Anne Chiarello had a question for the governor. It was late July, and the state had just evicted more than 800 people from emergency housing in motels. Some had started pitching tents in Newport, Chiarello’s hometown and the setting for Gov. Phil Scott’s press conference that afternoon.
Chiarello was concerned for the campers’ safety — and their hygiene. Could the state spare some cash for portable toilets and fresh water?
“We need your help,” Chiarello told Scott, “and we need it now.”
Scott didn’t directly address her question. Instead, he floated the concept of state-funded congregate shelters without providing any specific details.
“We’re not turning a blind eye to this,” the governor said. “We know this is difficult for every town and community, but we can’t continue to do what we’ve done in the past and just put people in hotels and motels.”
That’s little solace to cities and towns across Vermont, which, thanks to these motel evictions, are feeling the impact of the state’s homeless crisis more than ever.
Burlington, the state’s largest city, has hired specialized workers and started new programs in response. But smaller towns with far fewer resources are struggling to respond. Local leaders are now echoing the calls that have come from Burlington for years: Vermont needs to take a larger role in managing what is a statewide issue.
The state “should be providing human services, and at this point, they’re not,” Barre City manager Nicolas Storellicastro said. “We’re left holding the bag.”
For years, it was towns’ responsibility to care for the needy. In the late 18th century, Vermonters began electing municipal “overseers of the poor” who provided food, clothing and shelter for the indigent at so-called “poor farms.” The system began to fall out of favor when many people sought relief during the Great Depression, an era that ushered in a slew of federal welfare programs. Vermont lawmakers banned poor farms in 1967, stripping towns of their legal duty to care for the indigent. Two years later, the state’s Agency of Human Services was born.
Lawmakers then couldn’t have envisioned the crisis now enveloping the state. Homelessness exploded during the pandemic, and rates have remained stubbornly high since. Meantime, Scott has decided the state can no longer sustain the motel program, which has cost tens of millions of dollars since the pandemic. Scott has slowly scaled back the program over advocates’ objections.
The state has given towns limited money to open emergency homeless shelters, but competition for the funds is fierce, and the rate of homelessness has far outpaced the number of available beds. Lawmakers passed a bill this spring that would have allowed regional nonprofits to operate the motel program, but Scott vetoed it.
As a result, more people are living outside. The latest Point-in-Time Count, a federally mandated census held on one night in January, reported 270 people were living unsheltered. Officials have said the actual number was likely much higher, and the census preceded the summertime motel exodus.
A lot of those motel residents have landed in Burlington, which has spent millions of dollars dispatching park rangers to encampments and embedding social workers both in the library and police department, among other strategies. Last winter, city staff worked overtime to open a warming shelter on the coldest nights.
But while the Queen City has become emblematic of the problem, it’s far from alone in experiencing it.
In Hartford, groundskeepers hired to mow fields are picking up trash from tenters. And further south, on the Connecticut River, an island between Brattleboro and Hinsdale, N.H., has become a hot spot for camping. Blaming its Vermont neighbor for the influx, the Granite State town is now rethinking plans to rehab two bridges that reach the spit of land.
“We’re working on it,” Brattleboro town manager John Potter said of homelessness generally. “We’d like to figure out a way to improve things here and all throughout Vermont.”
In lieu of state help, towns are trying to manage. But the efforts are costly.
A state grant that helped Montpelier pay for a part-time social worker expired this year. The city is now trying to figure out how to replicate those services with only $50,000 in the budget.
“It’s tricky. This is a priority issue because people are in crisis, and we want to support all community members,” acting city manager Kelly Murphy said. But, she added, “we’re trying to figure out how to do that in the most efficient way.”
Montpelier has long dealt with homelessness, albeit not at the historic levels now. Some smaller cities, meantime, are having to grapple with the issue for the first time.
In Newport, members of a new task force are writing the city’s first-ever ordinance to manage encampments on public land. They’re also looking into Gov. Scott’s suggestion to build a homeless shelter, ideally at a former nursing home that could accommodate both families and individual adults, Mayor Rick Ufford-Chase said.
The building is in poor shape, and no one is lined up to staff the would-be shelter. But the possibility of state dollars is too good to pass up, the mayor said.
Gov. Scott was not available for an interview, and a statement from a spokesperson, Amanda Wheeler, didn’t address Seven Days‘ specific questions about the governor’s plan to pay for new homeless shelters.
“I don’t have any illusion that somehow we’re going to find a magic bullet here,” Ufford-Chase said. “Anything we do is going to be a nonideal fix to a far deeper problem that plagues everybody across the country right now.”
Their strategies may differ, but officials across Vermont agree that local municipalities can’t handle homelessness alone. That’s a message championed by Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, who has called out the state’s lack of action at council meetings and in op-eds. While most of her messages have focused on the Queen City’s woes, a missive last week emphasized that homelessness is a statewide issue.
“If our State is serious about supporting Vermonters, then we cannot ignore the public suffering that is affecting so many Vermont communities,” she wrote in an email newsletter. “Burlington stands in solidarity with other cities across the state that are struggling to meet the extraordinary needs of this moment.”
Scott’s administration, meantime, has largely characterized Burlington’s homeless crisis as one of public safety — and of the city’s own making. At a press conference last week, he suggested that police should arrest people who use drugs in public spaces, some of whom are homeless, and claimed that Burlington hasn’t been specific enough in its requests for help.
City councilors passed a resolution on Monday that provided some detail. Introduced in response to recent violence around City Hall Park, the measure asks Scott to convene health experts to find ways to get more people into drug treatment. It says the city will “make all reasonable efforts” to ensure the park isn’t used after hours — a reference to homeless people sleeping there.
Other towns have focused on the financial ramifications of addressing homelessness. A year ago, a cadre of local leaders held a press conference in Montpelier to demand the state take charge of the crisis. The officials asked for compensation to offset the burden on first responders and for the state to pay taxes on rooms used in the motel program. They also suggested opening state lands to sanctioned campsites, staffed by rangers.
Storellicastro, the Barre City manager, said the demands are still on the table as the motel program continues to wind down.
“Cities don’t have departments of mental health. We don’t have departments of homelessness response. I came from New York City, where we had all those agencies,” he said. Here, “we don’t have anything.”
Wheeler, in her statement, sidestepped questions about the state’s plans to help towns that are struggling. Instead, she reiterated a popular Scott talking point: that the motel program is unsustainable.
“The Governor continues to believe we should focus on real solutions, including additional shelter capacity and accountability requirements for work, training, and treatment for those who need it,” she wrote. “That way, individuals experiencing homelessness can get the support needed to get back on their feet and into permanent housing.”
Officials have funneled their frustrations to the Vermont League of Cities & Towns, a nonprofit that provides training for public servants and lobbies for local communities’ interests in the state legislature. Even before the pandemic, the league’s official policy book — which is adopted biannually by all 247 member towns — has included the position that the state, not local communities, is responsible for helping the homeless.
Samantha Sheehan, a former City of Burlington staffer who is now the league’s municipal policy and advocacy specialist, said members may decide later this year whether to strengthen their stance on homelessness, including by proposing legislation.
But while town leaders are still keen to ask for help, many have also acknowledged that they can’t simply ignore the crisis on their doorsteps.
Brett Mayfield, Hartford’s health officer for the past 16 years, is one of few people the town can dispatch for complaints about encampments. At the most recent cleanup, Mayfield helped collect more than 650 needles at a site that was covered in human feces.
He makes just $7,500 per year.
To Mayfield, addressing the homeless crisis is akin to fighting a forest fire: Nobody’s prepared for it, but someone has to act. Like it or not, in Hartford and elsewhere, the job falls to people like him.
“Somebody has to go put those fires out,” he said, “or everything will burn down eventually.”
Related
Vermont Has Made Little Progress on Homelessness, Report Finds
The original print version of this article was headlined “Is Homelessness a Local Matter? | Many of the people evicted from the state’s motel program now live in tents. The governor says that’s a municipal issue.”
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2 2025.
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