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Other cities reversed course. The magazine casts Burlington as the holdout. Six days before it published, the council’s Democratic majority moved to change that.
A new article in The Atlantic, published this morning, argues that a radical form of harm reduction has failed the American cities that adopted it. It’s called “The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs,” it’s by Michael Powell, and it runs as the magazine’s September cover story. It uses two cities to make its case. One is Seattle. The other is Burlington.
Burlington is the one the article presents as unmoved.
Compass checked the Vermont figures in the piece against the state’s own records. The ones that can be checked hold up. Vermont recorded 170 overdose deaths in 2025, a 37 percent decline from the 2022 peak of 269 — exact, per the Health Department’s 2025 Fatal Overdose Report, and the same figure Governor Phil Scott’s office used in its own May press release.
Twenty-eight people died of overdoses in Burlington in 2024, out of 64 in Chittenden County — also exact, from the Health Department’s January 2026 report to the Legislature on the overdose prevention center pilot. One number we could not reproduce from public records: the article’s count of 585 overdoses in Burlington that year, which may derive from a police incident category that the same report defines as any encounter with an officer, including a logged foot patrol.
None of that changes the picture. Burlington’s overdose rate is high. The conditions Powell describes — the needles, the tents, the park — are not in dispute here.
But the numbers aren’t what the article is actually arguing.
The argument is about direction
The piece opens on the street in Seattle: an open-air drug market at 12th and Jackson, a fenced playground in Little Saigon, a park pavilion on Beacon Hill taken over by people smoking fentanyl. It traces the philosophy back to the addict unions of 1970s Rotterdam, forward through Vancouver’s 2003 supervised injection site, and out into British Columbia’s “safer supply” program, which Powell argues fed a black market and widened the circle of addiction.
Then it turns to the retreat, and the retreat is the point.
British Columbia now requires supervised consumption of prescribed narcotics, and its decriminalization program has expired. San Francisco’s mayor has ordered crackdowns on dealers and tent cities. Philadelphia has stood up a treatment court. Boston’s mayor, once an enthusiast, has dropped all mention of injection centers from her plans, the article reports. Seattle’s new mayor — a democratic socialist with no prior elected experience — is authorizing encampment sweeps.
One city after another, in Powell’s telling, has looked at what it built and started taking it apart.
And then there is Burlington, where the article finds officials still insisting that harm reduction is the most effective and moral answer available. The mayor calls it humane and essential. The state’s attorney says the people using drugs downtown are rarely dangerous and that City Hall Park is still a very safe place to be. The city is planning an overdose prevention center — authorized by the Legislature in 2024 over the governor’s veto — and citing Vancouver, the model everyone else is walking away from, as its evidence.
That’s the architecture. Burlington isn’t in the piece because its numbers are the worst. It’s in the piece because it’s the one that wouldn’t reconsider.
July 24
On Friday, July 24 — six days before the article published — most of the Burlington City Council’s Democratic caucus held a press conference on Bank Street to announce a draft resolution called Burlington Forward: A Comprehensive Framework for Safe Public Spaces and a Stronger Community.
The Democrats hold a majority on the council. The draft calls for a stronger public safety presence downtown, moving homeless people out of public spaces, more police staffing, security cameras, encampment and graffiti removal, and demands that neighboring towns and the state carry more of the load. It takes direct aim at the needle exchange recently relocated to Bank Street, in the heart of downtown, arguing that facilities like it should go through formal zoning and public review and should not sit in the downtown core. The caucus said it plans to introduce the resolution at the council’s August meeting. (WCAX; Seven Days)
The councilor who called that press conference was Ben Traverse, the council president. “We are here now because, from our perspective, enough is enough,” he said. Neither the needle exchange nor a future overdose prevention center, in his view, belongs downtown.
Traverse is quoted in The Atlantic. Powell describes him as “a liberal Democrat who has grown uncomfortable with Burlington’s direction,” and notes near the end of the Burlington section that “Traverse and other Democrats on the city council have begun to challenge the mayor on harm reduction.”
That sentence is accurate, and this piece isn’t built on the claim that Powell missed something. It’s built on the size of what those six words now contain: the council’s majority caucus, a named framework, a public rollout, a planned August introduction, and the council president saying enough is enough out loud.
What hasn’t happened matters too. The resolution has not been adopted, referred to committee, or scheduled for a vote. It does not reject harm reduction wholesale — it goes after enforcement, encampments, and where these facilities sit, not the philosophy entire. Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak responded the same day, saying the draft does little to set a tone of collaboration and contains ideas that move Burlington away from its values by suggesting the city remove people and legislate restrictions that contradict what public health data shows works. Progressive Councilor Gene Bergman asked that it go through committee rather than get rammed through.
So Burlington is having a version of the argument the article says the other cities already had. It hasn’t finished having it. But it is no longer the city that isn’t having it.
It didn’t start last week either
Pressure has been building for the better part of a year, much of it applied from outside the city.
In October 2025, Governor Scott announced a 14-point action plan for Burlington: a special prosecutor for defendants carrying five or more open cases, state law enforcement on foot patrols, Health Department help with syringe disposal. The mayor didn’t fight it. She said the plan would help ensure cases are resolved and victims supported.
State troopers deployed downtown that November. They came back this week and will stay through mid-August.
In May, an effort to partially defund the overdose prevention center reached the Senate floor. It failed, and the Senate approved more than $1 million to continue the work — but the vote happened at all, and some of the project’s original supporters were publicly undecided going in.
And the center itself still has no site two years on. A location fell through in February and the city declined to say where. A May assessment narrowed the search to three areas of the city rather than to addresses.
None of that is a reversal of city policy, and Compass isn’t calling it one. It’s a record of a policy under sustained outside pressure and growing internal disagreement — in a place where the governing majority on the council has now put a name and a date on its objection.
What none of this settles
The article argues that harm reduction made things worse in Burlington. Burlington Forward assumes the same thing. Neither claim is settled by any Vermont data we can find.
Overdose deaths fell across Vermont and across much of the country in 2024 and 2025. Burlington’s own fell 20 percent while its police-recorded drug incidents rose. Chittenden County didn’t decline at all — 63 deaths became 64 — even as the state’s total fell 12 percent. Nothing in the public record separates the effect of a needle exchange from a changed drug supply, a naloxone campaign, or an enforcement surge. Broad declines across many places don’t tell you which local policy caused them.
But the argument in Burlington was never going to be decided by data, and it isn’t being decided by data now.
What changed on July 24 is that a group of elected officials stopped waiting for the evidence to resolve. The people who live and work downtown had already stopped. So had the merchants who wrote to the mayor last year, and the parents Powell interviewed, and — on the evidence of two trooper deployments and a 14-point plan — the governor.
That’s the thing The Atlantic documented and the thing the article couldn’t quite show, because it went to press six days too early: not a city that said yes to drugs and meant it, but a city that has run out of patience with its own answer and hasn’t yet agreed on a new one.
What to watch
August. Burlington Forward goes to the council for introduction. Whether it moves to committee or toward a floor vote will tell you how hard the Democratic majority intends to push, and whether the mayor and the Progressive minority can slow it.
August 11. State’s Attorney Sarah George, quoted in the article saying people who use drugs are “rarely dangerous,” faces a contested Democratic primary. Compass published its analysis of eight years of Chittenden County court data this week.
Mid-August. The state police deployment ends. Public Safety Commissioner Jennifer Morrison has said the state was already staffing up for a New England governors and eastern Canadian premiers meeting in early August and extended the deployment on both ends. Compass has asked the Vermont State Police to confirm that rationale, along with hours, cost, and end date — and for the same figures from the November 2025 deployment, which was announced with a start date and no public record of how it finished.
A note on timing: Powell reported this piece over roughly a year, and the Burlington section references visits last September and this April. Magazine production schedules are long, and nothing here is a claim about what any reporter could have caught. The observation is narrower: a story about whether a city would change course reached print the same week that city’s council majority made its case for changing it.
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Categories: Burlington, Media
Democrats have destroyed everything they’ve touched. The name Progressive is just a back door name for communist Democrat. They have enabled homelessness because they’re promoting free needles and drug use within the city. All on the expensive taxpayers dollar. They also miss you taxpayers dollars by putting these illegals and refugees and drug addicts into Hotels on taxpayers money. In excess of $50 million a year. they have created the perfect storm with a city full of troublemakers and drug addicts that are stealing everybody blind and miss using taxpayers money. Stop voting for Democrats and Progressive because they are both the same and they’re both communist terrorists
I would like to know why the mayor is so against trying to improve Burlington. She is ticked off because the State Police are there on Church St. I wonder just how many needles are coming back to this needle exchanged and were the business owners informed that the program is going to be on Bank St. People raised hell when it was on Clark St and now on Bank St. more and more people are going to stop coming to Burlington, Battery Park has become a disgrace, kids are not safe playing in the park anymore and concerts cancelled because of the homelessness and the drugs that are now in it. I remember the days where you could sit in the park, have a picnic, watch your kids play on the playground, eat at Beansie’s bus, look out on the lake, watch the fireworks etc. All the positive is gone now and it has gone from a beautiful park to a sh** show enforcing homelessness to the point where no one wants to go there. The police station is right next to the park, yet nothing is done. I just don’t understand that. But to their defense if they were to arrest all these people, Sarah George would let them all out and not make them accountable. Now who wants to go on Bank St. The Farmhouse and Henry’s diner is there right beside the needle exchange house. I bet those businesses are declining because of this exchange. Henrys has been there since I was a child, it was always a treat to go there, now forget it. You need to stop reenforcing drug use and start making them accountable before someone else ends up dead. I remember when the mayor told the press that ‘Burlington is Back’, that same day there was an overdose in the city park. When is it going to all end, it is an embarrassment to have the 2nd position in the most drug deaths in Burlington. Vermont has become an embarrassment, and people are embarrassed that they are from Vermont.
Correct me if I am wrong but the Situation Table only works when folks want to be helped. Until that point, homeless and drug users contribute to what is described above.
In case no one has seen this, this sums up what Burlington has become:
From the owner of Burlington’s Ready funeral homes and The Archives bar:
Dear Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak and Members of the Burlington City Council,
I have spent my entire career helping families through the worst days of their lives.
As the third-generation owner of Ready Funeral & Cremation Service and the owner of The Archives in downtown Burlington, I have a perspective on this city that few others do. Every day I see Burlington through two very different lenses: one as a business owner working to welcome people into our downtown, and the other as a funeral director serving families during the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
Recently, those two worlds collided.
I am currently working with the family of the young girl who tragically lost her life in last week’s bicycle accident.
During funeral arrangements, we discussed churches, music, readings, flowers, and all the decisions no parent should ever have to make for a child.
But another conversation emerged.
The family found themselves asking which downtown church would require hundreds of children attending her funeral to walk past the fewest encampments, the least amount of open drug use, and the fewest public safety concerns.
I have arranged thousands of funerals during my career.
Never, not once, did I imagine that public safety would become part of funeral planning.
Please stop and think about that.
Parents grieving the unimaginable loss of their daughter had to consider whether her classmates would feel safe simply walking into a church to say goodbye.
No family should ever face that decision.
No child should ever have to experience it.
No city should ever consider it acceptable.
Unfortunately, that was not the only moment that reminded me how much Burlington has changed.
While meeting with another family making arrangements for their mother, I escorted them to the front door of our funeral home. As we stepped outside, a couple sat on our front lawn openly injecting themselves while sitting on my front lawn. The family saw it. I saw it.
Imagine spending two hours making arrangements for your mother’s funeral, only to walk outside and witness that before you even reach your car.
Families come to us seeking peace, dignity, and compassion.
That is not what they should encounter.
Nor are these isolated experiences.
As the owner of a downtown business, I watch visitors change their routes to avoid College Street and City Hall Park. Employees tell us they are afraid to walk to the downtown parking garages, fears only heightened by the recent sexual assault in a downtown employee parking garage and our General Manager being beaten in another garage this past winter. Customers regularly comment on the conditions they encounter before ever walking through our front door. Our staff is asked to open our restrooms to non-customers, only to find them left with vomit, bodily fluids, drug paraphernalia, and damage that renders them unusable for paying patrons. We see shopping carts blocking sidewalks, people wandering into traffic, storefronts occupied for hours, and open drug use that has become so commonplace that many people have simply stopped reporting it.
Perhaps the most troubling part is how normal these conditions have become.
When disorder becomes routine, people stop expecting better.
Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak, I read your response to the Democratic Councilors’ Burlington Forward resolution with great disappointment. You suggested that stronger accountability and enforcement move Burlington away from its values as an inclusive and compassionate community.
Respectfully, I believe the opposite.
There is nothing compassionate about allowing people to remain trapped in addiction on our sidewalks.
There is nothing compassionate about untreated mental illness playing out in public while people suffer in plain sight.
There is nothing compassionate about allowing our parks, sidewalks, churches, parking garages, and business districts to deteriorate to the point that grieving families must consider public safety while planning a child’s funeral.
There is nothing compassionate about asking residents, employees, visitors, business owners, and children to lower their expectations of safety in the name of progress.
Compassion without accountability is not compassion. It is abandonment.
It abandons those struggling with addiction by accepting lives of crisis instead of demanding pathways toward recovery.
It abandons residents who no longer feel comfortable using their own public spaces.
It abandons employees walking to work.
It abandons visitors deciding whether Burlington is a place worth returning to.
And it abandons the small businesses that continue investing, hiring, paying taxes, and believing this city can be better.
The recent Burlington Forward proposal acknowledges what many of us have been saying for years: the current approach is not producing the results Burlington deserves. Compassion and accountability are not competing values. They are partners. We absolutely need housing, treatment, behavioral health services, and regional cooperation. But we also need laws that are enforced and public spaces that belong to everyone—not just to those willing to ignore them.
As a downtown business owner, I cannot place a few café tables on the sidewalk without first obtaining multiple permits, paying fees, complying with city regulations, and accepting the responsibility that comes with using public space. Yet every day I watch shopping carts, chairs, furniture, tents, bicycles, and personal belongings occupy those very same sidewalks and public parks indefinitely with little or no consequence.
The City has demonstrated that it knows how to regulate public space.
The question is why those rules are enforced so rigorously against the businesses investing in Burlington while they are ignored when public spaces are unlawfully occupied and rendered unusable for everyone else.
Small business owners are held accountable every single day.
If we fail our customers, we lose them.
If we fail our employees, they leave.
If we fail financially, we close.
We do not receive a paycheck regardless of the outcome.
We live with the consequences of our decisions every single day.
City leadership should be held to that same standard.
I appreciate the hard work of our police officers, firefighters, outreach workers, healthcare professionals, nonprofit organizations, and city employees. They are doing difficult work under extraordinarily challenging circumstances.
But good intentions cannot be the measure of success.
Results must be.
For those of us who live and work downtown every day, the results are impossible to ignore.
I love Burlington.
My family has invested generations serving this community.
I own two businesses here because I believe in this city.
That is precisely why I refuse to accept that this is the best Burlington can be.
Burlington is not failing because it lacks compassionate people.
It is struggling because compassion has too often been mistaken for the absence of accountability.
The residents have done their part.
Business owners continue investing.
Employees continue showing up.
Families continue hoping.
Taxpayers continue paying.
Now it is time for City Hall to do its part.
Leadership requires making difficult decisions, even when they are politically uncomfortable. Continuing policies that are not producing safer streets, healthier public spaces, or better outcomes for those struggling with addiction is not leadership.
Burlington deserves better.
So do the businesses that continue investing here.
So do the families I serve.
And so do the parents who should never have been forced to consider public safety when planning their daughter’s funeral.
Respectfully,
Michele Ready Ambrosino
Owner, Ready Funeral & Cremation Service
Owner, The Archives Bar
Burlington, Vermont
I presume Burlington’s college students are voting for the Progressives and their approach to the myriad social evils besetting our city and making it an open air asylum.
Does there have to be a complete dystopia to get her out?
Deaths is the standard for success?
Consider the more addicts who die the less addicts there are year to year. This doesn’t mean the program is a success it implies complete failure. I what world is 200+ deaths by overdose in a city the size of Burlington a success story?
Do the math not the meth kids.