation Brookfield. Brookfield removed itself from the project a couple of years later and was replaced by local developers, who are the folks behind the current development at the former mall site.
So, what is Sinex’s new proposal? He has floated the idea that the site should be an Amazon warehouse. Yes, that’s right: Downtown Burlington, with its parking and other traffic issues, should be the home of a facility that I imagine would magnify the traffic and congestion issues at least a hundredfold.
Besides the permanent disruption such a facility would create in Burlington, there’s the nature of the business and its ownership. Amazon’s largest shareholder is Jeff Bezos, a man whose largely untaxed wealth is arguably made in part by destroying the environment, intensifying surveillance of people’s private and public lives, providing surveillance technology and cloud infrastructure to governments, law enforcement and the military, and abusing its workers.
Furthermore, it is large global corporations like Amazon that have caused the destruction of more local businesses than one can count. Any Vermont politician who claims to support local business but would support Amazon moving into Vermont — in Burlington or anywhere else — is at best naïve. If this proposal isn’t denied outright and politicians start to sign on to it, I would suggest looking into how much Amazon money is funding their campaigns.
Back in 2022, when the CityPlace project was in complete disarray, I suggested an alternative to corporate ownership of downtown that would feature small, locally owned businesses and restaurants; a green space with a small band shell for entertainment; an indoor farmers market owned and operated through the city; and a permanent low-barrier shelter with cots, showers, job search and mental health resources and other appropriate services for the unhomed and other people down on their luck. I suggest it again now. The path toward such a project would begin by bringing the affected property into the public domain, as happened in the 1980s under then-Mayor Bernie Sanders, when citizens rallied to turn the Burlington waterfront into parkland in place of private development.
Like almost everyone else, I have no idea what will happen to the former Macy’s building once school begins in the fall of 2026. But the citizens of Burlington should automatically reject any projects involving Sinex, Amazon and any other corporate or financial schemers.
