Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger gave the following speech at Democratic Nominating Caucus and Miro for Mayor re-election campaign kick-off from Sunday at the Sustainability Academy elementary school in Burlington.
Miro Weinberger Speech
Welcome. Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you Governor Kunin for those warm words, your decisive support threeyears ago, and your support again today. More importantly, thank you for yourservice to this City, State, and country, and all that you have continued to dosince leaving office, writing important books and energizing a generation of women, including some here today, to run for office through your work onEmerge Vermont. You continue to be an inspiration to all of us.
Thank you Fauna Hurley, our outstanding new City Democratic Party Chair, andher leadership team for your work to make today’s event a success and for all you are doing to bring new people and energy into the Burlington Democratic Party.
Thank you Principal Brian Williams and the Sustainability Academy for hostingthis event.
Thank you Jake Perkinson for all you have done to revive the City and StateDemocratic party, for serving as Parliamentarian today, and for your personalfriendship and support.
Thank you to all the volunteers who have come together to make this caucushappen.
Many of you will remember from three years ago a standout volunteer namedJen Kaulius. I am very lucky that she is now serving as my campaign managerand I hope you will all get to know her better working with her over the nextseven weeks.
Thank you City Council President Joan Shannon for your generous nomination. Iwould not be standing here today without your early and strong support threeyears ago. I am very grateful to still have that support today and appreciative of the steady hand you have brought to the leadership of the Council, and yourforceful advocacy on quality of life issues.
I also want to share my deep appreciation for our other Democratic CityCouncilors. No Mayor can successfully lead this City without a good workingrelationship with the Council, and I have been fortunate to have that for threeyears.
I want to thank Karen Paul for your partnership on the City’s financial issues, foryour visionary leadership making planBTV happen, and your focus on saving ourgem of an airport from financial crisis. Thank you also, Karen, for your decision ayear ago to join the Democratic Party – you have made us stronger as a partyand all of us in this room are thankful for that.
Thank you Dave Hartnett for your championing of schools and parks issues andbringing a voice of common sense to our Monday night gatherings.
Thank you Tom Ayres for your passion, your focus on making our pedestrianinfrastructure safer for our seniors and children, and for the helping us all get2015 started on the right foot through your leadership of First Night.
And all of Burlington owes Chip Mason an enormous debt of gratitude for hisskilled, detailed work as the chair of the critical Ordinance Committee which inthe last few years has grappled with some incredibly difficult and importantissues.
Finally I want to give a special thank you to Norm Blais and Bianka LeGrandwho have chosen not to seek re-election in March. Norm, you have served Ward6 with distinction and wisdom. Bianka, you have been a ground-breaker in thiscommunity. You will both be deeply missed on the Council.
Finally, I want to say thank you to my parents, Michael and Ethel, for coming upfrom Hartland for this caucus, and for all those conversations over dinner timewhich instilled in me the idea that politics were important and, potentially, noble.
Thank you to my daughters Li Lin and Ada, and to my incredible wife Stacy,thank you for your partnership in this adventure and your daily supportthroughout our now 19 years together.
Three years ago you came to this Democratic Caucus and you didsomething radical: you voted for a Fresh Start, nominating someone whohad never served in elected office before, because you knew this Cityneeded to do things differently.
Three months later the voters overwhelmingly did the same thing because wewere a City that had lost its way. Our municipal finances were in disarray, manyof the City’s initiatives were stuck and drifting, and trust in City Hall was gone.
As bad as it was, we all sensed that even worse news lay ahead. The City creditrating was headed towards junk bond status. One of the world’s largest bankswas litigating for the removal of a City-owned utility. The Department of PublicWorks Water, Sewer, and Traffic enterprises all faced unprecedented financialtroubles, and our airport had the lowest credit rating of any airport in thecontinental United States.
Our parks, garages, and firehouses were crumbling, and large sections of ourbeloved bike path had been washed away.
In short, the foundation of our City’s greatness and prosperity was eroding.
As we gather here today, Burlington faces a much different, and much brighterfuture. After three years of hard work, collaboration, and focus by myadministration, the City Council, and the voters, the signs of Burlington’sresurgence are all around us and woven into our daily lives.
Our commitment to fixing the City’s finances as the top priority has resulted insignificant improvement of the City’s financial position across the board. Theseefforts are already saving Burlingtonians money, and, as long as we not gobackwards, in the years ahead we will keep tens of millions of dollars in thepockets of Burlingtonians instead of transferring them to Wall Street bondholderscollecting high interest rates.
You can feel the progress when under your wheels as you ride on the rebuilt BikePath. Last summer under the dynamic leadership of new Parks, Recreation andWaterfront Director Jesse Bridges, we broke ground on the first phase of ourinitiative to modernize, expand and enhance the entire 8-mile long bike path.
You can enjoy the progress when you take your family to a City park. It is greatto see Tim Jarvis here at the caucus today. Three years ago Tim was a fixture atNPA and City Council meetings, reminding officials that, amazingly, Burlington’sgirls’ high school softball team was playing their home games in Williston orwherever else they could find a field because there wasn’t a single quality softballfield in the City that drained properly! Last spring Tim was able to watch hisdaughter play her senior year home games at Leddy Park. Hockey players andtheir parents are enjoying a revitalized City rink. Patrons of the boathouse nolonger get wet when it rains. In all, 61 Penny For Parks projects have beencompleted in the last couple years using existing resources.
Looking out over our beloved waterfront the progress is clear. The giant powerlines that marred views of the lake for decades are now gone, we have refreshedWaterfront Park, and last August we broke ground on the voter-approved plan totransform the northern waterfront, the first major waterfront improvement sincethe early 1990s. Throughout the City our public works projects are at last movingagain.
In the Pine Street corridor and around us here in the Old North End we areseeing unprecedented levels of investment, job creation, and important newhousing.
And, after City Attorney Eileen Blackwood and Chief Administrative Officer BobRusten and the rest of the City team worked until nearly 11pm on New Year’sEve, we began 2015 with a dismissal of the Citibank lawsuit over BurlingtonTelecom. We have now definitively ended a long and unfortunate chapter in theCity’s history, protecting taxpayers from any further harm and saving a publicutility from destruction. Burlington Telecom today is profitable and growing –and with the cloud of litigation gone for good – BT’s rebirth has become asymbol of the Fresh Start we have earned together.
While our work cleaning up the City’s finances and addressing the City’sstagnating initiatives is not done, many of our most serious problems have beenaddressed.
We now have the opportunity to lift our eyes to the horizon, focus onlonger-term challenges and opportunities, and define the future we want forour City and our children.
This election will be about that future. Voters on March 3 with have a veryclear choice on the mayoral ballot. One option would return us to theorganizational culture, policies, and some of the same failed leadership thatcreated the Burlington Telecom lawsuit and the other messes that we are justnow emerging from.
The Democratic Party has just given the people of Burlington the option tokeep Moving Forward.
If re-elected, I will keep Burlington Moving Forward by bringing energy andresources to bear on five major areas of focus over the next three years.
One, we will continue Moving Forward with job creation.
In the years ahead we will continue modernizing the post-industrial areas of our waterfront, accelerating Burlington’s efforts to become a great tech city andreforming the permitting system that makes it difficult to grow jobs in thedowntown.
However we will not stop there. Tomorrow we are asking the City Council tocreate a ballot item to begin a major new economic development initiative toimprove our downtown sidewalks, street trees, and other public infrastructurepaid for with TIF funds that do not impact local property tax rates. And during this campaign we will announce our plans for funding the next phaseof the Bike Path expansion and other improvements to our public spaces thatbring more visitors to Burlington.
Two, we will continue Moving Forward Towards a More Affordable,Walkable, Livable and Sustainable Burlington.
One of the most positive trends in the country over the last twenty years is thedramatic increase in the number of people wanting to live in our cities instead ofmoving further out into the suburbs. Unfortunately, the numbers show thatBurlington has largely missed out on this opportunity and as a result, Burlingtonhas become one of the most expensive cities in the country to live in.
We must re-affirm our commitment to house our most vulnerable BurlingtoniansAND fix the broken housing market by passing and implementing the 17-PointHousing Action Plan my administration released in November.
This plan, if implemented successfully, will accomplish many City goals. Morepeople living downtown will make Burlington more affordable and vibrant,increase municipal revenues, improve the quality of life in our historicneighborhoods, help our businesses recruit and retain talent and much more.
Three, we will continue Moving Forward with Municipal Savings andEfficiencies.
Over the past three years we achieved about half of the $8 million in long-termcost savings that we had set as a target. We are positioned and focused tocomplete this goal through technological efficiencies, the completion of a majorpush to make our City buildings more energy efficient, and completing the reformof the City’s pension system that we have been working towards with our publicemployees for over a year.
Four, we will continue Moving Forward By Making Municipal GovernmentMore Effective.
Building on our past efforts in this area, we are in the process of hiring for a new Chief Innovation Officer position to improve our use of municipal technology andcreate a culture of continuous improvement. And soon we will roll out the City’s first-ever, ten-year capital plan to emphasizecost-saving preventative maintenance and to ensure that we never return to thedays of decaying public infrastructure that marked the prior administration.
Finally, we will continue Moving Forward by doing everything we can tomake Burlington a City of inclusion and opportunities for all.
This country was founded on the principle that all Americans should have anequal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. However, the country welive in today has not fully realized this promise. Even here in Burlington nearlyhalf of our children reach kindergarten unprepared, and a disproportionatenumber of these kids come from poor homes.
This pattern becomes more pronounced, and harder to change every year askids get older. Far too often these children who start school behind graduate atan unusually low rate, earn less as adults, suffer higher rates of incarceration anddrug use, and enjoy a far lower life expectancy.
It does not have to be this way.For decades we have known that the driver ofthese outcomes is childhood poverty. What has changed in recent years is thatwe now know the solution. Done right, investments in high quality child care forchildren from birth to age five eliminate the learning gap between poor childrenand their peers and create enormous, documented, public returns on investmentover time.
In the days ahead we will release our plans for an ambitious Burlington EarlyLearning Initiative. Our goal will be nothing short of ensuring that all Burlingtonchildren have the opportunity to lead full, healthy, successful lives.
And, as part of this focus on opportunity, we will continue our work to makeBurlington a truly inclusive community. Last summer we had a ceremony in frontof City Hall to mark the 50th Anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of1964. We celebrated the courage and sacrifice that produced that landmarklegislation and recommitted the City to further progress. Events since around thecountry have been a harsh reminder of how far we still have to go to truly fulfillour nation’s ideals of justice and liberty.
The City is deeply engaged in an effort to eliminate racial bias and institutionalbarriers to inclusion from our practices and policies. In November we adopted aCity Diversity and Equity Strategic Plan that included dozens of needed reformsand the most senior members of City government meet regularly to addressthem. One example of this effort is the ballot item you will see on Town MeetingDay to make it possible for all residents, regardless of citizenship, to serve asdepartment heads and volunteer on our boards and commissions.
If I am re-elected, I pledge that this incremental, long-term work will continue,because when I think about the urgency of becoming a more inclusive City, I amreminded of my own daughters and their circle of friends.
A little more than a year ago, late on a fall afternoon, Stacy and I received phonecalls. We both sprinted back to the house, picked up the overnight bags we hadpre-packed, and drove to a distant corner of the state. At about 8pm that night we took into our arms the 3-hour old baby who wouldsoon become Ada Champlain Weinberger.
In an instant we became an even more multi-cultural family than we alreadywere, adding African-American to the Russian, Jewish, and Chinese ethnicitiesand cultures already merged in the Weinberger home.
\I am committed to doing everything I can to see that Ada and Li Lin, their friends,and all of Burlington’s children grow up in a City in which diversity enriches ourcommunity, where inclusion is valued and practiced, and where our children’sdreams flourish in the face of diminishing institutional barriers.
In summary, the choice before the City now is whether to Keep MovingForward or to return to the leadership and attitude that put the City in suchtrouble three years ago. Now is not the time to turn back. The people inthis room will not let that happen. The people of Burlington are tooengaged and too committed to this wonderful place to go back. I ask foryour support in the weeks ahead to make sure that together on March 3,Burlington continues Moving Forward.
Thank you.