Upon taking office, Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak pledges to prioritize community safety

BURLINGTON — For the first time in 12 years, the Queen City has a new leader.

Emma Mulvaney-Stanak was sworn in as mayor of Burlington on Monday night as the city council kicked off a new term. In remarks to a packed auditorium, she pledged to tackle quality-of-life issues in a city she said had experienced an “unraveling of our sense of community” in recent years. 

“As your mayor, community safety will be my top priority, because everyone deserves to feel and be safe in our city,” Mulvaney-Stanak said. 

The first woman and the first openly queer person to hold the city’s top job, she also committed to be a mayor for everyone. 

“I did not run for mayor because I believed that I alone had the answers to meet our current moment,” she said. “I ran because I believed my experience as a community and labor organizer and my ability to bring people together to solve complex problems was and is exactly the kind of leadership our city needs at this critical moment.”

Mulvaney-Stanak, a Progressive former state representative and city councilor, thanked former Democratic Mayor Miro Weinberger and outgoing city councilors for their leadership. She also saluted City Councilor Joan Shannon, D-South District, whom she defeated in last month’s mayor election. 

Newly elected and reelected city councilors were also sworn in Monday at the body’s annual reorganization meeting. The 12-member council includes five new members but remains under Democratic control. 

The council voted 10-2 for Councilor Ben Traverse, D-Ward 5, to serve as its president. He succeeds former Councilor Karen Paul, who also ran for mayor and whose term on the council expired. Councilors Melo Grant, P-Central, and Joe Kane, P-Ward 3, voted against Traverse. 

The new council president congratulated Mulvaney-Stanak on “tonight’s historic milestone,” which he said would be an inspiration for “thousands of Burlingtonians, your daughter, my daughters.”

“The political campaigns are over,” Traverse said in brief remarks. “We now turn towards a shared commitment for our city. We will find partners to collaborate and find common ground wherever we can.” He promised to treat everyone with fairness and respect — and to end meetings by 10:30 p.m.

In an interview earlier Monday, Mulvaney-Stanak discussed how she would prioritize “community safety” as mayor. 

She said she had not determined whether to replace Police Chief Jon Murad, who has faced criticism from Progressive city councilors and skepticism from Mulvaney-Stanak. For now, she said, she is “waiting and watching.”

“Murad and I are still learning about each other,” the mayor said. “He has a lot of learning to do about me. I have a lot of learning to figure out about how he chooses to lead.”

Mulvaney-Stanak has three months before she formally announces new city appointments. In that time, she said, she is looking for Murad and all department heads to “be self-reflective, to think creatively and to move off things that are just fiscally not working and to be able to adjust to the new leadership that the majority of folks in the city supported.”

In her remarks Monday night, Mulvaney-Stanak said she was “eager to rebuild a police department that is right-sized for Burlington” and which includes officers, social workers and first-responders. But she said it was also important to ensure staffing levels were appropriate in other frontline fields, such as teaching, nursing and mental health. 

“I think we have to zoom out a little bit and really think comprehensively about this and move with the same urgency about the shortages in all those different fields to make sure that we have a system that’s working,” she said in the interview. “Because it will do us no good if we magically can get 20 more police officers but we can’t get more social workers, for example.”

Mulvaney-Stanak said she also plans to address homelessness, mental health and the opioid crisis plaguing the community. 

“I am going to be the mayor who can recognize the suffering that’s happening and while also holding two very different concepts at the same time that some people are feeling unsafe while other people are actually unsafe,” she told VTDigger. “And we can address both but there’s different urgencies around those two pieces.”

That conversation is also an opportunity to invite deeper community reflection and to develop shared compassion and dignity for all, she added.

Then there’s the matter of a $9 million city budget deficit. “That’s a big one,” she said.

Not having examined the budget in depth since she was a city councilor, Mulvaney-Stanak said, addressing that challenge will take “some serious pencil sharpening” and a hyper-focus on whether the city is achieving its priorities. She said she plans to convene a team of expert advisers — including subject matter experts, people with lived experience and formerly elected officials — who have worked through tough budgetary times.

The new mayor also announced three new hires on Monday: Chief-of-staff Erin Jacobsen, a former senior assistant attorney general and co-director of the Community Justice Unit at the state Attorney General’s Office; communications director Joe Magee, a former city councilor; and administrative assistant Emma Allen, a holdover from the Weinberger administration.

Mulvaney-Stanak said her conversations with Weinberger and his staff had been honest and productive through the transition. “So there’s been a real generosity of sharing of information, and I very much appreciate that because no one really tells you how to be mayor,” she said.

The new mayor said she was most excited about being able to fully focus on one job — a luxury she said she had not experienced as a state legislator, city councilor and labor organizer.

“I finally get a chance to fully dig in and work with a team on my staff that I’m excited to get to work with and to just fully immerse myself,” she said. “So the policy dork me is super excited to just be mono-focused on doing good work for Burlington.”

But first, she said, she plans to bring in some plants to brighten her new office in City Hall.