Will’s Platform

Help everyone be more safe, more healthy, and more confident in the stability of their future.

The PROBLEM: Burlington residents are unsafe in our city, whether it be due to personal involvement with substance use disorders and violent crime, or being in proximity to people experiencing these crises simply by virtue of living here.

• Insufficient mental health, social work, and substance abuse treatment resources have led to outsize pressure on the police, hospitals, and institutions of community aid to mount a sufficient response.

• The police department is operating at suboptimal staffing levels, preventing them from providing enough officers to respond to serious reports from the public, or enough officers on patrol to act as a deterrent to public violence and drug use.

• Illegal drugs in Burlington have become more plentiful, more lucrative, more addictive, and worst of all, more deadly. Overdose deaths and violence related to drug trafficking have climbed substantially since the 2020 pandemic.

• Jails and courts are beyond capacity, and more often than not, when punishment is handed down, it is ineffective, if not counterproductive, in helping people become contributing members of the community.

• Homelessness, poverty, substance use disorders and crime have entered the public view as never before. While it is true that everyone in our city is less safe because of this, it is important to remember that for people who are actively experiencing these problems, there is a clear and present danger to their lives day in and day out. Our solution ought to be focused primarily on ensuring everyone has the resources they need to live a happy, healthy, and stable life, rather than on hiding suffering people away from public view, through incarceration or otherwise.

The SHORT-RUN SOLUTION:

• Continue the reconstruction of the Burlington Police Department, including the restoration of staffing to a level of 87 to 100 officers as soon as possible.

  • Continue the growth and development of the BPD’s Crisis, Advocacy, Intervention program, including the Community Support Officers and Liaisons. Mandate a collaborative effort between BPD crisis intervention and teams deployed by the Fire Department and the Howard Center. Develop a program to furnish the ranks of trained interventionists with volunteer citizens and students.

  • Budget additional resources towards the Fire Department’s overdose pilot program, and directly link overdose prevention efforts with responses from BPD and community organizations.

  • Advance dialogue between police officers, our neighbors, and officials including the Police Commission, in order to better understand how community oversight over the BPD can be implemented in a way that allows citizens to address their concerns with police culture and conduct, without adverse effects on officer morale and/or attrition.

• Expand and reinforce the efforts of Racial Equity, Inclusion & Belonging to establish a community alliance dedicated to the elimination of gun violence.

  • The 2nd Amendment specification that the right to bear arms ‘shall not be infringed’ creates a near-insurmountable roadblock for Burlington to create municipal laws preventing gun ownership. Although efforts on the state level have been increasingly successful, they have still been limited to the extent that immediate action is needed in our neighborhoods to stem the inclination and ability of people to fire guns at others, or, far too often, themselves.

  • A community alliance must feature leaders from every neighborhood, and represent as fully as possible the cultural and economic mosaic that makes up our urban population. These leaders must work together to give the City, Police, and associates of the Chittenden County Gun Violence Task Force a full understanding of why and how gun violence has become prevalent in their community.

  • Outreach efforts by an alliance will not only provide the City Council with information it needs to devise a long-run solution, but immediately connect people who might otherwise become involved in criminal activity to the resources that our community has to offer.

• Target locations that enable criminality, while supporting and creating those that strengthen the bonds of community.

  • Strengthen code and building ordinances, and the enforcement of those rules, while providing support to landlords where necessary, in order to put a stop to illegal drug operations being staged from rental units.

  • Strategize with BPD to keep officers continually placed in ‘hot spots’ around the downtown area, including City Hall Park, the Downtown Transit Center and it’s immediate surroundings, in order to ensure the safety of all transit riders and employees, and encourage ridership of the bus system.

  • Accept a proposal for the redevelopment of Memorial Auditorium as a space that everyone here can enjoy, including spaces for activities, classes, performances, and other events.

  • Begin a program to create community centers in every neighborhood where they do not currently exist, including the Hill Section, South End, and Riverside-Centennial.

• Embrace a multifaceted paradigm of treatment for addiction in order to better address the substance abuse crisis.

  Addiction affects everyone differently, so as of yet, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to address the increasingly deadly drugs that our neighbors turn to out of despair. In order to best mitigate the damage that substance abuse disorder causes for victims and the community around them, we need to adopt and fully support an approach that incorporates multiple strategies that have proven to be successful.

  • Harm reduction strategies seek to help people use drugs in a way that satiates their addiction, while ensuring they use them in a way that is safe for themselves and others. Adopting the harm reduction strategy would mean working to prevent drug overdoses and the spread of disease associated with intravenous drug use. The Howard Center is already leading the way on these efforts, and should act as a hub for knowledge and resources as the city works to unite institutions, responders, and community members as we try to save the lives of people struggling with addiction. This means coordinating a city-wide syringe exchange and cleanup program, and mitigating overdoses not only by expanding the Crisis Response efforts of the police, fire department, and other institutions, but by establishing one or more Overdose Prevention Centers, also known as safe use sites, should their creation be approved by the legislature.

  • All harm reduction-related services should aggressively attempt to link people with substance abuse disorder to resources for recovery. We can save people’s lives by ensuring their drug use is safe, while also providing the resources needed to help people recover from addiction completely.

  • The most effective recovery strategies are centered around the provision of medications that help people overcome their addictions, like buprenorphine and methadone, and perhaps even more importantly, access to homes that have recovery policies, such as sober houses. Although Burlington does already have a number of institutions that provide these resources, centered around the Howard Center, city government should endeavor to draw on state and federal resources to increase our availability of detox beds, recovery housing, and medication that can be helpful in beating addiction.

  • Provide any and all resources possible to the BPD and state and federal law enforcement partners to stop the trafficking of illicit drugs into Burlington. The most dangerous drugs are not being made here- they are brought from out of state, marked up in price, and sold to poison our most vulnerable neighbors. We need to ensure that Burlington has a national reputation as a city where, if you come to sell drugs, you will be captured and imprisoned.

  • Throughout all these endeavors, the City Council must work to coordinate the substance abuse response in the city. Eliminate redundancy of programs, create efficiencies, enable the sharing of knowledge, and above all, connect people who benefit from one resource to the benefits of another, for example, ensuring that anyone who accesses harm reduction resources is introduced to the available support for recovery.

    The LONG-RUN SOLUTION

• Stay the course on aggressive, progressive housing policy. When we relieve the economic pressure that people face to survive, we can relieve the desperation that leads our neighbors to crime and reliance on substances for escape. Simply put, crime tends to increase in situations of wealth inequality, and exclusion from opportunity of economic advancement. It should not be difficult to see how the economic toll of the pandemic, as well as the ongoing breakdown our nation is seeing in social norms, has contributed to the dramatic increase in criminal activity and substance use disorder in Burlington.

  Our long-term goal for making everyone more safe, happy, and healthy should be to level the economic playing field, and the single biggest economic pressure that we are facing- as well as the area in which our City government has the strongest policy levers- is our acquisition of shelter.

• Advocate for carceral reform on the state level until our criminal justice system is effective at helping people who break the law become contributing members of our community.

  • Prison in Vermont is not succeeding in any regard other than creating a Hell on Earth for people that have, more often than not, fell into one or more of the cycles of poverty, substance use disorder, domestic and/or sexual abuse, which eventually led them to breaking the law. The corrections system is costly to taxpayers, but what are we getting in return?

    Over 44% of prisoners return to prison within three years of their release.

    40% of correctional officers and over 50% of prisoners have developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder since entering their facility. Even more disturbing results are present throughout the Vermont Prison Climate Survey.

  • The state of Vermont must change it’s strategy for incarceration, and shift towards a Norwegian model of community integration, education, and employment training. Available evidence suggests that, post-transition, annual costs would be roughly similar to what they are now, while the long-term benefits to the economy by helping people leave prison with better education, training, and health would be massive.

  • This is a long-term goal that the Burlington City Council cannot itself enact, but the critical nature of the issue, and the responsibility Burlington has as the state’s largest city and epicenter of crime means that the Council needs to be constantly advocating for carceral reform to Montpelier, starting with the proposal for a new women’s correctional facility. We cannot let our state make an investment of this magnitude that doubles-down on the current system.