Hurdles Remain for Burlington’s Overdose-Prevention Center

In July 2024, a dramatic veto override vote in the Vermont Senate enacted a law that sanctioned and funded a place for people to use illicit drugs under supervision. Burlington was the intended location of the overdose-prevention center.

Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak was eager to set it up.

“I want to make sure that we are not rushing things but moving with an urgency that is really needed on this critical issue,” she told Seven Days at the time. She later said she hoped to propose potential locations by the end of 2025.

That didn’t come to pass. More than two years after the state cleared the way for its creation, the overdose-prevention center has yet to open — and it’s unclear when it will. City officials say they’ve zeroed in on a location and are discussing the purchase of a building, yet they have refused to publicly disclose even what neighborhood it’s in, never mind its address.

That’s intentional, according to Kara Alnasrawi, who is helping to lay the groundwork for the center in her role as the city’s Community & Economic Development Office director. She told the city council it would be “way too disruptive” to reveal a potential site and then have it fall through. Once a site is inspected, the city will initiate a public process to hear from neighbors.

Finding a suitable location is a crucial step, but it’s not the only challenge. There’s no city zoning classification for such a site, so the Burlington Planning Commission will need to create rules for the center, which will take time. 

“We are not in the business of forcing this on any particular neighborhood,” Alnasrawi said in an interview. “We are trying to weigh the pros and cons of any and every property that becomes available.”

The 2024 law directs the state to use money from a legal settlement with opioid manufacturers to open and run the center, which is estimated to cost $1 million per year. The nonprofit Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform will operate it, with assistance from the City of Burlington and the Vermont Department of Health.

The city chose VCJR through a competitive bidding process. The organization has operated a needle-exchange program on Bank Street for several years and helps connect people with substance-use disorder to social workers and rehabilitation programs. The group also provides health care services in partnership with the Johnson Health Center. 

The organization’s executive director, Tom Dalton, has run needle exchanges in Burlington for more than two decades. Jess Kirby, the nonprofit’s director of client services, is in recovery from opioid addiction. 

Together, the city and VCJR have hired a real estate agent to find an appropriate property. They initially hoped to rent a space but quickly found that no landlord in Burlington was willing to take on such an operation. A suitable building must be big enough to accommodate a waiting area, office space, rooms for injecting and smoking drugs, a room for people experiencing an overdose, and another to monitor people after they’ve used.

“It’s not like there are that many options,” Dalton said.

VCJR has looked at a dozen or so properties over the past 18 months. The organization reached an agreement to purchase a property last winter but discovered after closer inspection that it wouldn’t work.

The city has now signed a letter of intent to purchase a new property. Once a deal is complete, officials will discuss the location behind closed doors with the city council before publicizing it. 

At that point, the city will hold public forums and knock on doors to broach the center with residents in the surrounding neighborhood. The Burlington City Council will have final say over its opening.

The council once seemed unified on the idea, but that support is eroding. This summer, amid what police data show is an increase in reported public drug use and overdose emergencies, Burlington Democrats released a public safety resolution that included a demand that city zoning rules bar the overdose-prevention center from the downtown core and waterfront.

The city’s planning commission is beginning to consider new regulations. An initial proposal contained no limitations on where an overdose-prevention center could open, but some commissioners had reservations about green-lighting anything without more public feedback.

In written comments submitted to the planning commission, downtown business owners, real estate developers and others have called upon the city to carefully vet regulations governing overdose-prevention centers. Suggestions included keeping it away from commercial or residential areas; some opposed the idea altogether.

“In order to have an enjoyable downtown, the druggies and home less [sic] need to be moved elsewhere,” wrote Bob Feuerstein, a Church Street landlord. “Putting an Overdose Prevention Center downtown is the exact wrong thing to do.” 

Even Jonathan Farrell, executive director of the homeless shelter operator COTS, called the overdose-prevention center an idea “whose time has passed” and a “nuisance that will lead to more use and dealing in our city.”

The center’s potential clientele, many of whom are homeless and lack reliable transportation, indicated in a survey earlier this year that they’d prefer downtown as the first choice, with the Old North End and Riverside Avenue neighborhoods not far behind. Many addiction and social service organizations already operate in those areas, and the people who use them often congregate nearby.

VCJR polled 49 current drug users in Burlington to get some sense of how the overdose-prevention center could best serve them. More than two-thirds said they would use the center “all or most of the time.” Almost all indicated they would appreciate the opportunity to use indoors and in a safer setting, since a majority reported that they take drugs outside.

Some councilors, such as President Ben Traverse (D-Ward 5), still support opening an overdose-prevention center, as long as it’s not downtown. But a bloc of Dems, including Councilor Buddy Singh (D-South District), has signaled strong skepticism that the center is needed at all. 

“It seemed very surprising to me that we’re going full-bore ahead with this,” Singh said at a recent council meeting. Councilors noted concerns around the increased need for security at the center and surrounding neighborhood. Some Democrats also worry that the federal government could step in and close the center if it were to ever open, as the Trump administration has threatened to do previously. 

Council Progressives, the mayor and Dalton countered Democrats’ skepticism by arguing that the facility would accomplish what they and the Burlington business community want most: to get open drug use off the streets.

“When we look for locations, we’re really trying to do a good job balancing accessibility and respect for the feedback that we’ve been getting from the community,” Dalton told the council at a recent meeting. Dalton’s group has also discussed creating a mobile center that would set up shop in different locations around the city on specific days of the week.

While advocates still insist that opening an overdose-prevention center is a commonsense, data-backed approach to addressing Vermont’s opioid crisis, the number of overdose deaths has declined each year since a high of 269 in 2022. The state recorded 170 fatal overdoses in 2025, a 25 percent decrease from 2024, according to health department data.

Data through June show that Vermont is likely headed for another statewide decline in 2026. But there’s been a spike in Chittenden County: 18 overdose deaths through the first six months of the year, well above the three-year average of 11, according to health department data. 

The broader addiction-recovery community in Vermont remains divided over the overdose-prevention center. Dan Franklin, executive director of the Vermont Association for Mental Health & Addiction Recovery, said the divide is about efficacy as well as cost.

“For a lot of folks, it’s hard to envision spending a lot of funding, in this case millions of dollars, on something that is unproven,” said Franklin, whose Montpelier group advocates and provides training for mental health and addiction treatment. “We’re all struggling to keep the doors open with the resources that we have. At the same time, there’s a considerable body of evidence to show that a well-placed facility will save some lives in a hot zone like Burlington.”

Seven Days visited an overdose-prevention center in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City in March 2024. That same year, a center opened in Providence, R.I. 

Officials from Burlington and VCJR have been in touch with Project Weber/Renew, the organization that runs the latter center, for advice on setting up one in the Queen City. The Rhode Island center hasn’t had an overdose death and made more than 4,000 referrals to connect its clients to rehabilitation services in the first 10 months after opening. Overdose deaths in that state have dropped by 50 percent since 2022. 

The center is located in an area adjacent to a medical campus and set apart from nearby residential neighborhoods in South Providence. It’s separated from the downtown business district by an interstate highway. Weber/Renew is providing technical assistance to VCJR as the nonprofit looks to replicate the model. 

Weber/Renew encountered hurdles similar to those Burlington faces. Rhode Island legislators passed a law in 2022 to allow an overdose-prevention center to operate, but city politics and a challenging real estate market delayed its opening.

Ashley Perry, director of the Providence center, said it took years of advocacy. Three potential locations fell through because of nervous community members or recalcitrant sellers before Weber/Renew found the right space.

“An overdose-prevention center is really a public health initiative for a sick and dying population of people,” Perry said. “If people don’t want to see people outside using drugs, then they should absolutely open up an overdose-prevention center where people are.”

Brandon Marshall, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, located on Providence’s East Side, has been conducting federally funded studies on the effects of overdose-prevention centers in Providence and New York.

The studies have shown that, so far, the center has had no impact on the level of public drug use or discarded syringes in the surrounding neighborhood. They’ve also found that the clients tend to use the overdose-prevention center as a hub for health care and recovery treatment. Still, residents and workers in South Providence continue to support the center, Marshall said. 

But once — or even if — a center opens in Burlington, supervised consumption would not be allowed for the first three to six months to allow for a phased-in approach. Instead, VCJR would collect data on how many people visit — and for what reason — as the organization continues to provide a needle exchange and other harm-reduction services. ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “Site Unseen | Despite years of discussion, Burlington’s long-awaited overdose-prevention center is not close to opening”

This article appears in October 7 • 2026.

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