Vermont
Vermont Construction Company cited for housing workers in 'grossly hazardous and unsafe' living conditions – VTDigger
The town of Colchester has issued several violations against the Vermont Construction Company for housing company workers in “grossly hazardous and unsafe” spaces.
The company was issued an emergency order to vacate a portion of its office space at Hegeman Avenue last week. Part of the building was being used to house an estimated 17 people “despite having no approvals for life safety features for human occupancy of a public building,” the town’s complaint reads.
Town zoning and state fire marshal officials who visited the building last week said the property was “structurally unsafe,” with no smoke or carbon monoxide detectors, no fire extinguishers and several electrical violations, according to the complaint.
The emergency order was posted to the Colchester Selectboard’s upcoming meeting agenda scheduled for Tuesday. Town manager Aaron Frank said in an email that the violations were “concerning enough from a life and safety perspective to include” in the agenda.
It’s the second time in recent months that Colchester has cited the company for housing its workers in unsafe and unpermitted housing. In September, town and state fire marshal officials found that 60 people were living in similar conditions in a house at 28 Vermont Avenue.
Tenants, who officials said were seasonal workers employed by the company, were living in small, congregate sleeping areas, in bunk beds and in some cases on air mattresses.
Like the Hegeman Avenue property, there were no sprinkler or fire alarm systems in place, which the state requires when more than 10 people are housed in a single space, according to Robert Sponable, the deputy director of the Vermont Division of Fire Safety.
Visible mold was found at the Vermont Avenue home, with no carbon monoxide alarms and broken smoke detectors, officials said.
Cathyann LaRose, Colchester’s planning and zoning director, said that property was also issued an emergency order to vacate in September and has remained empty since then. She described the property as “derelict.”
“It is far from habitable, so nobody can live there — not without a significant amount of work and quite a bit of approval,” she said.
In an emailed statement, Dana Kamencik, one of the owners of Vermont Construction Company, said the company was “working closely with the appropriate authorities to address these issues and ensure compliance moving forward.”
The company, he said, was a “young and growing business.” He added that, “While we are still gaining experience, we take the recent violations in Colchester very seriously.” The company was incorporated in early 2016, according to the Better Business Bureau.
Vermont Construction Company owns at least four other residential properties in the county, including two in Williston, one in Essex Town, and one in Shelburne, according to business filings.
According to LaRose and town records, the company moved tenants from the Vermont Avenue property to a similar residential property it owns in Williston after the violations were issued against the Colchester property.
Sponable said the state had identified “issues that we’re working through” at both the Shelburne and Essex properties but it hadn’t identified hazardous conditions similar to those observed in Colchester.
“We understand the housing issues and the housing shortages — the last thing we want to do is put anybody out on the street,” Sponable said. “But we do everything that we possibly can to make these buildings safe, or at least safe enough for them to be in there until these other issues can be corrected.”
Dormitory-style living is more common in areas closer to ski resorts, which employ seasonal workers, Sponable said.
“But most of the ski areas, they have buildings that they’ve built that are set up more like a college dormitory,” he said. “The building’s got a sprinkler system and a fire alarm system and things like that.”
Vermont Construction Company purchased a single-family home at 281 Hedgerow Drive in Shelburne to house company employees, according to state fire marshal inspection records. At one point it had 15 residents.
That property has since racked up several violations, including failing to provide sprinkler and fire alarm systems, according to state fire marshal records.
A follow-up inspection on Sept. 20 found that, because sleeping quarters had undersized windows, the rooms “cannot be occupied at this time.”
A representative for the company told fire marshal officials at the time “that the plan is to find new housing for the majority of the residents, leaving two staff to rehab the house,” according to inspection records from May.
The property has since generated numerous written complaints from residents, and police have an extensive call log originating from the property, Shelburne Town Manager Matt Lawless said in an interview on Monday.
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182 Hegeman Avenue in Colchester on Monday, December 9. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
“There have been quite a number of complaints on it and those have continued over the better part of a year,” he said.
The complaints center around parking, late-night noise, and trash build-up outside of the property, but Lawless said the town has not chosen to issue violations against the property.
“The balance that they have to strike is, what rises to the level of disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace,” he said, “because there’s a set of things that you may do at home… that I think is annoying, but that is within your rights as a neighbor.”
Police haven’t issued any citations against the property, according to Shelburne dispatcher James Mack.
The company owns two more properties in Williston and one at 235 River Road in Essex Town, but it is not clear whether these properties are used to house company workers.
Sharon Kelley, the zoning administrator and health officer for Essex Town, said in an email that there have been several verbal complaints about trash build up at the property on River Road, but said no violations have been issued.
In Williston, residents have similarly complained of trash at 192 Aspen Lane in emails to VTDigger. The company also owns a residential property on White Birch Lane.
Kamenick did not respond to an interview request, and did not respond to a follow-up email with detailed questions on Monday afternoon, but said in his initial email that the company “would respond to any complaints promptly.”
“We view community feedback as a critical part of our growth, and we are committed to resolving any concerns and continuing to build trust with the people we serve,” he said.
Editor’s note: Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VTDigger.
When Emily Pierson decided to get married in Vermont, she knew she had to act fast before venues and vendors booked up
Vermont
She moved from Paris to Vermont and found her ‘dream job’ opening a bakery – The Boston Globe
BURLINGTON, Vt. — Shelley MacDonald and her husband, both Canadian citizens, had been living in Paris for over a decade when the pandemic hit. She’d been selling baked goods and hosting a dinner club called Paris Bread in their apartment. She wanted to open a business in the United States, where she could operate in English. It was time to leave, except that, at the moment, only American passport holders could fly into the United States.
With ingenuity and grit, the couple discovered a visa for foreign entrepreneurs and secured one from the American Embassy the day it reopened after lockdown. Once their passports were stamped, they had 30 days to fly out and move everything they owned to this picturesque college town.
Since 2022, MacDonald has run Belleville Bakery & Catering near City Hall in Burlington, Vt., down the street from the University of Vermont. She’s training staff, including students, and offering confections you might see in a Parisian patisserie, most not as fancy. She has different varieties of all-butter croissants, cinnamon snails and feta-garlic snails made with croissant trimmings, tempting lunch items such as bacon cheddar quiche and tuna sandwiches with smoked Gouda on homemade onions buns, and dinners such as lasagna, rigatoni, and chicken pot pie to take home.
“I think the town is adorable with kind people who help you when you don’t need to be helped,” says MacDonald, sitting in the bright bakery. “There’s something very special about Vermont.”
She and her husband — the hyperrealist painter André Beaulieu — picked Burlington because they had visited often when they lived in his hometown, Montreal. “The real reason is so that I could open a business in English,” she told her 48,000 Instagram followers, “so that I could function in my native language, for all of the reading and writing and dealing with lawyers and accountants and plumbers that you need to do when you own a business.”
MacDonald describes their new situation as “the best of both possible worlds, where I get to live in English in a really cute space, and he gets to live with me in English in a really cute space and he’s really close to home.” She describes her business as her “dream job.”
The 100-year-old building whose storefront she renovated is large and airy, with bakers in the kitchen in full view making croissant and brioche doughs, prepping cookie batters and galette pastry.
MacDonald moves quickly, laughs easily, and greets customers warmly. “People come into a bakery looking for a treat and some kind of care,” she says. When you’ve finished eating, you don’t have to take your plates and cups to various bins for recycle and trash. That system horrifies her. “No bussing,” she says. “We take care of you.”
Her clientele skews older, she has noticed, and they’re looking for somewhere to go. “The demand is enormous,” she says. She describes her personality as “Shelley takes care of people.” Remembering her days running an underground restaurant, MacDonald now offers twice-monthly Sunday brunches and dinners, both served at a long table farmhouse-style so everyone talks to their neighbors.
MacDonald, who is willing to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, also has a successful mail-order arm to send cookies across the country. They’re thick and perfectly round in flavors such as orange gingersnap, pistachio chocolate, and lemon pistachio shortbread.
She also gives classes in the bakery and writes a weekly newsletter, which she snail-mails for free. “People are lonely,” she says. They want to receive real mail.
Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, MacDonald, 59, also lived in Vancouver. She met Beaulieu in Montreal. His large, striking artworks hang in the bakery.
In order to get a US E-2 Investor Visa, they had to invest $15,000 in a new US company (some applicants invest considerably more) and have secured premises in the destination city. Sight-unseen, they rented a painting studio in The Soda Plant in Burlington for Beaulieu, which qualified them.
The bakery’s name is the English version of Beaulieu’s surname. Beaulieu means “beautiful place,” she says. Belleville, which means “beautiful city,” is easier for Americans to spell.
Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, who happened to be there when I was — she said she stops by often since her office is so close — describes the bakery as “loveliness in this corner. [MacDonald] draws people into this community.”
The bakery has become known for its I am Proud of Me Banana Cake. It’s really banana bread, but when MacDonald made it in France, customers wondered why it was called bread.
When you buy one, MacDonald asks you what you’re proud of. She’s heard many comments, mostly emotional. One woman in her 20s was going to drive on the highway for the first time, someone else was excited to have completed exams. Then a man came in to say he was proud of his wife for finishing chemo.
“She’d been planning this cake during her treatment,” MacDonald told a local TV reporter who did a segment on her. Donations started coming in so other cancer patients at the local hospital could get a banana cake; MacDonald also sends cakes to a palliative care center and a teen drop-in center.
Those efforts came to the attention of a program director at the University of Vermont, who called MacDonald in the middle of Vermont’s dark, cold February winter. The administrator was running a mental health day for freshmen. She bought 100 banana cakes from MacDonald and asked her to come and hand them out.
The line was an hour long. Students waited patiently, not just to get an I am Proud of Me Banana Cake, but also for a moment to tell MacDonald what was on their mind.
Belleville Bakery & Catering, 217 College St., Burlington, Vt., www.bellevillevt.com
Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com.
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