BRATTLEBORO — Back in 1960, when this southern Vermont hub of 12,000 people decided to manage capacity Town Meeting crowds by becoming the only community in the state to elect a set number of citizen participants, residents never imagined that subsequent decades would bring more open seats than candidates willing to fill them.
Then social media sparked a recent firestorm of questions about policing and a proposed 12% municipal tax hike.
Some 150 Town Meeting representatives, about half chosen earlier this month in races that drew twice as many aspirants as available positions, are set to debate a proposed $25 million local government budget March 22.
“It all shows community engagement,” said Amanda Ellis-Thurber, who won election to Town Meeting and, defeating two incumbents, the five-member local selectboard.
It also presents a collective challenge, as a citizen advisory finance committee notes that residents don’t have to ratify the budget, but instead can reduce the bottom line or reject the spending plan and send officials back to the drawing board.
“Chatter around voting down the budget is louder than I’ve ever heard,” said Oscar Heller, the finance committee chair and another newly approved member of both Town Meeting and the selectboard. “This is the highest tax increase in quite a while, and people are quite upset.”
The surge in public interest and ire began last spring and summer when local leaders — facing a crescendo of complaints about drug dealing, burglaries and assaults in a community with the first three Vermont exits off Interstate 91 — learned police calls had jumped 16%.
Downtown storekeepers and shoppers pushed for more law enforcement. Social workers countered with a call for more resources to fight poverty and substance use disorders. And an online content creator named Hank Poitras began filming and posting videos of police responses, sparking a war of words between viewers who see him as exposing the depth of the problem and others who charge he’s exploiting people when they’re most vulnerable.
By fall, the selectboard voted 3-2 to boost its budgeted count of police officers from 27 to 30 and to seek up to six support staffers for a new Brattleboro Resource Assistance Team (or BRAT). Only later did leaders calculate that those and other budget additions would result in a double-digit tax hike for the coming fiscal year.
Enter social media and public records
At subsequent meetings, self-declared progressives opposed to more officers began speaking out alongside centrist and conservative residents seeking fiscal restraint. That spurred Poitras to start a political action committee, Real Progress, to campaign for police-supporting local candidates.
The content creator held a January rally that drew 200 people, with some 50 moving on to run for Town Meeting seats. Critics, in turn, searched out and shared Poitras’ past social media posts in which he called Black Lives Matter “scumbag filthy animals,” said of Donald Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll, “Why would anyone rape this ugly woman?” and commented on a nonbinary person being pepper-sprayed, “This is the new way, 100%.”
In response, Poitras said the posts were “old screenshots taken out of context” when he was an aspiring comedian and “don’t reflect who I am now.” (Days later, he used his weekly live stream to offer a “trigger warning” to “all the snowflakes and all the delicate people in the world” who are “very offended.”)
At the same time, Poitras’ critics used the state’s public records act to request his emails with Brattleboro Police, which the citizen journalist asks for comment after filming their patrols.
Jonathan Elwell, a local justice reform organizer, went on to post a story on the website The Rake Vermont headlined “Are Brattleboro Police Hiding Their Relationship with a Right-wing Video Blogger?”
In it, Elwell said the emails showed “communication and coordination” between police and Poitras. He added that Police Chief Norma Hardy “may have altered records” because documents provided included a set of duplicate emails from Poitras in which one was missing the content creator’s ending proposition that “we can ‘shop talk’ about how to respond about those topics.”
In a statement, the police department said it “does not collaborate” with Poitras and instead provided information “at the request of any reporter or journalist that makes such a request.”
“The statements we give Mr. Poitras are the same statements in our public media releases,” police said. “While Brattleboro PD has no say in how content is used, that in no way should give the illusion or impression that we condone white supremacy or unfair policing practices.”
‘Some difficult decisions to face’
Police haven’t commented further since Town Manager John Potter called for an internal review of how the public records were collected and shared. But the administrator told VTDigger that his office determined the missing line in question was “accidentally left out” and “we found no proof that anyone was trying to hide information.”
“Since the chief herself shared the full email elsewhere in the same set of documents, the claim that this was done on purpose is not supported by the facts,” Potter said. “At the same time, we know there has been a lot of tension in town lately. People are frustrated, pointing fingers and trying to ‘catch’ others making mistakes.”
Amid the online clamor, both police supporters and people with budget concerns recruited their own slates of Town Meeting candidates. Both groups won a portion of the nearly 70 seats up for election this month, with the top winners either not aligned to any side or not endorsed by Poitras, who himself received the lowest number of votes in the race he lost.
Residents also defeated two incumbent selectboard members, Richard Davis and Franz Reichsman, who supported the proposed 12% tax hike.
“The fact that the two incumbents in the race finished dead last shows the degree of general unhappiness with the selectboard and our recent actions,” Reichsman told the weekly newspaper The Commons.
Representatives now are preparing for Town Meeting, set for live broadcast March 22 on Brattleboro Community Television. Although local leaders can’t predict the outcome, newcomers who won selectboard seats understand they might be asked to rewrite any rejected budget before the July 1 start of the fiscal year.
“It would be a difficult job to do in a compressed timeline,” Heller said, “but I’m confident this board, if asked, is ready to take up that challenge.”
Isaac Evans-Frantz, who also won election to the selectboard and Town Meeting, said residents have shared concerns about local taxes, the overall cost of living and potential changes to federal programs.
“No matter what,” Evans-Frantz said, “there will be some difficult decisions to face in the weeks and months to come.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Questions of policing and a proposed 12% tax hike entangle Brattleboro.