As Burlington and othe municipalities across the state contend with ongoing public safety concerns, state and local leaders are at odds over how to handle the problems.

The problems in Burlington did not occur overnight.

They will not be fixe overnight, and it requires that everybody commit to principles of accountability.

Shifting the pendulum back to the middle, so that the use of public spaces is just as important for law abidin people and businesses to thrive as it is for service resistant people who make others afraid or commit crimes.

Plus, the Scott administration announces a new return to work policy for state employees and statewide office holders start planning for next year's elections.

All that and more ahead on Vermont this week.

From the Vermont public studio in Winooski.

This is Vermont this week.

Made possible in part by the Lintilhac Foundation and Milne Travel.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Mark Johnson sitting in tonight for Mitch Wertlieb It's Friday, August 29th.

With us on the panel tonight we have Shaun Robinson from Vermont Digger, Ike Bendavid from WCAX and Lola Duffort from Vermont Public.

Thank you all for joining us.

Well, Ike, let's start with you on the, problems going on in Burlington and really in many municipalities across the state.

You were at a recent pres conference with Governor Scott.

And, as we saw Public Safety Commissioner Jen Morris and a former police chief in Burlington.

Pretty contentious.

Yeah.

And I think it's first too important to note that this is not immune to Burlington, Vermont.

We're seeing these in other cities in New England and across the country.

I've seen it personally covering the state in Brattleboro.

I've seen it in Montpelier, Rutland.

We've seen these issues, but Burlington being the biggest city.

It's pretty up front, and it's in a lot of the public view.

And businesses are really starting to get vocal now.

This is really where before that meeting with the governor, there was a town hall with businesses, over 100 stakeholders and businesses, and the city of Burlington were there.

We're talking big names.

Owner of Farmhouse Outdoor Gear Exchange, Single Pebble, the Bern Gallery for retail, which owns several restaurants as well.

And they were all saying, yes, we are not hearing that French in our our businesses.

There is a lack of Canadian visitors.

They're also mentioning the construction.

There are several projects happening at once which is impacting them.

But they're all saying a very similar tone to the mayor.

That they are not feeling safe.

Their employees are not feeling safe.

Business is down.

We're seeing 30 to 50% businesses are reporting.

On top of that, it's it's not just a rumor coming from these businesses.

They're saying it' what the customers are saying.

It's saying what the employee that they can't keep employees.

And it's getting to a poin where it's really breaking them at this point.

For a while, they did not want to say anything.

They don't want to.

They didn't want to talk to the media or or be public about it for the fear of losing business.

But now is the point where they're really it's almost too late.

We are seeing some of those big names starting to get stressed.

So Mark, to get to the point, what happened on Wednesday, the governor held a press conference and I asked him a question.

From there, the mayor of Stanek, progressive from Burlington.

I quote, Governor Scott has not been a strong partner in this, and he pushed back.

He said he hasn't heard from the mayor.

And he really said that they're willing to help.

He put that hand out there saying he's willing to help.

But it really seemed specifically only on that public safety side.

He made it clear when it comes to the hotels, and shelter, that's not something he's going to budge on.

And Sean, right after this clip we ran, Jen Morrison also said, you know, Burlington has made its bed, referring back, I think, to the 2020 vote where the police force was reduced.

That seems to be, something that continues to linger.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's interesting that in a lot of ways she's making it very political, right?

And focusing on these really intense political schisms that Burlington has seen for a long time.

Like you mentioned, Jen Morrison was the police chief summer of 2020 when George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.

And the response and the protests that we saw in the city then, so it seems like she's speaking from some personal experience there, too.

But even, you know in terms of at the city level, and we can talk about this more, but, city Democrats on the cit council then came out afterward and said, you know we need to do more to make City Hall Park safer, to make it a better place for families to come to addressing these business concerns that I was talking about.

And then that statement from the City Council president, Ben Travers, he said specifically, we need, you know I need progressives to join me.

Right.

And it's really political language, I think is is interesting.

The interesting context to this.

Yeah, I mean I think people don't understand in Burlington, the progressives and the Democrats are really the two major parties.

You know, think one of the things that really stood out, that you reported was that the governor said that he has not been in Burlington in quite a long time.

Yeah, he he initially said almost two years ago, and his staff quickly corrected that.

He was there, for example at the UVM men's soccer parade.

They also mentioned the marathon.

But when I asked specifically, I even asked him if he would join me on a walk downtown.

He called i an opportunity for a photo op, and he declined, which I understand that.

And the staffer really says that told me that he doesn't need to see if they report to him, and he doesn't need to see it himself.

And, you know, Mark, personally, I was like, racing myself.

I was in Montreal this past year to see F1 and it's different in person.

I think if the governor were to see that in the States biggest city businesses are saying this is a crisis now.

And they I just had one reach out today that said people would be willing to manage the construction and go through if it was shiny Burlington their words.

You know, I think there is that fear.

And the one thing they do agree on, though, this didn't happen overnight and it's not going to be fixed overnight, but they're looking for some answers right now.

Well, what's your observations on this?

It kind of feels like faced with, a problem that is getting worse and that has, many, causes that politicians are doing what they do best which is to blame one another.

Right.

The Democrats are blaming the dogs.

The governor is blaming the Prague's.

The mayor is blaming the state.

And I, you know, I'm sure to a certain extent they may all have a point.

But what's certain is tha they are not working together.

Well.

And it is it is hard to see a way through.

You mentioned that the governor's staf said this would be a photo op, but it might be a photo op that would be beneficial.

Yeah.

I think going back t to seeing it in person, I mean, obviously the governor did follow up that he hasn't walked down Montpelier or Barre recently as well.

And I understand the governor has to worry about, the whole state.

It's it's, I would say maybe like a parent, you don't have one favorite.

And he's obviously from central Vermont, the capital city in Barre.

But I seen it in person I think could have an impact.

And, I think that's one thin which kind of ripples through, as well.

You know, but there's always been this Burlington and then the rest of Vermont and that seem to be playing into the discussion, too.

But what I was gonna say, I mean, to that point, right, like this is not as you have said, this is not just a Burlington problem.

It's worse in Burlington because there are more peopl there and more services there.

But, businesses are really hurting in Montpelier.

They are really hurting in bury.

Very really hurting across the state.

And everyone is dealing with really visible, you know, public safety and homelessness problems.

And, you know, it's very obvious that the closure of the motel program has accelerated that that is not a defense of the motel program, which was extraordinaril expensive and not well managed.

But one thing that it did was you know, help isolate the problem to a certain extent, at least put it out of sight and out of mind.

And I think for some people it actually was beneficial, you know, created some mor stability than being in a tent.

But, absent that, what we're seeing is a spiraling problem.

And, I mean, let's not forget too, right, that the governor chose to, you know, on July 1st to let that executive order expire.

Right.

And as a result of that, there were many some of the most vulnerable people in the motel progra who had to leave that program.

So, I mean, like to your point about that being the context for this, this was a huge topic i the statehouse this year, too.

Right?

And now we're talking about it in terms of Burlington and Barre.

But, I mean, we've been talking about it all year and even for years before this year.

Yeah, I think the big thing with the governor is there's no accountability in that.

Obviously, there's a lot of advocates, and I think a lot of people understand that they're these people, they don't have a place to go.

And we're seeing a vigil.

If you go to the waterfront, if you go to City Hall Park in the biggest city, you're going to see that.

But I think that's that's the what the governor's still standing on, as there was no accountabilit and there was no end in sight.

But to the mayor's point a well, there's no shelter beds.

So where is the answer?

Did you feel at the end of this press conference that things were more polarized, less polarized?

How would you characterize that?

Is there going to be any sort of follow up, any further discussion between the city and state leaders?

I don't know if it's happening publicly or behind closed doors.

And, you know, the one thing the governor did offer was more public safety efforts and police.

I know former Mayor Miro Weinberger asked for that.

We would see state police downtown Friday, Saturday nights.

I asked the mayor that this week.

She declined that, citing that it would, not do it would do more harm.

And she's really more focusing on the housing and the service is what she wants to bring in.

I mean, look, too many moons ago, Mark, when I, when I was applying to colleges, there was this feeling for many people that said, don't go to Springfield, mass.

There are many colleges there, but it's not safe.

Now, I'm not saying Burlington is there, but you're we just had parent drop their students off at UVM.

What do you want to show us?

You want to show off Church Street?

You want to show off City Hall Park on the waterfront and we didn't hear crazy news of things happening, but we know people are avoiding them.

And if if people are feeling that, they go back to Boston and New York, we're in.

Does that become irreversible?

And I think to your point, we're playing politics here.

I think it gets to a point where businesses are saying they're in crisis.

This is what they're saying, that people have been driven away.

The action people want action now and again.

What that is.

How long will that take?

Is a big question still?

Yeah.

And I have a few more white hairs than you do.

And I remember growing up that New York City, everybody was terrified.

Even Detroit now is making a big comeback.

You mentioned people sleeping at City Hall Park.

What did the the resolution by the city council actually target?

It did target making sure people were out of the park, when it was closed and bring more police.

You know, it's cited that since Chief Burke has been there, they are having more patrols.

I've seen it personally.

I've also seen the people that were in City Hal Park are going to side streets.

I'm sorry to hear from businesses.

Mentioned that.

I'll say this morning it was raining.

No one was in City Hall Park around 7 a.m., but a few hours later it was filled up again.

Again?

Where do these people go?

You know, what are the services?

Those are the questions which that that resolution really doesn't answer yet.

But it was bipartisan.

It was both sides that council, as you mentioned earlier, that supported that, and are asking for that change.

Stay tuned.

Sean, meanwhile the governor, announced a plan to have state workers come back into the office three days a week.

This did not seem to go over terribly well.

No, it did not.

And I think a big part of that is because of the way that it was rolled out.

The governor mentioned it sort of offhand in a press conference a couple of weeks ago.

And obviously, reporters that we are we all wrote about it, right?

We jumped on the story.

And I think even the the head of the state employees union said, you know, that press conference was when he learned about, you know, the fact that the administration was considering this.

Now they've taken some time to mull it over.

They've, I guess, refined it.

And yeah, you're right.

As of this week, the plan is starting December 1st for state employees to come in at least three days a week.

I think they said some supervisors couldn't require more if they wanted.

But, you know, they still want to preserve that hybrid option to an extent.

And I mentioned the the state employees union, you know, they've been pretty categorically against this.

They've said, you know, we don't think this is goin to make people more productive.

We actually think it's going to hurt morale.

The governor's folks have said, no, actually, it is going to make us more productive.

Right?

And I mean, here we are five years out from Covid and we're still debating what to do about this.

Right.

And they maybe we don't know for sure what's best.

Yeah.

The pandemic did change everything, didn't it?

It did.

And it I don't know, sometimes it feels like it didn't.

I mean, it's so interesting because just like a year ago, you know, Montpelier businesses were or some Montpelier businesses were all up in arms still about the fact that state employees were still remote, which is hurting their bottom line.

And the line from the state is like look, they're not coming back.

We need this as a recruitment tool.

And yeah, I wonder why the change I, I it might have to do with the fact that employees have fewer options.

Right.

So you might need to be you might not need to be as generous as, before, you know the labor market is undergoing some pretty important transformations right now.

And I, you know, do find it interesting that it it did take so many people by surprise.

But we're also in this space where remote work is drying up, kids going back to school.

In the meantime, there's controversy over the private schools and advocates suing.

What's this issue about?

Yeah.

Well, you know, big, big, big education reform law, was passed last session.

And one of the big things that will for sure change, unless it' reversed by the courts, is that fewer private schools are now eligible for the state's, voucher program.

And, you know, we are seeing kin of the first round of backlash.

There's, an attorney based in the Northeast Kingdom that is trying to prepare a lawsuit.

And, you know, we'll see if it goes forward.

I talked to one legal expert who thinks that, lawmakers were on very strong legal ground, right, that when you have a public benefit, you can draw guardrails around it.

You have quite a bit of discretion as long as it's not totally absurd.

Right.

But but we'll see.

And I'll be very interested to see what happens when this actually hits the courts.

One of the things that is most interesting to me about these new rules is that, i seems like they have taken out all of the religious schools that were once were recently allowed to participate because of Supreme Court decisions.

So, you know, I think I think we'll see.

But I would expect this to continue to be contested.

And, of course, we hav the redistricting conversation that still has to happen in education reform.

And redistricting will have, really important implications when it comes to school choice.

So these rules aside, this will not be the end of the perennial debate that we have in this state about school choice.

Yeah.

Which seems to be one that will never end.

A lot of schools removing cell phones ahead of even when the law requires them to do so.

Does that surprise you?

Absolutely not.

You know, last session, lawmakers passed this law saying, okay no more cell phones in schools.

And they did this becaus a few schools had already gone ahead and done this.

Over half of the states in the country, have moved to ban cell phones in schools.

This is this there's this bipartisan.

It's the only thing America can agree on.

Yes.

And so, you know, this law will ba cell phones in schools starting not this school year, but the next one.

But ahead of that, a bunch of schools are just saying, let's just go ahead and do it right now.

I mean, you know, we have the state's backing, and it will remove a lot of distractions from the classroom.

So, yeah, I think we're seeing that in, a number of schools this year.

Speaking of guardrails, Sean, I had an interesting conversation with Secretary of State, Copeland hands this week.

I know you did to pushing back on the efforts of the Trump administration to try to get Ahold of voter information.

Yeah.

That's right.

And I think so, to my knowledge, right now, the state has not actually received a request for this detailed, sensitive information, but there has been some communication that the Secretary's office has received from Trump's Department of Justice saying, we'd like to discuss the possibility of information sharing.

Right.

And this is a this is a huge topic nationally.

You could pick any number of, of of areas where data privacy and data sharing has come up recently.

But I think an importan distinction here is to sort of say kind of what data we're talking about.

Right?

So anyone you, me folks watching could go to the Secretary of State's office and ask for what they call a voter checklist, and that basically has folks names and addresses, of everyone who's registered to vote in the state.

Obviously, I think that the state has more data on hand about folks than that.

I think the most important piece for this conversatio is that the Secretary's office has the last four digits of folks Social Security numbers if they've registered.

And you can imagine, right, hypothetically, maybe not even hypothetically, it's already happening.

The Trump administration, maybe the Department of Homeland Security saying we want, you know, a list of folks who vote and we want to see the Social Security numbers, and we want to be able to use that to tell somehow if people are voting who aren't citizens, right, voting in federal or state elections.

And we do know from research broadly that that doesn't really happen very much at all.

But this is huge political point for Trump.

It's been for years, for congressional Republicans to the House passed a law that's now in the Senate.

It's called the Safe act.

That is looking at voter ID.

So you can see kind of where the political push is coming from.

The secretary of stat also pushed back pretty heavily on President Trump's idea to get rid of mail in voting, and made the point that an awful lot of people voted for him who mailed in voting to.

And there's a huge number of Vermonters who use that.

Yeah.

That's right.

And I should make that clear.

Yes, that the Secretary came out in terms of the, voter dat and said kind of preemptively, if we get asked, we're not going to give it to them, you know, and she has pointed to actually this existing state law that Vermont has that prevents that information sharing in a lot of cases.

But to your point about mail in voting, yeah.

I mean, this is a huge topic for the secretary's office here.

They're really passionate about it.

And they are, you know, incredibly strong defenders of that.

And they say, you know this is not a political issue.

Right.

And I think that's what's really interesting about this across the board is that we're talking about, you know, just sending in a ballot to vote for whoever you're marking down.

Right.

And now this is so political in 2025, and it's a democratic view or it's a Republican view.

And the secretary told me, you know, I don't see why this is a political debate.

Yeah.

On top of that, Vermonters overwhelmingly say they appreciate it.

They enjoy Mail-In voting.

I think to you, it's not a political party.

Vermonters themselves, that they enjoy it.

Yeah.

It's like two thirds of a voters use that.

Meanwhile, the secretary of state and also Lieutenant Governor John Rogers say they're going to run next year.

Are you surprised to hear that this early?

Not this early.

I think the questions are who's not answering the question of who's running next year?

But it is interesting to see what pieces will fall after this, especially with, Rogers running for lieutenant governor if he stays in the party.

What does that mean for for governor Scott would you think about that?

Well, every time I, I mean, it sounds to me like he's assuming that Scott is going to run again, right?

If he's declaring I'm running for lieutenant governor, that means he's not running for governor.

But, you know, sometime I predict things on television and I'm wrong.

So, a lot of people do.

Yeah.

So, you know, take that with that grain of salt, but that's that's what I would.

That's what I would assume.

Where does that leave?

Who?

Who are we talking about?

Who has or hasn't declared?

Right.

Well, I talked to both the attorney general, charity clerk and the treasurer, Ike check.

And neither of them have, at least on the record, publicly said what offic they're running for next year.

So obviously that leads to the speculation that maybe they're going to try to be governor.

I think that really depends on what Governor Scott does.

We know from how Governor Scott's done this in the past, that he typically doesn't announce his reelection plans until the summer before.

After the legislative session before ends.

So, I mean, that's still a ways from now.

And, I mean, you've asked the governor recently or folks have and he's you know he just kind of laughed it off and says, you know, I don't know.

And he's he's got a lot to do.

And I think you mentioned the, you know, the education reform conversation.

Right?

The governor's put so much political capital into this, this year that and here I am predicting something.

But like, I think it would be pretty surprising to, you know, have him bow out when that process is really only just starting.

Right?

I mean, we're a year out from seeing the actual impacts of what was passed this year.

You know, it's interesting because I heard somebody make the argument the other way, which is that because he pushed this last year, that maybe that indicates that he can now walk off.

What do you think?

I and you could be wrong, I disagree, I yeah, yeah.

I mean, I guess like a really cynical take because, you know, you passed a bill and, including the second step next year and then, you know, you walk away before implementation gets messy and you get to declare your legacy.

But, I, I don't know my, my, my hunch is that he runs again.

What I'm most curious about is whether or not, either my paycheck or charity clerk will challenge him.

We know they're very ambitious.

And my paycheck has been, more critical of the governor publicly than I think he ever has before.

And that's been interesting.

And there, you know, certainly rumors that potentially Democrats smell some blood in the water between education reform, which is a risk politically.

I don't think that it's necessarily a liability.

It may be that, Vermonters truly are ready and willing to have this really difficult conversation, but it is a risk politically.

And then on top of that, you know, there's Trump.

Yeah.

Right.

And, having an hour after your name can be a problem, having an hour after your name.

And also, you know, the the governor has picked his battles when it comes to Trump.

And that has made a lot of Vermonters angry.

And, we've seen Democrats take a few subtle shots.

And so, you know, those those are the political dynamics.

I'll be watching.

But, once again, I've predicted some things and been wrong.

So, Mark, I'll quickly add that, you know, he's almost ten years now.

He's been in office.

He's always kind of been, you know, high ratings from Vermonters.

But notice that at this table, we're naming possible Democrats and not possible Republicans.

So it's interesting that, it's not like the party is kind of pushing someone up on the other side, as we've only said, possible Democrat running for governor right now.

And I can hear people condemning us, saying, why are you talking about this now?

But, political races are pretty expensive an you got to start raising money pretty early.

Lola we're going to wrap up tonight with, you never want to be part of the news, but for my public had some, news that they announced this week and some layoffs announce what would have happened here.

Yeah.

That's right.

Well, Vermont Public is, an NPR affiliate and a PBS affiliate.

And we, lost $4 million in the rescission package that just passed Congress.

And so on Wednesday, the company announced that it would shed 15 positions.

That's 13 people, that lost their jobs, full time jobs.

Really, difficult really dark day for the company and probably the worst day of some people's lives.

You know, like I said, the proximate cause of this is, the federal funding cuts.

The company was facing some pretty large shortfalls before that because of longstanding trends in the media industry.

So.

Yeah.

All right.

Thanks for good luck.

Thanks for making that.

Thank you all for being on the program tonight.

And thank you, of course, for joining us tonight on the program.

And.