This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Some service providers and municipal leaders are suggesting that the Gov. Phil Scott administration’s plan to assemble three family shelters in state-owned buildings amounts to too little, too late. 

For weeks, local officials, lawmakers, and service providers have been pushing the administration to intervene on behalf of the more than 1,000 people who have lost their shelter through the state’s motel voucher program over the last month.

Among the many Vermonters who had called on Scott to intervene, some expressed gratitude at the news of the new shelters this week. But some have cautioned that these shelters won’t meet the need. 

“This has been entirely predictable since the legislation was signed by the governor,” said Frank Knaack, the executive director of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont. “We knew that these dates were coming for months. Providers have been asking the governor for months to do something about it.” 

The state has not yet lined up service providers to operate the shelters, to be located at the Waterbury Armory, the former State Police barracks in Williston, and a thus far undetermined location in Montpelier. Officials are aiming to open the first two sites by Nov. 1, and said the Montpelier site will likely take longer to open.

Julie Bond, executive director of Good Samaritan Haven – the primary shelter provider in Washington County – said the organization has been in talks with state officials for the last several days about operating the Montpelier site. Good Sam doesn’t currently operate family shelters, and making the call on whether the organization has capacity to step in is “a major decision,” she said.

“I’m very heartened by the opportunities and the thinking about increasing shelter capacity,” Bond said. But creating a new shelter that meets the standards she would expect will take time – creating one in a matter of weeks isn’t realistic, she said. 

“We still need an even quicker solution to house people in the immediate term, and that just simply means keeping the motels fully operational without the 80-day-cap until we can do this correctly,” Bond said, referring to a new time limit on voucher stays that has resulted in the current wave of evictions.

The 80-day time limit, along with an 1,100-room cap on the motel program, will both be lifted during the winter months, beginning Dec. 1. But facing a severe housing shortage and a lack of family shelters, some families evicted from the motel program this fall have had little option but to pitch tents outdoors – a situation that has become increasingly dire as temperatures drop. 

Some families had been camping at Burlington’s North Beach Campground, where the city opened tent sites for families leaving nearby motels. But the city closed that campground for the season on Tuesday Oct. 15, leaving families further displaced. 

“We communicated to the State that we were willing to be partners and would consider extending the closure of North Beach campground if the State offered a firm plan to provide an indoor shelter alternative,” Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said in a written statement. “As of October 15 at 12:00 PM, when North Beach closed, no tangible State plan for alternative shelter was shared with the City.”

Sarah Russell, the city’s special assistant to end homelessness and co-chair of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance, said she had spoken to state officials about the possibility of using the barracks as a shelter in the last month, but the news Tuesday afternoon that the state planned to move forward with it came as a surprise.

“We had no idea what was going to happen,” Russell said. “I was shocked to see that Williston was – you know, that they were moving forward with that location.” 

The Department for Children and Families has not provided numbers on how many families the three shelter sites will be able to accommodate. At a Wednesday press conference, Scott said the shelters will differ from the large, congregate shelters the state stood up last spring, and will provide private spaces for individual families.

The municipalities slated to host these shelters have had varied responses.

The town of Waterbury has signaled its pushback. A statement from the town, shared by its zoning administrator, Mike Bishop, on Wednesday, says the town had not been contacted by the state about this latest attempt to use the Armory building as a homeless shelter. The state can do so now only if it uses state employees to staff it, the letter says – if officials want to use a third-party, they will need to seek a new zoning permit. 

Bill Fraser, the city manager for Montpelier, said the city learned about the state’s plans to open a family shelter there through news reports over the last several days. The city doesn’t yet know what site is under consideration, he said. 

“We certainly support having more shelter space in the city. It’s a huge need,” Fraser said. On Sept. 18, one day before people sheltered through the motel program began exhausting their 80 days, Fraser led a group of municipal officials calling on the state to open up state-owned buildings for temporary shelters and to oversee sanctioned encampments on state land.

“You would have thought that having additional shelter spaces, or whatever alternative was going to be available for people, would have been in place and functional by Sept. 19,” Fraser said. “Not, you know, we’re trying to figure it out here on Oct. 15th or 16th or 17th.” 

Williston Town Manager Erik Wells said officials from the Agency of Human Services reached out to him several weeks ago to relay that they were considering using the former police barracks site as a shelter. He took a tour of the site with state staff last week.

The town is supportive of the state’s effort, he said. “These are our fellow Vermonters that are in need of assistance right now, families with children as we’re entering the cold winter months. I mean, we had our first 30 degree day this morning.”

His message to the town has been one of “asking people to join me in welcoming families to the community, and working to build a supportive and compassionate social infrastructure to assist.” 

State lawmakers – many of whom voted in favor of the state budget, the legislation that has resulted in the motel evictions – had also called on Scott to intervene. 

“I think the governor has finally done the right thing here – but, again, late in coming,” said Senate President Pro Tem. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central.

In addition to families with children, hundreds of other vulnerable Vermonters were evicted from the program in recent weeks, including elderly people and people with disabilities. Baruth said he had hoped to see Scott’s administration exercise more flexibility when implementing the law.

“It has been my understanding that the American Disabilities Act and other legislation gives the administration space for discretion where the disabled are concerned,” he said. 

Everyone already in the motel program this summer and fall met vulnerability criteria previously set by the state. Lawmakers missed an opportunity to spell out who was most vulnerable among them and should be prioritized, Baruth said, noting that the Legislature’s partnership with the administration on this issue “has frayed to the point where we find it hard to accept their representations on it.”

“What they’re fixated on is what the governor calls ‘weaning people off the program,’” Baruth said. “And what that means, in effect, is putting them on the street and hoping they go away.” 

Scott has emphasized that the cost of the motel voucher program, which greatly expanded due to an influx of federal funds during the pandemic, is unsustainable. Lawmakers passed the current caps on the program in an effort to rein in costs earlier this year. 

Tierney Farago, the town administrator for Chelsea in Orange County, is new to the position and new to Vermont. So when she read about a course designed to help town managers gain key skills, she applied. 

Farago, 30, is one of 18 municipal leaders from 14 small towns in Vermont who are participating in what is being called a “boot camp” for town managers at the University of Vermont, which was announced this week in a press release.

Vermont Local Government Institute is a certificate program that started in September and ends in February, and is free to participants thanks to a $28,000 grant from the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships at UVM.

“Vermont’s towns are very small. Often our municipal leaders are working alone or they are working with a part time staff and there is a need for this kind of professional support,” said Patricia Coates, the institute’s director.

Developed in partnership with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, the Vermont Town and City Management Association and UVM Professional and Continuing Education, the course covers a broad range of topics from open meeting law to grant management. 

Many small towns have seen high turnover among local administrators and the new hires are often coming in with less municipal experience, according to Ted Brady, executive director of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, or VLCT. Town officials are also grappling with increasingly complicated and time-intensive workloads, such as applying to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for flood recovery funds. 

Given that many town managers do not have a lot of resources and often, not much managerial experience, the formalized training can really help fill the gap, Brady said.

Some veteran municipal managers, including Bill Fraser, the city manager in Montpelier, and Jessie Baker, the city manager of South Burlington, are helping to teach the course, according to the release.

“I want to help newcomers to the profession feel like there are no dumb questions,” Fraser said in the release. 

The first round of participants include new and mid-career managers as well as a treasurer and a selectboard member, Farago said. 

So far she said she likes it a lot. “I feel like it’s a really broad spectrum of information, I don’t feel like it’s too specialized so it applies to a lot of different municipal positions,” she said.

Farago said she has never worked in human resources, for example, so getting insight into how to conduct interviews and hire people is going to be really useful in her position.

The course is the first of its kind offered in Vermont, aside from a two-year certified public managers program at UVM, said Abigail Friedman at VLCT’s Municipal Assistance Center that helps small member towns with various requests. Staff at VLCT came up with the idea for the boot camp and helped develop the course. Friedman said she hopes it will help prepare new leaders and improve local governance statewide.

“We got a really great cross section of the state in this first cohort,” said Maureen Hebert, director of strategic initiatives at the continuing education center, called PACE, at UVM. “The networking piece making them connected via this whole program, and then being able to share resources will be really powerful.”

The part-time program includes in-person, virtual and self-directed study with courses covering leadership, human resources, grant writing, financial management and training in diversity, equity and inclusion. It aims to enhance networking and resource sharing among municipal leaders to help them better address challenging issues that Vermont continues to wrestle with such as housing and climate change.

While the program is funded for two years, the goal is to see how it works, make changes and make it valuable enough that a town might be willing to pay for a portion of the training going forward, Brady said.

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Can social media bring people together rather than divide and deceive us?

In the world of corporate social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, the notion of a nontoxic public forum seems quaint. These are places where political and personal brawling goes on 24/7 and disinformation flows as freely as cat videos. The platforms rely on high conflict to attract eyeballs and make money.

Vermonters have another option. Front Porch Forum (FPF), co-founded in 2006 by Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife Valerie, is a decidedly friendly online place where neighbors go to interact civilly with one another, and do what neighbors do: seek advice, buy and sell things, and discuss local issues without resorting to personal attacks. The site is heavily moderated by real people who read each posting and filter out items that offend, incite or misinform. It operates in every town and has nearly 235,000 members, including nearly half of Vermont’s adults.

The discord common on conventional social media is “not an accident,” said Wood-Lewis. “Another way of saying people are attacking each other and acting cruel is Ooh, member engagement is up. We can sell more ads. We can collect more data to sell to huge data brokers who do God knows what with people’s private information. That’s the business model of Twitter and Facebook and all these others.”

The idea of an online forum that builds community instead of dividing it is attracting national attention. The Washington Post recently reported, “At a time when Americans are increasingly disenchanted with social media, researchers are studying Front Porch Forum to try to understand what makes for a kinder, gentler online community — and what Big Tech could learn from it.”

The best indication of FPF’s influence is the way that it builds civic engagement. According to a new study by the nonprofit New_ Public, 61% of FPF users reported that they had attended a local event or public meeting as a result of something they read on the forum, over half reported that they had discussed issues with a neighbor and one fifth of users said they had volunteered locally in response to a posting on FPF.

FPF, which is headquartered in Burlington, employs 30 people, including many content moderators. Wood-Lewis said that a “critical part of our model is that each member-submitted posting is reviewed by our professional staff before publication (which) is absolutely not how any other social media works.”

FPF enforces a strict set of rules in its online public square, including no personal attacks. “We’re not going to let people basically weaponize Front Porch Forum to do harm to our democracy, to our public health, things like that,” he said.

Elon Musk, who owns X, and Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg insist that the unfettered exchange of views on their platforms is just free speech. Wood-Lewis begs to differ.

“I do not think the folks you mentioned have any real interest in protecting free speech. They have an interest in amassing power and money.”

Front Porch Forum “has felt better and better as the divisiveness in our national scene has gotten worse, and as the isolation brought on by the pandemic and social media and smartphones and so many different things in modern life has gotten worse,” said Wood-Lewis.

Despite requests to expand to other states, Wood-Lewis insisted that FPF will stay local. The online forum proved its value by  connecting people impacted by flooding in Vermont in 2011, 2023 and 2024 with help and resources.

“As long as Vermont communities are struggling in significant ways, Front Porch Forum wants to be there as an ally and a partner.”