Updated on August 11, 2023.
A review of Burlington’s management of its Juneteenth celebrations, first held in 2021, found no evidence of theft. However, a report detailing the review, by an outside law firm, alleges “mismanagement or carelessness” by organizers leading up to the 2022 event.
The city opened a financial review in March after Tyeastia Green, Burlington’s former director of racial equity, inclusion and belonging, who helmed the original celebration, faced questions about how she managed a Black History Month event at her subsequent job in Minneapolis.
Reached on Thursday afternoon, Green said the report misrepresents her work in Burlington. Green and her supporters, including former state representative Kiah Morris, plan to confront Mayor Miro Weinberger at Monday’s city council meeting.
“I demand an apology, and I demand that my integrity, my name, be restored in the state of Vermont,” Green said on Thursday afternoon, after the city released the report. “And I think that Mayor Weinberger needs to step down. He has proven time and time again that he is a racist mayor.”
Asked for a response, Weinberger’s spokesperson Samantha Sheehan wrote, “Once again Tyeastia is responding to public concern about her professional work by making personal accusations against others.
“Following the events in Minneapolis, it would have been professional malfeasance for Burlington not to commission this financial review,” she wrote. She added that the mayor has worked to “advance racial equity in Burlington,” most notably by creating the office that Green once led.
The 2021 Juneteenth event, the city’s first, was widely lauded. Green also helped plan the 2022 Juneteenth celebration but left her job in March 2022, a few months before it was held.
The report alleges that Green initially asked the city for $100,000 to put on the 2022 event, a budget that later was increased to $180,000. It says before she left, Green told the city that she’d received $300,000 in private donations for the event, but officials didn’t find any evidence of these pledges. Later, only $103,000 of private sponsorships came in.
The event cost $414,677, and the city made up the $131,658 difference.
The report says Green and an event planner said the 2022 Juneteenth budget was always “intended to be $500,000.” But the review found “no evidence” that a budget of that amount was shared with the Board of Finance or the City Council.
Green, meanwhile, didn’t know about the inquiry until she was contacted by Seven Days back in March. She requested to see the report before it was released to the public, she said, but got no response.
After reading the report when the city released it on Thursday afternoon, Green told Seven Days that it’s misleading and contains lies. Green said she was only the “visionary” for the 2022 event, and Zach Williamson, the festival and event director at Burlington City Arts, was responsible for all contracting with vendors. She questioned why he was not included in the report. (The report contains conflicting information about who handled the contracting.)
Green, who spoke to the auditors, said the report misconstrued her words. For instance, she maintained that she never said she had already secured private donations for the 2022 event, only that that was her goal.
The report also questioned Green’s decision to hire out-of-state vendors, including a traveling history museum, for the event. Green called this criticism ridiculous, noting that Vermont doesn’t have any such museums. This isn’t the first public spat between Green and Weinberger. In early 2021, Weinberger removed Green, a Black woman, from overseeing a consultant’s review of the city police department, insinuating that she would be too biased to manage the project. He appointed a white, male department head but then reversed course and apologized after catching flak for the decision.
This article appears in The Animal Issue 2023.
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