Town Meeting Day in South Burlington presented voters with a clear choice on their city’s direction, and they delivered a decisive verdict: Out with the new, in with the old.
Incumbent city councilors Sandy Dooley and Paul Engels were buried in a landslide that swept challengers Pat Nowak and Chris Shaw onto the five-member panel. Dooley and especially Engels presented themselves as a new guard with progressive views, while painting Shaw and Nowak as exponents of an old, pro-development way of conducting the city’s affairs.
But the more than 2-1 rejection of the incumbents by voters does not necessarily signify a triumph of the right over the left. Council candidates in South Burlington don’t run with party labels. And Dooley and Engels were members of a body that made some broadly unpopular moves that had nothing to do with liberal or conservative attitudes. Those actions left them on the defensive throughout an intensely fought campaign.
“It was a combination of things — interim zoning, the F-35, Cairns Arena, the National Gardening Association” that accounted for the outcome, Engels said on the morning after.
Interim zoning refers to a two-year freeze the council imposed on most development in the city, with the aim of enabling four study groups to develop recommendations for South Burlington’s future. “The developers were against that from day one,” comments council chair Rosanne Greco, who remains in office but who will almost certainly have to surrender her gavel when the new council convenes.
“The development community bought this election,” Greco added, referring in part to the heavy advertising on behalf of Nowak and Shaw that ran in South Burlington’s weekly paper.
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From talking with folks in the 7-4, the vote wasn’t against Dooley and Engels as much as it was against Greco. She comes across as VERY aggressive and dismissive of anyone who doesn’t follow her. If Greco had been running as well, Dooley and / or Engels may have been re-elected.
I do not believe for one second what Greco says above that she did not intend to run again next year. Greco says that now after the election of Nowak and Shaw because she knows that if she would run again she would not win.
I do not live in S. Burl., but I find Greco’s post-election comments to be among the most ungracious, bitter, and poor-sported that I have ever seen.
Yup, I’d encourage Dooley and Engels to run again. There was no other effective way to send a message to the council.
There is a way to acknowledge the loss without insulting the electorate. She didn’t do that. I’m against the F-35 basing too, but I would not vote for Ms. Greco based on her dismissive attitude.