BURLINGTON — Former state representative and city councilor Carina Driscoll, the stepdaughter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, is strongly considering a run for mayor of Burlington.
Driscoll, a Progressive, said colleagues are encouraging her to run against Democrat Miro Weinberger, the current mayor. Weinberger is expected to seek his third term election in March.
“I would say a decision is imminent,” Driscoll told VTDigger this week.
Driscoll, 43, was in the Legislature from 2000 to 2002 and was a city councilor from 2003 to 2004. She has also served in Weinberger’s administration.
Weinberger won office in 2012 over Republican state Rep. and City Councilor Kurt Wright with 57 percent of the vote. In 2015, Weinberger prevailed over a pair of candidates running to his left in Greg Guma and Steve Goodkind, securing 68 percent of the vote that year.
During his current three-year term, opposition from Burlington’s activist left has come to a crescendo, with well-organized campaigns opposing Weinberger’s development agenda and stance on the Burlington Telecom sale. Progressives routinely pack public meetings.
The mayor and his supporters say that despite the opposition, Weinberger prevailed at the ballot box last November when a pair of ballot initiatives necessary for the Town Center development passed by solid margins.
Still, Driscoll’s experience in local and national politics gives her the fundraising ability and acumen to pose a stiff challenge against Weinberger.
Sanders, an independent, was mayor of Burlington from 1981 to 1989. Driscoll’s mother is Jane O’Meara Sanders, the former president of Burlington College.
During his presidential campaign last year, Sanders developed a large following. One email from Sanders to his supporters last year helped State Sen. Chris Pearson raise $60,000.
If Sanders is able to wield that same kind of fundraising power for Driscoll, his stepdaughter could have the money to make a serious bid against Weinberger who spent a total of $88,000 on his 2015 campaign, according to the secretary of state’s campaign finance database.
That’s if she decides to run. Driscoll has been out of elected office for more than a decade, having departed to start a family and co-found the Vermont Woodworking School with her husband Blake Ewoldsen.
Those responsibilities are weighing on her decision, but Driscoll said she has hired a capable director to lead the school and her children are old enough where balancing parenting and the demands of office is doable, she said.
Though officially undecided, Driscoll has already begun talking like somebody who is running for mayor. At a recent news conference on the steps of City Hall, Driscoll joined Progressive politicians and other supporters of a local co-operative seeking to purchase Burlington Telecom to deliver remarks that were decidedly broader in scope than the telecom sale.
The choice between the Keep BT Local co-op and the mobile and fiber internet provider Ting is not unlike many other decisions facing Burlington, Driscoll said.
“Whether we are talking about Burlington Telecom, the recently closed Memorial Auditorium, the recently abandoned new initiative for the Moran Plant, we are talking about our public assets, about our community assets,” Driscoll said.
In each instance, Driscoll said, Burlington has a choice. It can either find a way to pass off responsibility for those assets to “others with no vested stake in our community” or “we can be bold in our actions” and retain local ownership.
“Now we are living in a time none of us could have predicted, a time of rampant greed and bigotry. Now more than ever we need our local leaders to provide bold and visionary leadership,” Driscoll said, in a sweeping statement at a news conference about selling Burlington Telecom.
Then she delivered a shot directly across the mayor’s bow, cloaked as a message for city councilors considering Burlington Telecom’s future. “Nothing great has ever comes from shrinking from the challenges before us. Please choose your legacy, our legacy, without fear. Choose people to lead progress. Choose local control. Choose co-op,” Driscoll said.
Weinberger, at his own recent news conference, had come out as a strong opponent of the KBTL co-op, arguing that its bid is not viable given the legal, regulatory, financial and operational challenges it would face.
In an interview, Driscoll was even more direct in her criticism of the mayor: “I am deeply concerned about the priorities of the city at this time. I’m deeply concerned about the threat of gentrification in the city with the current leadership we’re receiving from city hall,” she said.
Gentrification is not something that can be stopped once its effects become noticeable, Driscoll said, “we have to prevent it and look forward to predict the consequences of our choices.”
Driscoll said Weinberger is too focused on solving Burlington’s housing problems by increasing supply, without focusing enough on building or maintaining “permanently affordable housing.”
It’s not a novel criticism of the mayor, who before being elected, worked as a developer. The activists to his left, who campaigned vociferously against the nascent downtown redevelopment Weinberger championed, frequently cast him as a cold-hearted capitalist.
Weinberger bristles at the characterization, noting that he spent the majority of his career as a developer working to build affordable housing, first with the Hartland Group in Vermont and New Hampshire and before that with Greyston Foundation in Yonkers, New York.
The idea that he doesn’t support more permanently affordable housing in the city is at odds with the policy crafted by his administration and the unanimously supported by the City Council, he said.
The mayor argues that the developments he supports — the Burlington Town Center, Cambrian Rise and others — will serve as a bulwark against gentrification, which started to grip the city during an economically stagnant period before he took office.
“We are an administration pushing back against gentrification, working to be a place where people of all backgrounds can live and can thrive,” Weinberger said.
“I think that vision for Burlington was in jeopardy when we were blocking every major project from going forward. Gentrification is what happens when you don’t build, not when you do,” he added.
Former Progressive Mayor Peter Clavelle, who joined Weinberger to campaign for ballot items that would allow the Town Center redevelopment to proceed, said that Weinberger’s critics fail to appreciate the “strong policy framework” Burlington has in place to ensure equitable housing developments.
The city supports its housing trust fund with taxes and the city’s inclusionary development ordinance requires that a certain percentage of new housing projects with more than four units be maintained as permanently affordable, Clavelle noted.
Still, Clavelle said battles over development in Burlington are nothing new. Does he believe supporting the latest projects could leave Weinberger vulnerable to a challenge from his left?
“It’s tough to read those tea leaves, and they’re often misread,” Clavelle said. “From my perspective, I think he’s doing a decent job.”
There are certainly those in the city who think the mayor is vulnerable. Among the is Shay Totten, communications director for the advocacy group Rights and Democracy.
Totten says his organization, and he personally, plan to be much more active in city politics in a broad array of issue and electoral campaigns.
The former Seven Days political columnist has already thrown himself into the fray, volunteering on Ali Dieng’s successful City Council bid and serving as the de-facto public relations manager for the Keep BT Local co-op, where he previously served as a board member.
Totten is among those urging Driscoll to take on the mayor, he said. “Increasingly his vision for the city is one that’s not matching with a lot of folks, and it’s much more evident with the BT sale than any other issue in the last year or so,” Totten said.
Totten and others feel Weinberger unnecessarily sandbagged the co-op’s bid by coming out in support of two other companies seeking to buy Burlington Telecom, and raising his host of concerns with the co-op’s bid.
“He went out of his way to really undermine our effort, and I think that was a mistake,” Totten said.
Weinberger disputes critics who say he does not embrace the co-op model, noting his long-standing support for City Market. His administration has worked, he said, to pass a zoning change that’s paved the way for the co-op’s second location under construction in the South End.
The concerns he’s raised about the co-op are legitimate, Weinberger said. Not only has Citibank threatened to sue if the city selects Keep BT Local, but Burlington’s charter and Public Utility Commission regulations “severely constrain” the city’s ability to step in and rescue the co-op, he said.
Weinberger said he also believes Ting, the other remaining bidder, would be a good steward of Burlington Telecom, supporting net neutrality and ensuring fast affordable internet and an alternative to telecom giants.
“We have, baked into the agreement, the assurance that we’d never go back to the pre-BT days of Adelphia, or Comcast now, having a monopoly on these services,” he said.
Weinberger said it’s too early for him to begin campaigning for his third term in office, but he said he welcomes the challenge. The mayor said he’s comfortable running on his record, which he said includes restoring the city’s fiscal health, helping Burlington go all-renewable for its energy and mounting a strong response to the opiate crisis.
The mayor said he’s optimistic the support he has received personally and for initiatives he’s backed will continue.
His critics on the left said they feel they’re gaining momentum, and they hope to break that streak.
Driscoll said she plans to be more involved politically whether she runs or not.
“No matter what I do, I’ll play an active role in influencing these discussions. There’s been an absence of real clear opposing viewpoint coming to the fore,” Driscoll said.
She mentioned the possibility of taking on Democratic City Councilor Chip Mason in Ward 5 as another possibility for her re-entry.
Should Driscoll decide against a mayoral bid, Weinberger is still likely to face a challenger from his left, though it’s unclear whether those looking to draft someone could find a stronger candidate than Driscoll.
Totten said he’s in talks with a few others about taking on the mayor, but declined to name names.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed the mayor’s previous workplaces.
