FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 28, 2016
Contact: Jennifer Kaulius
802.324.2505
Mayor Miro Weinberger Testimony on Burlington Charter Changes
Burlington, VT – Mayor Miro Weinberger today testified before the State House of Representatives Government Operations Committee on the three charter changes passed overwhelmingly by Burlington voters on Town Meeting Day in 2014. Mayor Weinberger's testimony focused on three facts:
1) The charter changes are responses to serious public safety concerns in Burlington;
2) State law and the legislatively-approved Burlington charter generally delegate responsibility for public safety matters to municipal government; and
3) The Burlington charter changes are not pioneering or novel – all are based on policies that are laws in many other communities.
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“Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. I want to thank committee chair Donna Sweaney for the decision to revisit Burlington’s proposed charter changes and to take considerable additional testimony on these items today.
I believe today’s testimony will add important information to this debate. As we engage in today’s discussion, we should not forget that many have already testified in favor of these charter changes in significant ways.
The duly elected 12-member Burlington City Council – made up of Democrats, Progressives, Independents, and a Republican – voted unanimously three weeks ago to urge “the State Legislature to pass the changes to Burlington’s charter approved by Burlington voters on Town Meeting Day 2014, thereby allowing the City of Burlington to help protect citizens within the City’s boundaries from gun violence.” As the Mayor, I signed that resolution, and submit it into your record here this morning.
And on Town Meeting Day in March of 2014, Burlingtonians went to the polls and cast what they hoped to be binding votes on the matters before you. They went to the polls amid a sea of yellow and black signs urging them to vote “no” on the charger changes, and after weeks of vocal opposition from a well-financed “no” campaign. 5,194 (68%) voted yes to prohibit guns in bars. 5,597 (73%) voted yes to give the police the ability to remove guns from Burlington residences where domestic abuse was suspected. 4,651 (61%) voted yes to protect Burlington children from irresponsibly stored firearms. For just a moment, I ask you to envision those thousands of Burlington voters who have already acted on these issues being with us in the room this morning and to remember that those voters are also witnesses to today’s deliberations. I submit into your record the official City Clerk’s record of those votes.
I know and respect that you sit before me as representatives of other communities with many constituents who may not agree with Burlingtonians on these issues. As you consider the matters before you I respectfully ask you to weigh your Constitutional responsibility, codified in your oath of office, to be a “guardian for the people.” From my reading, that is a responsibility to all the people, including the more than 42,000 people of Burlington.
Next, I would like to review the events that caused Burlington voters and City Councilors to act. In December of 2012, twenty first-graders and six of their educators were horrifically murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, just a short drive away from where we sit. This event rightly caused a broad and deep reassessment of all of our public policies that could have in some way precluded such a terrible event.
Over the next year, Burlingtonians watched in concern as the federal government debated and then took no action to protect Americans from a repeat of such a tragedy.
Throughout 2013, a City Council committee, staffed by the City Attorney, worked diligently to consider what kind of action could be taken at the local level to protect Burlingtonians. The charter change committee worked for many months on the issue, and the City held multiple public meetings and hearings and took extensive public comment before charter changes were placed on the Town Meeting Day 2014 ballot. Many options were considered and discarded because of constitutional or operational concerns. Eventually, three separate provisions were put forward to the voters.
For over a year after the decisive Town Meeting Day 2014 votes, through the better part of two legislative sessions, Burlington representatives waited to advocate for the Burlington charter changes as the legislature debated a variety of statewide actions to curb gun violence. We waited because we agree with the idea that it is generally preferable to take action on these issues at a statewide level instead of the municipal level. However, once it became clear that the important bill, S.141, would not address directly the issues Burlington voters had weighed in on, it became incumbent on those of us who represent the City to advocate more forcefully for their review and passage, bringing us to today.
There are three points I am hoping you will remember and consider from my testimony:
- The charter changes before you are responses to serious public safety concerns in Burlington.
- State law and the legislatively-approved Burlington charter generally delegate responsibility for public safety matters to municipal government.
- The Burlington charter changes are not pioneering or novel – all are based on policies that are laws in many other communities.
I will expand a bit on each of these points.
- The charter changes before you are responses to serious public safety concerns in Burlington.
We are fortunate to live in a state with very low levels of violence, and I understand how that fact has shaped state policy. Burlington, while also an exceedingly safe place, is a City that faces many of the same challenges that larger cities do, including those associated with poverty, drug trafficking, and gang activity.
In recent months we have had incidents of violence or near violence on the streets of Burlington by bar patrons carrying guns, continuing patterns that have been an active concern for the police and bar workers for many years. As you will hear more from our police chief, we have a domestic violence problem in Burlington. And while fortunately there have been no accidental deaths stemming from Burlington children finding unsecured guns in recent memory, the reports that across the country hundreds of deaths occur annually from children wielding improperly stored guns is a concern in a city with a large and growing number of children.
You will hear more about these public safety threats from me and others this morning. Now I will simply say that today is one of those relatively rare times as a state or local public servant when the matters before you for decision are clearly issues of life and death. By approving these charter changes it is very likely that you will save future lives in Burlington.
2. State law and the legislatively-approved Burlington charter substantially delegate responsibility for public safety matters to municipal government.
As someone who has worked now for local and federal government, and long been a student of government, I am very aware that the debate about the allocation of powers and responsibilities between different levels of government is an important and long-standing one.
Moreover, I think it is a debate that Vermont generally treats carefully and that Vermonters get right. While I believe deeply in the value of local government and decision-making, in part because the needs of a City like Burlington are far different from many of our other towns and villages, I respect the need for state government to play a unifying and decisive role on many matters.
As you decide this issue I respectfully ask you to consider that in Vermont public safety is substantially recognized as a local responsibility, particularly in towns and cities with their own 24-hour police forces like Burlington. In Burlington we spend a large percentage of our time and governmental resources focused on the opiate challenge, stopping property crime, preventing domestic abuse, and other public safety work. In Burlington this responsibility for public safety is codified in the municipal charter granted to the City by the state legislature that declares, among other powers, that the “Mayor shall also be the Chief Conservator of the Peace and Safety of the City.”
With respect to the important public safety issues at stake in the proposed charter changes, this solemn responsibility assigned to local government by the charter is contradicted by other areas of state statute that preclude Burlington from taking any action – whether through liquor licensing, business licensing, or other locally regulated matters – that would impact the possession and use of firearms. Sitting here today as Burlington’s Chief Conservator of Peace and Safety, I call on you and the rest of the legislature to resolve this contradiction so that I am able to act to protect the safety of Burlington domestic abuse victims, police officers, restaurant workers, and children as the responsibilities of my office demand.
3) The Burlington charter changes are not pioneering or novel – all are based on policies that are laws in many other communities.
Burlington has a well-earned reputation as a City that is often a pioneer and an advocate for progressive causes. That is not the case with the proposed charter changes before you. Gun safety is not an area where Burlington is trying to chart some new path – today, we are trying to catch up with laws in Texas, Montana, and Alaska.
You are receiving memos today from the Burlington City Attorney that include state-by-state reviews of existing policy with respect to guns in bars, domestic violence, and the safe storage of firearms. In each case you will see that the proposed Burlington charter changes are based on policies that are well within what is existing law for millions of Americans. A striking finding of these memos is that there are numerous examples of state laws prohibiting guns in bars and giving police powers to remove guns from the scenes of domestic abuse incidents in rural states like Vermont that have longstanding traditions of responsible gun ownership.
Before closing, I would also like to address three of the objections to Burlington’s proposed charter changes that I believe you are likely to hear today.
First, during the discussion with the committee last spring serious objections about the constitutionality of Burlington’s proposals were raised. As a mayor who has been very focused on avoiding unnecessary liabilities, I respect the committee’s caution in this area. At the same time, I think it is important to put the constitutional risk in perspective. Our City Attorney will do that in her testimony, however I would like to stress a couple of points.
As I emphasized earlier, the Burlington charter changes are not novel, pioneering policies that invite legal challenge and great uncertainty – they are policies rooted in long-standing state and municipal law in many other states. While there are no guarantees in matters of judicial review, if the proposed charter changes were unconstitutional they would likely have been challenged and struck down elsewhere already.
I have heard some concern that because we are proposing to institute these changes at the local level that would open them to constitutional challenges that state laws are not prone to. As the City Attorney will explain, this is not the case.
Second, I know that there is considerable concern that the proposed charter changes would undermine what is often referred to as the Vermont Sportsmen’s Bill of Rights. Unlike the Bill of Rights enshrined in the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Vermont Sportsmen’s Bill of Rights is state statute created by previous occupants of your offices. You have the express authority – and I would argue responsibility – to amend statute if necessary to meet today’s public challenges. The charter changes before you are proposed to be exactly that – legislatively-enacted amendments of state statute designed to meet today’s public safety challenge.
Also, from my perspective, the Burlington charter changes address public safety matters that have no substantive bearing on the important rights of Vermonters to hunt, fish, trap, and enjoy the state’s rural areas. I want to be clear that I grew up on a dirt road in Hartland, Vermont and have a deep respect for those rights and the importance of them to Vermont. If, as I do, you believe that Vermonters have a right to continue to hunt, fish, and trap in this state as they have for generations, the legislature can continue to consistently protect those rights from any form of local pre-emption without any logical or substantive contradiction with taking action on the public safety proposals before you.
Third, I understand the concerns that have been raised about allowing patchwork legislation on issues that face all of Vermont. I have several reactions to this concern.
One, the proposed charter changes have been designed in a way that minimizes these concerns. These charter changes would apply narrowly to Burlington establishments and residences only and would be administered by Burlington police. I see little reason for concern that confusion or lack of understanding of Burlington’s rules would have a negative impact on the broad Vermont public.
Second, I understand that some legislators point out that guns in bars and the protection of domestic violence victims are issues statewide and thus should only be the subject of statewide action. This makes some sense and was the reason that for most of two legislative sessions after Newtown Burlingtonians deferred to the legislature. However, the legislature chose not to address these issues statewide and has no pending plans to do so. In the absence of active state efforts to address these issues it is, from my perspective, no longer appropriate to block local action on these public safety matters of life and death.
Finally, on this point, I offer for consideration the idea that there is a logic to taking a step towards statewide action by allowing the largest City, with its own unique law enforcement capacity, to be the first to move forward with these new public safety steps.
I would like to close with the words of President Barack Obama, who was elected by Vermonters twice with over 65% of the vote in the state. “We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence.”
In the face of the unwillingness of Congress to act in any way to stop the relentless violence we have seen in this country in recent years and months, the President issued several weeks ago a long list of executive orders to save lives and called upon state and local governments to do the same. Together, with the charter changes before you, we have an opportunity to do just that in a manner consistent with extensive precedent, the Vermont traditions we all hold sacred, and the clear will of Burlington voters.
Thank you.”
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