Church Street Businesses Ask Gov. Scott for State Help on Downtown Public Safety and Homeless Shelter Site

Burlington business owners have joined together to ask Gov. Phil Scott for help with public safety problems in the city’s downtown. Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak and the Burlington City Council have also asked the governor to commit more state resources and effort to these problems, and Scott has not granted those requests.

In a letter sent on Wednesday, the Church Street Marketplace Commission framed the issue in economic terms. The letter says Chittenden County contributes a quarter of the state’s total tax income and describes Burlington as “the top spot for tourism” in Vermont. “A crisis in Burlington is a crisis” for the state, the commissioners wrote. The letter states that “Burlington’s downtown is essentially in a state of emergency” and that residents, business owners, employees and property owners have said “time has run out.” An early draft warned that some Church Street businesses “have months before they will be forced to close their doors,” but that language was removed from the final version.

The nine-member commission outlined four requests. First, it asked Scott to help the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity find a location for a 100-bed homeless shelter, a search the nonprofit has struggled with. Showing hospitality to people in need is a theme that runs through this request (Matthew 25:35). Second, the commission asked that state troopers again patrol downtown regularly. Third, it asked the state to restore the “accountability court,” which heard cases involving repeat offenders. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George has continued a more limited version of that court without additional state resources, calling it “support court.” Fourth, citing an increase in incidents involving people with untreated mental health issues, the commission asked the Agency of Human Services to develop a plan to “establish a State mental health facility to replace/enhance the services previously provided by the Waterbury Hospital that was closed 15 years ago.”

The letter is the latest in a series of appeals to the governor concerning downtown Burlington, where the issues discussed include open drug use, untreated mental health problems and low-level crimes such as shoplifting. Many of these concerns involve the downtown homeless population. A bipartisan resolution the Burlington City Council passed in August made nearly identical requests. Scott did not respond to it directly, saying instead that the state had already “done a lot for Burlington.” He has also said he would prefer advocates create multiple new homeless shelters rather than one large one.

Commission member and Homeport owner Mark Bouchett said he hoped downtown business owners were a constituency Scott would “value enough to give some consideration to.” When Scott sent state troopers into Burlington over the summer, a spokesperson for his office said the move was in response to concerns from “community and business leaders.” The governor did not confer with Mulvaney-Stanak before ordering the deployment. The commissioners wrote that “it’s time for all of us to stop reassessing the past and to instead look forward,” echoing language in Burlington Democrats’ public safety resolution. Bouchett said the letter responded to concerns that business owners and residents raised with the commission at a July meeting.

Earlier, Mulvaney-Stanak hosted a forum at the end of August, where business owners complained about the negative effects of bad behavior from some people experiencing homelessness who live on and around Church Street. Two months before that, the mayor and Bouchett had stood on the Church Street bricks and declared that Burlington “was back.”

Bouchett said the “landlords and business owners” of Church Street, who pay an additional fee that helps maintain the mall, see the marketplace commission as their “conduit to the city government.”

The city has taken some steps to address conditions downtown. It has restarted a program that targets “hot spots” of bad behavior and installed a surveillance camera and other deterrents in City Hall Park.

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