Burlington progressives should oppose mayor’s privatizing

When Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency sought to take a meat cleaver to federal agencies, Burlingtonians — like many other Americans — protested. On the local level, using a different rhetoric, a Progressive administration has undertaken a surprisingly similar project, and so far, relatively few Queen City residents seem to have noticed.

A proposed elimination of the city’s in-house recycling collection program, if it happens, may change that. On May 19, the Burlington City Council authorized the Department of Public Works to solicit price quotes for private hauling services.

The potential shift takes place amid a broader municipal downsizing. On May 9, Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak laid off 18 city workers in an effort to narrow an $8-million gap between anticipated revenues and expenses for fiscal year 2026.

The administration initially framed its plan to contract out for recycling collection as another money-saving measure, albeit one that would, by  the Department of Public Works’ April estimate, add perhaps as little as $50,000 to the city’s general fund. But it now exists fully outside of the mayor’s current cost-trimming process.

That’s because, with privatization as yet uncertain, budget season has already begun. The Department of Public Works expects the council to fund the municipal program for another year and then, in July or August, to vote on whether to transfer those same dollars to a private company instead, as part of a three-to-five-year contract.

In its voluntariness, the drive to privatize recycling offers a unique window into the politics of a mayor whose neoliberal instincts elsewhere have enjoyed an appearance of choicelessness, owing to the disappearance of the pandemic-era federal funding that sustained City Hall under her predecessor. In reality, Burlington’s crisis is not merely fiscal — it is a crisis of political identity.

Lately, a statewide outrage against rising property tax bills has tested Burlington’s commitment to the generous public sphere for which the small city earned a national reputation. Voters rejected the last Town Meeting Day request for a general fund rate increase in 2022.

Since then, ostensibly left-wing politicians have acceded to the conservative tax revolt, attributing their reluctance to challenge homeowners’ stinginess to what they describe as the unfair, regressive structure of the property tax and becoming champions of an “affordability” that excludes renters.

The resulting slide toward austerity has, by now, taken on an ideological character. While lamenting individual firings, Mulvaney-Stanak has routinely characterized her broad strategy of cutbacks as a “right-sizing” of city government.

Now, she may liquidate a 36-year-old public service for no clear reason beyond her own department head’s disinterest in identifying an internal solution to a labor shortage that has recently hobbled the program — better and easier, in the view of Director of Public Works Chapin Spencer, to hand the headache of hiring over to the experts at Casella Waste or Gauthier Trucking.

News of the dire state of municipal recycling arrived at the city council this spring in the form of such a proposal, representing the administration’s first thought, not its last resort. Exhausted workers, sick of pulling double-duty, have signed on, pleading for relief. In the absence of a ready-to-go alternative, a spiritless AFSCME local has, on their behalf, tacitly accepted the erosion of its bargaining unit.

A new, nonunion workforce will presumably suffer many of the same indignities that the Department of Public Works’ workers do now, enduring impossibly long hours and on-the-job injuries. But privatization will make these problems invisible. They’ll become someone else’s issue to deal with, not the mayor’s.

Can the public sector take on challenges, solve problems, do things? These questions have important stakes. At every level of government, officials offer their responses.

The Vermont Progressive Party has traditionally said yes. Given its social-democratic orientation, it couldn’t say otherwise. “We believe the economy should be democratically owned and controlled in order to serve the needs of the many, not to make profits for the few,” its official platform states.

Yet its supporters appear hesitant to condemn Mulvaney-Stanak’s intention to deliver a public service to unaccountable, profit-making entities. On debateable procedural grounds, the Progressive State Committee tabled a resolution that would have called on the mayor “to prioritize maintaining the city’s utilities under public ownership” on May 17, signaling a reluctance to confront the party’s most prominent elected official.

Mulvaney-Stanak, who campaigned for mayor primarily on a promise of “community safety” (as opposed to her opponent’s “public safety”), may view herself as a pragmatic problem-solver, not as an agent in the big-picture, historical struggle for economic justice imagined by her party’s platform.

Yet one doesn’t have to think in historical terms to become part of history; unless it changes course, Mulvaney-Stanak’s administration will do so, in its minor way, on the side of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Elon Musk.

Just as the Vermont Progressive Party still has a chance to reclaim its soul, so too do Burlingtonians have a chance to reclaim the soul of their city.