After 12 years in office, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger plans to leave City Hall on Monday, April 1, handing the keys to the city to Mayor-Elect Emma Mulvaney-Stanak. Weinberger has been the longest consecutively serving mayor in Burlington’s history. The length of his tenure is exceeded only by Peter Clavelle, who served five non-consecutive terms.
In the last days of Weinberger’s administration, VTDigger sat down with the outgoing mayor for a conversation about his tenure, his hopes for the city moving forward, and his plans for the future.
During the interview, Weinberger told VTDigger that “the biggest heartbreak and disappointment” during his time in office came when the city began to lose ground in its fight against the opioid epidemic. He also offered his thoughts on the city’s public safety crisis, racial justice and the long-delayed CityPlace project.
Despite the obstacles his administration has faced, the outgoing mayor said he feels that he has set the table well for Mulvaney-Stanak.
“We certainly have our challenges,” Weinberger said. “But there are also a lot of things that are happening right now that are very positive trends — that are going to result in … enduring opportunity for the city going forward.”
As for Weinberger’s political future? He has been exploring a run for higher office since last fall and remains “interested in some kind of statewide service.”
“I haven’t made any decisions yet,” he said, adding that he would sit down with his family after leaving office Monday, “And we’ll make some decisions there. I’m not really sure what’s going to happen after this Monday.”
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
VTD:
You first took office in 2012. If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself? What would you have liked to know that you now know?
MW:
I’ve certainly learned a lot on the job in 12 years.
A big principle I’ve learned in this role is to reserve judgment. You’ve got to get all the information and hear all of the perspectives before making a decision. It’s something I learned about with personnel issues. You know, when you’re the mayor and there’s 600-plus employees that you’re responsible for, there are HR issues.
Something I shared with the incoming mayor and have shared with many new mayors over time is just how important getting good department heads is to your success. You really need to spend personal time to build your team.
I was elected on this platform of a fresh start, and bringing about some change and innovation, and so it was really important to be able to find people outside of city government at the time and convince them to come be part of the city team, and that takes real engagement from the mayor to find people right at the right part of their career.
An area that I had had really almost no engagement with before becoming mayor was public safety and the police, and there, too, I quickly learned that such a big part of a mayor’s job is being responsible for public safety.
The relationship between the mayor and the police department and the police chief is a critical one, and that’s something I would encourage new mayors to realize — how engaged they have to be with policing issues, as well.
VTD:
What would you say has been the biggest challenge in these 12 years?
MW:
I would say the hardest challenge was the public safety crisis. That was sort of this long simmering crisis from the moment it erupted onto the scene. … Progressive city councilors introduced this resolution calling for a 30% reduction of the police force on a Friday for a vote on Monday — and I opposed it immediately.
Everything I had learned about policing up until that point, as an eight-year mayor, was that good policing, like many things in life, is labor-intensive, that you need more resources, not less, if you want good policing.
I thought protesters were right to demand more action on racial justice. I thought it was problematic to pit public safety and racial justice against each other and felt that we needed both, and that people were right, that I needed to do more on racial justice. And we did do more after that. A lot more.
I had a compromise, that I came within one vote of prevailing on, that would have kept the department essentially stable around the 90-officer level until this report was done. The report came back 18 months later saying that that’s about where we should be.
There’s been no other issue like it that for 18 months continued to be a polarizing debate within the community, and there’s no other issue that I think had such impacts on the community.
VTD:
Well, let’s talk about policing for a minute. You mentioned racial justice. Your administration experienced criticism — obviously in connection to a larger nationwide issue — in 2020. There have been questions about several incidents of alleged excessive force by the police department. How do you think that the city responded to that criticism? How do you think the city and you personally have moved forward from that?
MW:
Protesters nationally and locally were right to be demanding change.
I hope that my time in this role is in part remembered for the reform of policing being a high priority. It was something that, when I first hired a police chief in 2015, my top priority was to get someone and bring in someone from the outside that would lead on police reform.
In many ways, from the years 2015 until 2020, I think Burlington was on the forefront of police reform nationally. We were one of the first police departments in New England to have body cameras on all of our officers. We took significant early actions to create some kind of new community oversight of the police department — to start to transform the police commission into an oversight body, to make sure that it reviewed significant use-of-force issues, which is not something that had happened previously. We set up what we called a transparency portal and to this day do, I think, substantially more than any other law enforcement agency in the state to, in real-time, release data about the police.
It’s one of the reasons that we’re in the headlines so often — that we put a lot of information out there, whether it’s the publishing of statistics or now we have a very open policy of releasing body camera footage and having processes and standards for releasing that on a regular basis that never existed before.
After two terrible events in the community where people having mental health crises were shot and killed at the hands of the police, we’ve completely overhauled the way in which we respond to mental health incidents and re-equipped the police department with different equipment, vehicles and very different training to respond to those incidents differently. I’m proud of how much transformation we’ve had from 2015 until today.
I do think that one of the ironies — a sad irony, really a tragic irony — of the post-George Floyd moment was that, in some ways, I think nationally and to some degree even here, the pace of reform and improvement, I think … was set back by the fact that, from 2020, we had that 18-month period where we were losing a huge amount of officers, losing institutional knowledge, and suddenly we were in a situation where some days it was not clear we were even going to be able to continue to have a police department, much less have one that could be on the leading edge of reforms.
And so how have we gotten through that moment? How have I gotten through that moment? It was certainly a test.
I think I fundamentally got it right from the beginning and held the line against a shift in direction that did great damage to the police department but did not break it — that did damage to the community but that we were able to halt and recover from. And we have now begun the rebuilding process and are making progress with that rebuilding process.
I wish I was leaving office at a time when the police department was fully rebuilt, but at least I do feel that I am leaving at a time when it is on a different trajectory. It’s on a trajectory where I fully expect that three to five years from now it will probably be a stronger police department than it has ever been because it will be back to being properly sized, and it will have capacities and professional perspectives in it that are broader than what we had before the pandemic.
VTD:
I think it’s undeniable that you’ve built or initiated a lot of housing development in your tenure. A criticism would be that it’s still not enough or that specific development deals don’t go far enough. What have been the barriers to building more housing in the city?
MW:
Housing has been a priority of mine from the day I came in office.
I was a housing developer before being mayor. I only tried one Burlington project in that 10 years, when I had my own company here in Vermont. The majority of what we did was in New Hampshire because you could actually get things built in New Hampshire, whereas, throughout Vermont, and particularly in Burlington, it was very challenging to build anything new.
We had one project on North Avenue. The Packard lofts project, that — I had this harrowing experience, you know, really harrowing is not overstating it in that I put, you know, a lot of capital from this new and young company that I created with a partner into this Burlington project. The permitting process lasted five years, and there (were) moments in there where we had expended hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we didn’t know if we’d be able to build anything.
I thought that was a big problem — just how long and how hard it was to get anything built here. I knew it needed to change if we were going to be a city that could address its housing challenges.
You know the biggest challenge in the first decade of my time in this role … public attitudes about housing were very different. There was a great deal of skepticism and ambivalence, I would say, about new development. There was not consensus that more housing was necessarily a good thing.
But we got a lot done, even when there were such mixed opinions about it, and that’s what allowed us to, at this point, have over 2,000 homes built or under construction. And now that there is consensus that we need a lot more homes if we want to make good on the promise that housing should be a human right, the pace of progress is accelerating.
VTD:
The pace is accelerating, but for all of the accomplishments, you set a goal in 2021 of essentially ending homelessness by 2024. Homelessness is obviously still an issue. Do you think that goal itself was unrealistic?
MW:
Well, first of all, it’s the right goal. We can end homelessness, and we need to believe that it is an achievable goal and something that we should be working towards.
Communities that have had that goal for a sustained period of time have, if not fully achieved it, have made substantial progress towards it. … I firmly believe this is a problem we can solve.
It’s a modern phenomenon. It didn’t exist not that long ago. And it is something that I think we have largely created through poor land-use policy choices, as well as some bad policy choices in our mental health system and elsewhere. But primarily, I’m a firm believer that homelessness is a housing problem, and that we can largely address, not entirely, but we can largely address it by creating a lot more housing.
I knew it was going to be a hard goal to meet in 2021. I did not anticipate — and I think it would have been pretty hard for just about anyone to anticipate — the magnitude of change that Vermont was experiencing just as we were setting that goal.
I didn’t understand well at the time how many people had moved here during the pandemic because of the state and the city’s outstanding performance during the pandemic that we had. We were the state with the biggest immigration — net immigration — of any state for two years in a row.
No one could have anticipated how poor of a job the state would do winding down its pandemic-era housing programs and the pressure that that would put on the system. I really believe — and it would have happened — that the Elmwood Avenue shelter that we were setting up to take a public health approach to homelessness and serve as a transition between people being unsheltered homeless and getting into permanent housing — that would have worked, and it will work in the future when we can implement that plan.
What has happened … is that all of our capacity … to house people in supportive housing, coming out of homelessness — all of that capacity has needed to be devoted, since for a year now … to helping wind down the Chittenden County hotel program.
I see little downside to having set an ambitious goal. … I hope that survives me — that this remains something that we say: This is unacceptable that we have this level of homelessness here and is something we can choose a different path on.
VTD:
As far as permanent housing goes, for better or worse, people would probably consider the CityPlace project something of a hiccup in your tenure. Was there a way that the city could have handled that better?
MW:
So I think there’s a lot we got right with CityPlace.
One of the things that gets confused about CityPlace is that the decision that I had to make and City Council had to make is — we have an owner of this property where we have these public goals (who) wants to work with the city to achieve what the city has put on paper. We didn’t get to send out (a request for proposals). We didn’t get to choose who our owner would be. Were we going to engage that or not? I think it was undoubtedly the right decision to engage.
I further think it was the right decision when (the original CityPlace developer) Don Sinex, having had some important early successes, when he came to us and said, quite transparently, “I don’t have all the financing lined up, but I want to move forward and take down the mall. Will you permit me to do that?” I think it was the right decision to allow him to take it down, even though we then had what ended up being a four-year period where there was no on-the-ground progress.
I think the alternative to that — of having said no to him, “You can’t take it down until you have it all figured out” — very likely would have put us in a much worse place today than we are. (It) would very likely (have) resulted in just the status quo indefinitely. Maybe a couple more decades of this sort of failing mall limping along.
I would say another thing I got right — and I don’t know, you know, I’ve never really gotten much credit for and don’t really necessarily expect to at this point is — I, having come from that developer background, I was very aware that things could go wrong once we gave that permission to Don to move forward — that it was very uncertain what was going to happen from that point.
We wrote these detailed development agreements to very carefully protect the city and taxpayers from the risk of things going wrong. And so there’s been no public money lost — literally no money lost — as a result of the delays and the period of shutdown there. We got that piece right, too.
Something I do regret — I don’t know how much of a difference it would have made … even though I had prepared for it — I did not do the mayor’s job (of) sufficiently preparing the public for that possibility, of making clear to the public that there could be delays and that this might be a bumpy road.
I’m pretty confident with the last development agreement that the council approved … this project is now on its way. I don’t believe there will be a need for any more significant city actions between now and when it’s complete. Once it’s done, it will be the second-largest housing project in the history of the state, second only to Cambrian Rise. It will bring two new hotels, which will have a tremendously positive role in terms of the economy and city revenues. … It will transform that part of town.
VTD:
The last specific issue I wanted to talk about was substance use in the community. What do (you) think we’ve done right? What do you think are some things that you could have done better?
MW:
Since the fall of 2015, responding to the drug crisis has been one of my very top priorities. It has been an issue that I probably put more time into than anything else.
In many ways, Burlington … has been looked to as leading one of the most robust local responses to the drug crisis of any community in America. We’ve done a lot of good things throughout this period. There was a moment in 2018 and 2019 where we were making great progress with this. We cut opioid-related overdose deaths by 50% in the county from 2017 to 2018, and it stayed there in 2019. … In some ways it was the most hopeful and encouraging, some of the most meaningful work that I’ve done.
It is, to me, the biggest heartbreak and disappointment of this experience that we have had such a setback since then. It coincides with the pandemic, but the bigger change, what really happened, is fentanyl got here in a big way. It is now the dominant drug. Fentanyl is a game-changer. It is so much less expensive than previous drugs. … It is so much more powerful. And the grip of the addiction is so much more intense.
The system hasn’t responded sufficiently to that change. I have been very vocal about this … for a while, calling on us to redouble our efforts calling on the governor and the state to make this a top public health priority once again. It has remained one of mine.
I’m not one of those folks that doesn’t think enforcement is part of the solution. I’ve always believed, especially with fentanyl, this substance is too dangerous. I resisted calls at the state level to legalize it or decriminalize it or reduce penalties.
I don’t think the City of Burlington can solve this alone. I think that should almost be self-evident when you have a problem of this scale and scope. I do think it is totally different now than it was from 2014 through 2018, when the state was leading on this issue. Gov. (Peter) Shumlin made it a top priority to him and that carried into the early (Phil) Scott administration years.
I will tell you that, as mayor, it has been a completely different experience trying to address this issue when the state government is leading, versus now when we are basically trying to drag them along to get them to do anything.
VTD:
Let’s talk briefly about what’s next for you. You have expressed interest in the possibility of a statewide run. What do you think you could bring to the table in a statewide conversation?
MW:
I think there’s been a growing realization in the last six months or so that the challenges Burlington faces with the drug crisis, with the unsheltered homelessness crisis, are statewide challenges. We should be being so much more aggressive in both our law enforcement and our harm reduction response to the drug crisis than we are now.
What we have gotten done here in Burlington that has had such an impact on the trajectory of housing, that kind of work is needed statewide in the state. Vermont uniquely among states has a huge role in it, because we do have this statewide land use regulatory regime in Act 250. And … I think we should be doing a whole lot more on climate.
I have been so grateful for the opportunity these last 12 years to serve the people of Burlington. I would be interested in some kind of statewide service, and it is something I’m exploring. I haven’t made any decisions yet.
A few months back, I just made a decision that we had such a long list of things that we wanted to get done before the end of the term that I needed to focus on — that I needed to focus on a good transition to the new mayoral administration. After April 1, I’ll sit down with (my wife) Stacy and my daughters, and we’ll make some decisions there. I’m really not sure what’s going to happen after this Monday.
VTD:
Do you think you’re setting up incoming mayor (Emma) Mulvaney-Stanak for success. Do you think you’ve set the table well?
MW:
We’re certainly trying to do our job handing off the leadership of the city government in a responsible way. We have had our department heads working on transition memos. We’ve been trying to collect all of the documents that, having sat in this seat for 12 years, I think are important for the mayor to be aware of and understand. We’ve had three transition meetings with the mayor-elect so far. (Editor’s note: Another such meeting was scheduled for after this interview took place.) I’ve offered to make myself available, if it’s helpful to her beyond that.
I do think that this is a good time for a change in leadership, and it’s part of the reason I chose not to run.
I didn’t think it would have been a good time three years ago. … Think back to April 2021. Vaccines were just starting to become available. There were all these emergency orders that were out there. There was this incredible volatility in terms of the revenues the city had. I thought it would have been an extraordinarily challenging time for a new administration to get started.
This feels very different to me. We certainly have our challenges … but there are also a lot of things that are happening right now that are very positive trends, that are going to result in … enduring opportunity for the city going forward. I’m speaking specifically about infrastructure, where we have lined up between … in the downtown, tens of millions, and then out at the airport, hundreds of millions of dollars of federal aid for these upcoming years to be a time of continued investment in critical public infrastructure.
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