Sat. Jan 18th, 2025
Bennington town offices seen on Thursday, September 8, 2022. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Bennington resident Jasen Fredrickson said what pulled him off the sidelines to speak at local selectboard meetings were the “behaviors, words and tone” he had observed from the board since new members took their seats last spring. He is among several residents who have come forward at selectboard meetings in recent weeks to air such sentiments.  

“As a concerned community member, I see challenges in the current direction and productivity of these meetings,” Fredrickson said at Monday night’s meeting. “Disagreements are natural, but even when two people don’t see eye-to-eye, progress is possible.”

A division has emerged within the selectboard in recent months as the two newest members, Clark Adams and Nancy White, have questioned the use of federal funding for two key projects now underway. They claim the local government is being fiscally irresponsible with grant funding and lacking transparency.

Incumbent members who have shepherded the two projects express concerns about what they say is a lack of understanding of the board’s policies and procedures.

The frustrations bubbling up in Bennington have brought what is expected to be a competitive election on Town Meeting Day. Three seats on the Bennington Selectboard are up for grabs. Board chair Jeannie Jenkins and board member Jeanne Conner are not seeking reelection, while current member Tom Haley has confirmed he is. 

Already, seven others have declared their candidacy and more may step forward before the filing deadline at the end of the month. With a crowded field of candidates and at least two new members joining the seven-seat board this spring, there is a potential shake-up of its priorities and direction.

Public-private partnerships  

When Bennington received American Rescue Plan Act funding three years ago, the town engaged in an extensive public process to identify residents’ priorities, Jenkins said. The process revealed two specific community needs: housing and recreation.

Since then, the board voted in 2023 to approve the use of the federal funds to help redevelop the former Bennington High School into housing and a hub for social services and wellness, especially for seniors and families. In 2024, the board voted to use the federal funds to build a skate park.

Jenkins said the town hired two new employees to compile information on the town’s website to chronicle updates on the projects and other town goings-on. 

The two projects and their sources of funding have since been questioned consistently by some board members and residents during meetings, regardless of the meeting’s agenda. The projects have also attracted a deluge of Facebook comments under Catamount Access Television’s postings of selectboard meeting recordings.

Ed Woods, the board’s vice chair, said troubles with public discourse in meetings and online is due to the board having to “continue to repeat the facts” instead of “discussing the issues,” which he called a “terrible time-waster.”

“I think that some of the confusion comes from a handful of people in the public who may disagree with a trajectory or a particular path that the board may be taking up on any particular item,” said Woods. “Rather than just voicing their discontent with the project itself, they’re not willing to accept real information as truth.”

Jack Rossiter-Munley, executive director of Bennington’s refugee resettlement agency, announced his bid for the selectboard last month, running jointly with Martha Mackey. He said he hopes to foster positive participation in local government if elected.

Rossiter-Munley said there has been more engagement in local politics lately, but it is happening under “a cloud of contention” because of the public’s concerns about transparency and confusion over the projects local government is working on. 

“I think it has been hard to match the amount of information that is available with people feeling adequately informed,” said Rossiter-Munley. “Oftentimes, you have totally factual information that’s being shared and reliable information that people can get pointed to in places like the town of Bennington website, but that doesn’t necessarily address the feeling that someone has that they don’t have the information that they need.”

Haley, first elected in 2021, said the communication and transparency issues raised by some are “overblown,” and as the Bennington High School project evolved, the town was diligent in keeping residents informed. He said he is worried the continued questioning of projects already approved will hamper progress. 

“Overall, the communication has been very good. It is an incredibly complex project. It’s the biggest public-private partnership that we’ve ever tried here in Bennington, and it’s got a lot of moving parts,” said Haley. “We’re seeing outside investment in Bennington on a level we haven’t seen in a very long time.”

But Adams, one of the newest members of the board, said he ran for the seat to increase accountability and transparency he thought was lacking. Adams said he is opposed to projects that use American Rescue Plan Act money or other government funding because of concerns over the national debt and residents’ tax burdens. 

“A lot of the projects, when they get federal grants or state grants, come with such conditions that it makes the projects more complicated, more expensive, and they don’t move quickly,” said Adams. “It’s very, very burdensome using grant funding as the basis of some of these projects, and I think that we have to come up with some alternatives.”

Woods disagrees. He said funding from the federal or state government helps the community because “a larger grant list lowers the burden on each individual taxpayer.”

As resident Fredrickson sees it, the infighting between selectboard members regarding anything related to public-private partnerships has resulted in slow movement by the town government on issues he would like addressed, namely opening a warming shelter during the cold months. 

‘Vitriol and libel and negativity’

As conversations over town issues continued online, Jenkins said concerns were raised that, if there was not a clear social media policy in place, elected officials may engage in discussions about town issues online, inadvertently violating Open Meeting Law. 

Last year, the selectboard voted to extend the town’s social media policy to elected officials. It states that employees should refrain from using social media to discuss municipal business.

“One of the things that we are all very, very careful about is making sure that the conversations that we have about the town’s work are done in public,” said Jenkins. “One of the areas where individuals can get themselves into trouble is by having conversations through email or on Facebook.”

But at the board’s Jan. 13 meeting, two Bennington residents raised concerns about Facebook comments, including Thomas Scheetz, who said he was “disturbed” by the “vitriol and libel and negativity” in online comments during live video posts by Catamount Access Television. 

At the Dec. 9 selectboard meeting, resident Vickie Lampron made a public comment about “reprehensible behavior,” claiming some board members displayed lack of decorum, yelled at colleagues and the town manager and commandeered meetings with repeated questions. 

Through a public records request, Lampron obtained email exchanges between Adams and a resident that used repeated profanity to characterize fellow board members and challenged their truthfulness in pursuing town projects.

In response to the email chain, Adams said he considers the act of listening and responding to constituents as part of his responsibilities as a selectboard member. Disagreements on the board are part of a democratic government’s function and have been negatively misrepresented as discord, said Adams. 

“The fact that someone is asking questions and is not accepting the information or demanding clarity does not mean that there’s discord. It means the political process is working,” said Adams. “People are supposed to ask questions. Elected representatives are supposed to be accountable to their constituents. The system is supposed to be transparent and open, and if insisting on that is discord, I guess maybe I could be termed guilty as charged.”

‘Huge learning curve’

Woods, the board vice chair, attributes some of the problems to what he calls a “huge learning curve” for new volunteer selectboard members, adding that some of the issues the board has faced reveals a gap in training. 

“I think that the breakdown is based on new members really not understanding the process and knowing where to go for resources,” said Woods.

Ted Brady, executive director of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, said his organization has been training and advising municipal officials and selectboard members for years, but it was only last year that the state mandated training for selectboard chairs and ethics training for municipal employees. 

Conventionally, selectboard members attend a day-long institute hosted by the league at the beginning of their term, said Brady. He encouraged any municipal board members to contact his organization for support and said resources on the group’s website are updated weekly. He noted there have been more inquiries from towns in recent years, with a peak during the pandemic. 

Brady added the history of American politics is actually more rife with infighting than people realize, but good policies and education can help encourage civility in local government. 

“Everyone bemoans the lack of civility and decorum in American politics right now. I always point out, you know, a United States senator beat up another United States senator on the floor during the Civil War,” Brady said, referring to the Brooks-Sumner affair of 1856.

“There’s nothing new to issues with decorum in democracy,” he added.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Division or democracy? A monthslong ‘cloud of contention’ over public-private projects besets Bennington’s selectboard.