Vermont Business Magazine Mayor Miro Weinberger secured the endorsement of the Burlington Democratic Party during its virtual nominating caucus Sunday evening. South End resident and Campaign Treasurer CD Mattison nominated Mayor Weinberger for the mayoral seat.
Mayor Weinberger delivered a speech where he laid out a plan to continue strong focus on containing COVID-19, drive a robust and racially just economic recovery from the pandemic, and shared a vision for Burlington that bases policy on science, data, and expertise.
The full text of Weinberger’s speech is included below.
Good afternoon, Burlington Democrats! It’s wonderful to join you today.
Thank you, Mattison, for being a leader who cares deeply about our supportive and engaged
Burlington community and for your inspirational words. I am humbled by and grateful for your
support.
Molly Gray -- Burlingtonians and Vermonters are very fortunate that we will have a leader with
your experience, intelligence, and passion for the state serving as our Lieutenant Governor.
To Sam Donnelly, our outgoing Party Chair, Ben Traverse, our Caucus Chair, Adam Roof, our new
Party Chair, and the rest of the Burlington Democratic Party team -- thank you for your
innovation and organization to make this new and unique Caucus format a success!
To my Mom and Dad, who are with us online from Hartland, thank you for your endless love,
support, and guidance.
And to my amazing family Li Lin, Ada, and Stacy -- thank you and I love you. I simply could not
serve in this way without your sacrifice and commitment.
One month ago, we created history and witnessed the power of our democracy as more
Americans than ever before voted and elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to lead our nation
through these challenging times.
Yes, brighter days are coming, but we have much more work ahead to reach the other side of
this long crisis.
On April 2 of this year, I declared that the State of the City was a state of emergency. Eight
months later, the emergency continues to rage – in fact we caucus at the end of the week in
which we have seen the highest number yet of new infections as a country, state and city.
The economic pain of this disaster is also intensifying. In recent weeks here in Burlington,
hundreds of our neighbors working in restaurants and shops have again been laid off, while
federal relief has almost entirely run out.
And at the same time, right now we have an enormous opportunity, if we get it right, to make
transformational progress on the issue that has plagued and dishonored us since our country’s
very founding: racial injustice.
How will we get through these historically challenging times?
The way we always do in this resilient city: by showing up to support each other; by looking to
data, science, and the best expert advice for solutions; and by working hard until all our
neighbors are cared for and safely on the other side of this crisis.
These community values and commitments are some of the very beliefs that I learned growing
up on a dirt road in Hartland, Vermont. My loving parents encouraged my two siblings and me
to find our own passions and follow some simple rules: finish what you start, leave every place
in better shape than how you found it, and take responsibility for the larger community.
One of my strongest childhood memories is of the winter that my mother rallied the whole town
to come to the elementary school gymnasium and place local gifts into a trunk that she shipped
to the Soviet Union to promote friendship and peace. My mom’s driving belief that we can
make the whole world a better place through local action is embedded deeply in me.
Also, as a kid, I fell in love with baseball -- playing it, reading about it, and listening to Red Sox
radio broadcasts every night. Through baseball, I learned lifelong lessons about the value of
teamwork, practice, and, most influentially, the vast and transformative power of data and
expertise.
As a teen, I read everything about baseball I could get my hands on, making daily trips to our
small-town pharmacy to check the magazine racks for the latest preview of the Sox season and
to pick up both the local Valley News and Boston Globe to read two accounts of each game.
But my favorite thing to read was a then obscure annual book desktop published each spring on
cheap, grainy paper – the Bill James Baseball Abstract. The 1982-92 volumes still sit on a
bookshelf in our house, and they proved with irrefutable numbers that bunting, stealing bases,
ranking players by batting average, and many more conventional strategies were deeply flawed.
He built a stunning case for rethinking just about everything we thought we knew about the
game.
It took a couple decades, but eventually James’s thinking fundamentally changed the sport. This
process culminated in the Red Sox hiring him out of rural Kansas to help run the club in 2003,
and the next year they won their first world series since 1918. The win was no fluke – they have
won three more since.
The takeaway that stuck with me transcends baseball: good analysis and the right experts can
have a tremendous impact on real world tactics, and generate life-improving results.
In my early 20s, my professional interests turned towards building affordable housing for the
most vulnerable, and creating great public places. But my belief in the power of analysis, and
listening to the best-prepared experts only increased.
I came into office determined to make local government decisions based on evidence, not on
the intuitions and untested conventional wisdom that too often carry the day.
We have applied this kind of problem-solving to all of our major challenges over the last nine
years.
For example, we confronted the opioid crisis head on in 2016 by creating CommunityStat – a
monthly stakeholder meeting focused on real time data, listening to the nation’s top public
health experts, and relentless follow up. Supported by this focus, our community’s incredible
nurses and doctors, syringe exchange workers and other treatment professionals, defense
attorneys, prosecutors, parents, police officers and others – the thousands of community
members who work on some element of this huge challenge – were able to come together to
reduce opioid overdose deaths by 50% in Chittenden County from 2017 through 2019.
And in the early months of 2020, as we saw COVID-19 coming at us from the other side of the
globe, we concluded based on history that in a global pandemic local actions matter and we
launched the City’s biggest data and science effort yet.
In early March we created a 10-person Analytics Team that has kept the City on top of the
quickly evolving knowledge about the virus and enabled us to add value to the broader
community’s remarkable sacrifice, service, and vigilance.
To cite just one of the dozens of examples of this, in mid-March, well before the CDC shifted its
guidance and started recommending masking for the general public, the city purchased a
truckload of denim and engaged hundreds of community volunteers and small businesses to
begin fabricating high-quality cloth masks. By the time Vermont began re-opening on May 15
we had distributed over 25,000 masks to essential workers, seniors, group living facilities, and
every Burlingtonian who wanted one.
This coordinated local government and community action is one of the driving reasons that the
Burlington metropolitan area has had one of the best records of any American city fighting the
virus and saving lives throughout this pandemic.
With your support and partnership, this is the way I will continue to attack our biggest
challenges. Over the coming weeks, I will lay out a series of critical plans for the crises we face.
We will detail how the City intends to continue to lead a robust, racially-just, multi-year recovery
with the same kind of energy, innovation, and resources that we have brought to fighting the
pandemic.
We will demonstrate how our 2017 commitment to strategic electrification has us on the path
to being America’s first Net Zero Energy City by 2030, and preview the exciting progress we
must make in the next three years.
We will lay out a vision for Burlington to join the more than 2,000 small jurisdictions with a local
public health department to ensure that going forward we combat racism as a public health
emergency and future crises with the same kind of approach, urgency, and focus on measurable
results as we have brought to the Opioid Crisis and pandemic.
Through this campaign and beyond, I will continue to work to forge a new consensus on policing
here in Burlington. My goal for the City remains to implement structural and cultural
transformation that is supported and accepted by the community and officers alike, while
keeping the department effective and responsive and making our City safer for all than it is
today.
And I will speak more during this campaign about how we will finish transforming the former,
failing mall into a downtown neighborhood with jobs, much-needed new homes, and vibrant
streets for the first time since the 1960s. While of course the last two years have not gone
exactly as we hoped, the City has been financially well-protected from the developer’s delays,
and our team is focused on and positioned to bring this project to successful resolution, just as
we have with the Moran Frame, the rest of the northern waterfront, City Hall Park, the new bus
station, the low-barrier homeless shelter, and so many other critical projects over the last nine
years.
However, for all this to happen, we first must win another election together. In that election the
voters will face a very clear choice.
As the Democratic Party has been establishing itself, both nationally and locally, as a Party
committed to people through policy and progress that are based in science, data, and expertise,
today’s Burlington Progressive Party has been moving in a different, rigid, ideological direction.
To the many Burlingtonians who have long thought of themselves as small “p”, or even big “P”
Progressives but are alarmed by this clear multi-year trend, we welcome you and your
community commitment at our Caucus.
We know here in Burlington how dangerous devotion to ideology without attention to data,
detail, or expert opinion can be. This practice created the BT debacle that brought our City to its
knees in 2009.
Last year, after a decade of focus and action, we finally fixed that problem for good, restored
our AA credit rating, and locked in more than 17 million dollars and counting in taxpayer and
ratepayer savings.
This financial strength has fueled our robust response to the virus and so many other new
initiatives in recent years, and allowed us to avoid public employee layoffs or furloughs even as
our revenues have taken a major hit.
To repeat the mistakes of the past amidst the pandemic and deep recession would be
disastrous. Let’s not let that happen -- let’s win this crucial election and keep in place a team
with proven crisis leadership experience and a keen focus on our biggest challenges.
To do that in a year in which we will likely see record turnout, and the virus will restrict our
campaign activities, we will need once again a strong grassroots campaign fueled by you and
your energy.
It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve you and all of Burlington as this party’s nominee and
as Burlington’s mayor. We have gone through so much together over this full, impactful, and
challenging decade.
I ask you to join me again and be an active part of this campaign. Please visit
www.miroformayor.com and sign up today to lend your name and energy to this crucial
campaign for Burlington’s future.
I promise, once again, to make good on your confidence and to do everything in my power to
protect this community and uplift all Burlingtonians until we reach the better days that wait for
us on the other side of this historic challenge.
Thank you, everyone, for participating in this virtual caucus. Stay healthy, stay safe, and let’s
take care of each other.
Source: Burlington, VT -- Burlington Democratic Party 12.6.2020