There were few points of disagreement at a City Council candidate forum held last Tuesday at the Ira Allen Chapel.
Ahead of Town Meeting Day on March 4, East District opponents Kathy Olwell (P-East) and Allie Schachter (D-East) were both at the forum to make their case for the vacant council seat in their district.
South District candidate Jen Monroe Zakaras (P-South) was the sole candidate from her district to make an appearance. Her opponent, Ranjit “Buddy” Singh (D-South) was not present at the debate.
There are two uncontested races for City Council in the North and Central districts of Burlington, with Melo Grant (P-Central) running for a seat in the Central District and Mark Barlow (D-North) for the North.
At the forum, all three candidates expressed concern regarding Vermont’s homelessness statistics, as the state is now ranked fourth highest in the nation for unhoused people per capita.
“Everyone should have a home or shelter that meets their needs, and that’s just a really fundamental way that I see the world,” Zakaras said.
While there were slightly different approaches in the candidates’ solutions, all supported expanding affordable housing and the use of the Housing Trust Fund.
The fund provides grants and loans to create and maintain long-term affordable housing for moderate, low and very low-income households.
Schachter, who worked in the affordable housing industry for a decade, argued for the need to think creatively about how to effectively use the infrastructure present within the community.
“We also just have a housing crisis in this community,” she said. “So really thinking creatively about how we can be utilizing all the structures that we have in our community to add additional housing, then fully utilizing every metric that exists in our community,” she said.
Olwell expressed similar concerns with the housing crisis, stressing the need for even more affordable housing built closer together as well as funding the housing trust.
“I support funding the housing trust, highly funding it at the moment because I really think that’s what the homeless population needs. So that’s the first thing that we could look at to get that housing funded,” she said.
On policing, the candidates all supported the City Council’s recent decision to abolish the cap limiting the maximum number of officers that the Burlington Police Department could hire.
Schachter said that she supported the symbolic nature of the cap removal, given the hiring difficulties of the department.
“We’re so far below, even with the cap that had been set up, it would have taken us many years to reach the cap, let alone surpass that cap,” she said.
Some disagreement emerged during the discussion of the McNeil biomass generating station, which generates around 35% of the city’s electricity but is also the largest stationary source of greenhouse gas emissions in Burlington.
All candidates agreed that Burlington should move away from using the plant’s energy but disagreed on how and when.
“I think it’s a very outdated plant […] something that’s reached the end of its natural life,” Olwell said.
Schachter offered a more cautious approach, bringing up that immediate closure could take resources and investments that Burlington doesn’t have available.
“It actually provides quite a bit of affordability around the energy costs in our community, which is not, to me, a reason to keep it,” she said. “It does need to be phased out, but it is one of the many considerations of when and how.”
Polling places for the East District will be located at the Mater Christi School for Ward 1 and the Fletcher Free Library for Ward 8.
In the South District, polling places will be located at the Burlington Electric Department for Ward 5 and Edmunds Elementary School for Ward 6.
