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Council also says safe injection site would require changing city bylaws
By Guy Page
The Burlington City Council is calling for faster removal of unauthorized vagrant encampments in city parks and other areas where camping is prohibited, urging the administration to begin enforcement actions within about 24 hours of discovering an illegal campsite.
The proposed action follows the cancellation of a Sunday, July 19 Burlington Concert Band concert in Battery Park due to disorderly vagrants who regard the park as their home.
A more detailed news story, including Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak’s ambivalent response to the council plan, will be published soon in the Burlington Daily News, and will be discussed Tuesday at 12:30 PM on Chronicle Conversations on WVMT AM 620 and wvmtradio.com.
The directive is part of a broader ‘Burlington Forward’ resolution on managing temporary encampments and evaluating their effectiveness. Under the policy, city officials would provide notice that an encampment is subject to removal and set a deadline for enforcement as soon as reasonably practicable. The council said the timeline should give individuals enough time to make alternative arrangements while protecting public health, public safety, environmental resources, and public access to parks and other shared spaces.
The policy includes several accommodations to vagrants, including city-sanctioned encampments. But it also states that “Lasting compassion is measured not by our willingness to tolerate harm and suffering, but by our determination to end it.”
And after many pages of proposed services aka carrots, the 21-page document then waves a stick, too.
Before an encampment is removed, the city would provide information about local social service organizations, Vermont’s Coordinated Entry housing system, other available community resources, and where any collected personal property will be stored.
The resolution also calls for tracking performance measures such as occupancy, average length of stay, successful transitions into shelter or permanent housing, and emergency service responses.
The council noted that Burlington’s ordinances prohibit camping in public parks, including the Urban Reserve, and said unauthorized encampments in prohibited areas are inconsistent with the city’s policies.
Overdose prevention centers aka safe injection sites restricted
The Council’s plan also calls for amending city development bylaws full regulatory review of Overdose Prevention Centers, approved for state funding by the Legislature but so far unpopular with all potential Burlington neighborhoods.
“The City Council declares that any proposal to authorize overdose prevention centers within the City of Burlington should proceed only through amendment of the Comprehensive Development Ordinance following public notice, public hearing, and legislative action by the City Council.”
The plan also declares the sites must not be located downtown.
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Categories: Burlington
Wallow in the mess you voted in Burlington, isn’t the lunatic left a hoot?
Google up WESTWARD HO! Burlington, VT
Then owner [creator of] Leunig’s , [ME] saw all this coming over 20 years ago…..
Let’s be clear……The “Progressives” did this….under Bernie Sanders….I’t probably time to send THEM packing. Westward Ho! California will
Denny, you certainly were a man ahead of his time. With that said, it took Burlington’s far left progressive leadership, which took a small problem to grow it into today’s crisis through enabling and accommodation. A textbook example was when the July 19th band concert was canceled due to safety concern. The Mayor tried to get it moved to City Hall Park (also with a well documented homeless issue) and then to Church Street. When the Band Conductor refused and the mayor got a lot of public pressure, she was forced to finally accommodate Burlington residents and have the homeless moved, the band shell cleaned, and security provided.
Didn’t the “SOCIALIST” mayor just say that Burlington is back??? What a joke!!! Maybe they should hold the concert in front of the $500k tree….
This is what happens when Democrats invite drug addicts from all over the country to come to Vermont for the free benefits. They hand out. Stop giving out free needles and stop encouraging drugs to be used downtown. Stop giving free housing and benefits to people that are not native to the state of Vermont. Stop voting for Democrats! Democrats are domestic terrorists!
Safe injection sites are “unpopular with all potential Burlington neighborhood.” Color me shocked that even those advocating for such sites suffer from NIMBY.
The city of Burlington will cite you if you create a habitat on your property that attracts raccoons or rats, but Mayor Emma-Hyphen has created a habitat for other pesky and dangerous critters and calls it compassion. The State’s Attorney also has such a soft spot for those same pesky, dangerous critters, but refuses to cage them when they violate the law. Just unbelievable that a band concert was not allowed in A BANDSHELL, because it had been turned into a shelter by vagrants…literally RIGHT NEXT TO the police station. Just unbelievable that another organization is setting up a new location for a needle “exchange”, when for years the “exchange” has never made any demand that it’s clients actually “exchange” any old needles for new ones…they just give them away by the hundreds and surprise, surprise, the bloody, used syringes end up discarded all over in public spaces, where they can be contacted by children and pets. That “harm reduction/public health” measure has turned into a public health nightmare. Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Isn’t the obvious location for the “safe injection site” in City Hall adjacent to the mayors office …. Then she can join in reaping the benefits instead of just the citizens who pay dearly to live in the city of “free everything”
Many are opposed to locating it downtown, as in- where most of the junkies hang out. I suggest locating it far from downtown, in the South End, close to where Mayor Emma-Hyphen lives.
It should literally be a requirement that anyone advocating for safe injection sites, homeless encampments, etc. be REQUIRED to live next door to those places, just like I believe that any politician that votes for the US to go to war should first be sending their own children!! I think then we would see real change.
I’ve seen encampments where it would have been simply to contain trash, etc. The residents simply didn’t care. They don’t maintain the common level of decency usually found in every day society. I was homeless for a total of about 9 years. I managed to avoid such actions and the people who perpetrate them.
I’m not sure what it took to get the current Westward Ho mentality in vogue and appearing to take hold, but I’m glad enough Vermonters endorse it and want to see the needles cleaned up, moved out, and more community supportive behaviors encouraged.