Letters to the Editor (7/16/25)

Bad Judgment

I believe [Feedback: “‘White-Guy Energy,'” July 9] should not have been published. It degrades the entire Vermont Statehouse, where females have made considerable progress, although more is needed.

To accuse white male leadership in Vermont of killing trans and queer folks, women, and people of color is insane.

Attacking Seven Days for publishing the article makes no sense, as the author degrades everyone but herself.

Jerry Spring

South Burlington

Good Reps

Thank you for your excellent story on rookie Vermont Reps. Shawn Sweeney and Michael Boutin [“Mr. Sweeney and Mr. Boutin Go to Montpelier,” June 25]. I learned so much from this inside look at the Statehouse.

I also want to commend Sweeney and Boutin for their attempts to think and act creatively and reach across the aisle. We need dissent and independent thought within political parties for a robust democracy and the best legislation.

Vermont has a fine history of this: Gov. Phil Scott has critiques of President Donald Trump’s policies, Sen. Bernie Sanders openly critiques the Democrat-supported war in Gaza, the late senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party partway through his career, and Lt. Gov. John Rodgers joined it. Political tribalism does not serve us. Public servants can be party-line when appropriate and independent and dissenting when they feel they need to take us on the best path forward with legislation.

Imagine if Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski had said no to the “Big Beautiful Bill” that makes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a $30 billion funded agency. Imagine if former West Virginia senator Joe Manchin had moderated the Democrats’ COVID-19-era legislation to lessen its effects on inflation and the budget. Outgoing moderate Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina recently stated: “In Washington … it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.”

I hope representatives such as Sweeney and Boutin can continue to foster an alternative tradition in Vermont.

Josie Alexander

Jericho

Co-op Unlike Other Business

It seems you missed a critical point in [“Market Forces: After Losing Money for Years, Burlington’s City Market Faces More Headwinds,” June 18]. Cooperatives are owned by their members. Your membership is unlike a membership of big-box stores that are used to track your purchases. Cooperative membership means you are a co-owner of your store. Your money stays in your community and does not get siphoned off to Wall Street and into some billionaire’s pockets.

If your co-op is not meeting your needs, say something! If it is a need that will be beneficial to your other co-owners, be it a product, a policy or some other thing, you are an owner and have the potential to direct your store via staff, general manager or the board that you elected. You can even run for a board seat at your annual member-owner meeting. Best of luck to City Market, Onion River Co-op as it rides out these interesting times.

Annie Gaillard

Walden

What Was Burlington Thinking?

Seven Days reported that Burlington will allow homeless individuals and families to live in their cars at the Perkins Pier parking lot [“Burlington Will Allow People to Stay in Cars at Perkins Pier,” July 2, online]. This is wrong on so many levels. Housing — in cars — is not housing. It’s not safe to have individuals and families living in a car where there is nothing but a Porta-Potty for personal needs. The location is on the waterfront, a main driver of Burlington’s economy. It’s parking for many to access the waterfront economy and will no longer be a place many will want to leave their cars unattended. It’s on the bike path and will be in a very public location, displaying the poor fortune of those without housing for all to see.

The Burlington government has made the city less safe and less humane and has destroyed the Church Street Marketplace economy. Now it is aiming to destroy the waterfront economy and at the same time not address the issues of homelessness and mental illness in a way that respects the community at large, including those in need of a dignified response to facing homelessness.

Richard Schattman

Colchester

Editor’s note: The day after we reported this story, the City of Burlington reversed its decision. We wrote about that, too, in a July 3 online story headlined “In a Swift About-Face, Burlington Drops Parking Plan for Homeless.”

‘Not Afraid of the Homeless’

[Re “More Than 100 Businesses Seek Relief From Burlington ‘Crisis,’” May 9]: I’m not afraid of the homeless people on Burlington’s Church Street, and neither are my young friends, who would be the usual demographic frequenting the businesses there who seem to believe that homeless people are the biggest culprit of their failing businesses. Obviously, it’s not OK that people are living in destitution in our cities and across the U.S., but the demonization of these people, while the majority of the conversations ignore the fact that we have the greatest wealth disparity since the Gilded Age, is aggravating. We won’t be seeing an end to a homelessness and self-medicating crisis until the wealth hoarding ends.

If businesses’ biggest concern is the unpleasant aesthetic of homelessness, why don’t they address the fact that we have a society where one accident that leaves you disabled can lead to a life on the streets? Of course, people are going to self-soothe and act out if society hates them and they can’t get a job — and insults them rather than works with them.

Me and my friends will be sticking to potlucks and drinks on our porches as long as wages stay the same while our rent and grocery costs increase. Perhaps homelessness is what keeps some away, but shuffling them to a new location won’t end the problem. I’d love to share a bottle of wine downtown regularly, but homelessness isn’t what’s keeping me from that; it’s the cost of living in this society of extreme wealth hoarding.

Maggie Ozog

Burlington

‘We Do Not Own Nature’

[Re Feedback: “Kitty Kills” and “‘Leave Them Alone,'” June 18; “Here, Kitty? Wildlife Advocates Want to Bring Catamounts Back to the Green Mountains,” June 4]: It seems all the conflicts surrounding restoring apex predators to N’dakinna — more recently renamed “Vermont” — center on European colonialism and the refusal to integrate into Abenaki culture, which caused the loss of this biodiversity in the first place.

The mindset of dominating and destroying nature, and thus our own ability to survive on the planet, has come to a crucial crux threatening our entire species. Native first peoples (who have never ceded these lands) lived sustainably in the same spots for thousands of years without destroying their surroundings. Instead of learning their ways, we tried to obliterate and erase them and now find ourselves in an existential crisis that can only be solved by a major shift in mindset and values.

We do not own nature but are merely a small part of it and don’t get to decide with which species we’re comfortable sharing the planet. Wolves and mountain lions belong here in N’dakinna; sheep are non-native species. We should start acting like we belong here, too, if we want to stay much longer.

Samantha Nickerson

Topsham

Catamount Sighting

[Re “Here, Kitty? Wildlife Advocates Want to Bring Catamounts Back to the Green Mountains,” June 4]: Around 25 years ago, I had a piece of property near the lake in Ticonderoga, N.Y. One morning, when I arrived there, a next-door neighbor excitedly told me that he had seen a small mountain lion in the front yard of my house. I took it with a grain of salt, considering he was a bit of a wacky character. That is, until a few days later, when another neighbor told me that she had seen a bobcat a short distance from the property.

When I asked her for a description, it was a very accurate and complete depiction of a cougar. The cat was fairly small, like what was described by the other neighbor. Not too surprising, considering that the vast wilderness of the Adirondacks conceals a host of rare species.

Sometime later, a Vermont friend told me that when he was hunting a piece of wilderness in the Bridport-Shoreham area in Vermont, he happened to find a bobcat skull, crushed in the manner that cats, with their remarkably powerful jaws, kill their prey. He thought it had to have been a considerably larger cat, presuming it would have been a mountain lion. Considering the sightings in Ticonderoga, it would be logical that they would cross the ice in the winter or swim a narrow stretch. Recently an intrepid hunter told me that he found a cat track considerably larger than that of a bobcat. When he showed it to a Fish & Wildlife person, that person insisted it was a bobcat track.

The cougar population is expanding eastward, and individuals have been known to range vast distances. They may have been here for a fairly long time, but the population level would likely have been kept down by deer hunters, who dislike any species that eats ungulates.

As for myself, I would like to see catamounts flourish, within reason.

Joe Gleason

Bridport

‘Magnificent Animals’

[Re “Here, Kitty? Wildlife Advocates Want to Bring Catamounts Back to the Green Mountains,” June 4]: A while back, I saw two of these beautiful creatures. When I spoke to the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department, I was told that I must have been mistaken because “There has been no evidence of catamount habitat in Vermont.”

I was not mistaken. These two magnificent animals were immediately visible to me.

One early morning, still dark, I started south on Interstate 91 from the St. Johnsbury exit. Suddenly, I saw a deer racing west to east directly in front of me. In hot pursuit was a catamount, its characteristic long tail immediately obvious. I was very close to them, and my headlights on high beam illuminated them beautifully.

In a second episode, on a beautiful, sunny midafternoon heading north near Woodsville, N.H., I saw a catamount loping across the southbound lane, the grassy intervening strip and my northbound lane. It was in no hurry, and there were no vehicles nearby. It then roamed down across a farmer’s field toward the Connecticut River, its lovely long tail easy to see.

Whether these catamounts live in Vermont or were passing through, they gave me the gift of a lifetime.

Jackson Beecham

Shelburne