Letters to the Editor (2/21/24)

Prize-Worthy Piece

Congratulations on this revealing and disturbing Decker Towers piece [“The Fight for Decker Towers,” February 14]. It is one of those rare reports that may even effect some kind of change. I hope you submit it for a Pulitzer or other journalism prize.

Elinore Standard

Burlington

‘Rigorous Reporting’

Kudos to Derek Brouwer for his investigative report “The Fight for Decker Towers” [February 14]. This rigorous reporting could finally make a positive difference.

I worked for Champlain Valley Agency on Aging, currently Age Well, when Decker Towers was a comfortable, enjoyable community of lower-income seniors. Seniors deserve a sense of safety and well-being, but when Burlington Housing Authority needed to accept other categories of vulnerable individuals into the housing, they did not have adequate support, and the atmosphere changed. Now, of course, the plague of highly addictive drugs has led to an unprecedented number of ill and desperate people seeking drugs and shelter.

The concerns of the Decker Towers residents must be addressed satisfactorily. I applaud their efforts to come together to gain attention in the hope of solving their current unlivable and dangerous conditions. However, some people taking up arms can only add to the danger. The medical and public health community must step up and take the lead to address what is fundamentally a public health crisis. We need a COVID-19-type response now!

What’s required is access to 24-7 medical assessments, stabilization beds followed by placement in evidence-based drug treatment centers leading to sober living opportunities, continued trauma therapy, skill building, job training/placement and permanent housing. When all this is in place, we can more effectively hold people accountable for their actions.

This effort will take time and be costly, but doing less will cost more, leaving the stairwells at Decker Towers and other public and private spaces to become de facto emergency shelters.

Jean Markey-Duncan

Burlington

No More Hotels

Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger announced on February 8 that there will be less housing at CityPlace [“CityPlace Burlington Developers to Add Hotels, Reduce Housing,” February 8, online]. This is bad news but not an emergency. Why is urgent action by the city council required before the election on March 5 — when we will have a new mayor and council who should chart the future course of CityPlace? Can’t we as a community take a moment and decide what the community wants and needs to replace the lost housing?

What funding was withdrawn, and why? Is there an option to finish the project with less housing with the funding we already have?

Let’s keep it local. We learned over the past nine years that partnering with out-of-state developers failed. Thank goodness for local developers and contractors stepping up and taking charge.

And what about hotels? Downtown Burlington has four beautiful downtown hotels for our small city of 44,595 people. Hotel Vermont, Courtyard by Marriott, Hilton Burlington Lake Champlain and Hilton Garden Inn supply 683 downtown hotel rooms, according to the Burlington assessor’s records. Why do we want to add two more hotels with parking?

The mayor recommends partnering with Giri Hotel Management at CityPlace. Giri bought the former YMCA at 266 College Street on December 9, 2022. For more than year, Giri added no value to the blighted building. What is the level of trust for a new Giri partnership?

Steph Holdridge

Burlington

Make Us Laugh

Could you please run some comics that cause laughter? I know the state/country/world is in a tough spot, but Fun Stuff is basically two pages of graphic angst. Please don’t ever remove Harry Bliss, or I’ll have to up my medication again. Thanks for an otherwise excellent paper.

Gigi Graner

South Strafford

‘Myth of Accountability’

I read with great attention [“Distress Signal: A Lawsuit Accuses Burlington Police of Using Excessive Force on a Black 14-Year-Old With Disabilities,” January 31]. This story finally made it past the city’s officials and out to the public. The light now focused on yet another excessive-use-of-force lawsuit against the Burlington Police Department cannot be understated.

The young man at the center of the event is a Black male on the cusp of manhood, with significant and well-known disabilities. The officers’ behaviors only served to escalate the situation, with predictably severe adverse and traumatic consequences.

I have a particular perspective as a then-contracted counsel to the Burlington Police Commission. Independent counsel is required because of the adverse interests of the city and the BPC, as evidenced here and elsewhere.

I cannot go into detail on the machinations of the commission regarding Cathy Austrian’s complaint. It’s all confidential under the commission’s current enabling ordinance.

The BPC has been the subject of great discussion. Despite repeated efforts to further empower the commission, proposed reforms were recently referred back to the commission by the city council for yet “further study.”

Austrian beseeched the city for a copy of the commission’s investigation report. She apparently needed to file suit to get to tell her son’s story.

I left to avoid further involvement in the façade of police oversight. Without the ability to share its insights with complainants and the public at large, all the commission effectively does is promote the myth of accountability.

Robert Appel

Cabot

Zoning Isn’t the Problem

The increasing number of homeless citizens is a tragic failure [“Shelterless: Burlington Doesn’t Have Enough Emergency Beds, and People Are Getting Turned Away This Winter,” January 31].

It’s also a sly justification — along with high rents, a tight housing market and Act 47 — for a power play to erase the protections against unregulated development that zoning provides.

Of course, we all want good-quality housing for everyone. But Burlington’s zoning is not to blame for the housing crisis. The University of Vermont may bear some blame; some investors may bear some blame. Not the zoning.

Nevertheless, the Neighborhood Code amendment scapegoats current zoning as the problem and celebrates itself as the solution. Just as the mayor and Burlington City Council railroaded the zoning amendments that led to “the Pit,” they are rushing to virtuously pass zoning changes even more dangerously flawed. Neighborhood Code is an end run around environmentally responsible development and respect for neighborhoods it claims are “the soul of our community.”

More duplexes, more triplexes and fourplexes, more condo villages and cottages, too. Absolutely! We have them and can use more. If zoning is really preventing us from building these on lots where they fit and belong, let’s fix it. There are sound and creative ways to add housing and increase density while improving blighted neighborhoods and preserving healthy ones.

Neighborhood Code instead chooses extreme density everywhere. It chooses more blight, and here’s why: It allows the development of 10 units in two structures — a sixplex and a fourplex — on every “residential medium” neighborhood lot indiscriminately — large or small. It allows two fourplexes on every “residential low” neighborhood lot. Way too much.

Michael Long

Burlington

Leave Schools Alone

[Re “Teachers’ Union Raises ‘Significant Concerns’ About Dyslexia Screening Bill,” February 2]: It’s always a well-intentioned instinct, when it comes to light that students are struggling, to throw some legislation at the issue. It’s natural to want to help, to try to cause change that might do … something.

But when it comes to education, I would propose something simple to our legislators: Don’t. Until you have worked within a school and seen firsthand what the situation is and how things are, please stop interfering.

There is a very, very simple reason that the reading levels of students are going down and that reading disorders are going undetected: Teachers are overworked, schools are understaffed, and both have too many expectations placed upon them to have the time or energy to pick up on the very subtle signals that a student is struggling with reading.

Students hide their struggles to avoid calling attention to them, not wanting to be seen as stupid or lesser than those around them. They don’t want to be singled out or talked down to, and many refuse to ask for help. No test or law will correct that.

We need to find ways to properly staff schools and reduce classroom size and teacher workload before we consider adding more demands to what teachers already are tasked with.

Teachers have extensive, continual training that they must undertake for their licensing. We should trust in them, trust in their training and stop backseat driving our schools.

Fran Bellin

Essex

A Vote for Charlestin

In a letter Seven Days published referring to Esther Charlestin’s run for governor of Vermont, the term “carpetbagger” was used incorrectly [Feedback: “‘Carpetbagger’ Candidate,” January 24].

A cursory look at the definition of carpetbagger implies someone seeking office that may provide personal advantage. Considering Charlestin’s experience with racism here in Vermont, considering the racism and threats directed at former state representative Kiah Morris, as well as Vermont’s checkered past and present with racism — if anything, Charlestin’s run for office is putting her at risk. This. Is. Hard.

I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Esther over the past year or so as we shared time and space in the Snelling Center for Government’s Vermont Leadership Institute. Her desire to make an impact where she lives extends far beyond whatever personal gain she might earn.

We need people of vision to step into the breach and push us to be better, whether they’ve been here as Indigenous stewards of this land for 10,000 years, as immigrants with one or seven generations in Vermont, or came here last week.

I’d encourage the writer of the “carpetbagger candidate” letter to visit Esther’s campaign page and learn more. You can, too!

Wayne Maceyka

Hinesburg

One for the Books

There’s more “that’s so Vermont.” [True 802: “Recirculated Favor,” January 24] mentions seven feet of water in the lowest level of Montpelier’s Kellogg-Hubbard Library during the July 2023 flood. During the 1927 flood, the water level in the Kellogg-Hubbard Library was eight feet deeper. That meant water was four or five feet deep on the main library floor. The 1927 flood depth is documented by a marker on the end of the set of shelving closest to the circulation desk. The Kellogg-Hubbard Library in 1927 was helping its sister library even while sustaining its own serious flood damage. Way to go for both libraries, caring for each other through both floods.

Thomas Weiss

Montpelier

Complicated Equation

[Re “With Large Tax Hikes Looming on Town Meeting Day, School Districts Ask the State for Help,” January 31]: Your article concerning large homestead education tax hikes omits any mention of the third component of the tax formula. This item, called the property yield (published by the legislature each year), is the middle element of the triumvirate (the two bookends to the formula being the equalized pupil counts and the common level of appraisal for each town) in calculating this rate. If a school region’s local per-pupil cost is higher than the published property yield, then one can expect higher taxes.

The property yield combined with the CLA adjustment produces a highly volatile result when considering how much these two rates are changing in today’s environment, producing 20-plus percent education tax increases for more than a few towns in the ’24 and ’25 tax years. Not changing this formula promises another ugly year in 2026.

The CLA is punitive, adjusting all properties in a town to today’s market value during a period when property values have soared to unprecedented levels. A town’s CLA is potentially decided from a relatively small number of arms-length transactions. This calls into question how the CLA is used and if it needs to be tempered or replaced completely as it errs on the high side when sale prices are moving rapidly (up), as they are today.

School officials still need to budget responsibly, but the state needs to evaluate its current tax determination model, as it is one of a kind in the U.S.

John Zimmer

Westmore

Zimmer is the Westmore town treasurer.

WWJD?

[Re “Judge Rules Parish Can Demolish Burlington Cathedral,” February 6, online]: The recent judicial decision to allow a demolition of the 20 Pine Street cathedral presents a huge opportunity: Imagine what that site next to the Downtown Transit Center could become.

In a recent community forum on public safety, a Green Mountain Transit worker mentioned the needs that are not being met by folks who take shelter in or near the station hub. It seems like the neighboring lot could be used as a place where people could be provided with basic needs: a place where people could take a shower, get a haircut or a warm meal, and have access to other services. This is possible — and is already happening in other cities.

For example, I used to work at the Low Income Housing Institute in Seattle. LIHI, an affordable housing developer, builds long-term housing, tiny house villages and urban rest stops, the last of which are “hygiene centers in Seattle’s Downtown and Ballard neighborhoods that provide free restrooms, showers, and laundry facilities to homeless men, women, and children within a clean, safe and dignified environment.” (Patrons also receive free toiletries and can wear a pair of overalls until their clothes are laundered.)

King Street Laundry already offers free laundry and community engagement with local partners. Burlington could take this one step further by creating urban rest stops and partnering with organizations like Feeding Chittenden, Food Not Bombs, overdose prevention centers (evidence-based and shown to reduce overdose-related deaths), and mobile treatment teams (with medical staff, social workers, etc. to provide disease management).

Emily O’Hara

Burlington