Burlington’s Main Street Will Reopen for Two-Way Traffic

Motorists will soon get an occasional reprieve from the disruptive construction on Burlington’s Main Street.

Starting June 27, a portion of the roadway will be opened for two-way traffic on nights and weekends. The shift is meant to prop up downtown businesses that have blamed the roadwork for slumping sales.

The change will cost $600,000 and tack a few months onto contractor S.D. Ireland’s construction schedule. The city will cover the cost using money earned on the tax-increment financing bond that’s paying for the $25.9 million project.

City councilors approved the plan with an 11-1 vote at their meeting on Monday. Councilor Joe Kane (P-Ward 3) cast the lone “no” vote.

“What we’ve been doing has not been working,” Councilor Buddy Singh (D-South District) said. “It is a lot easier for us, as a city, to help the businesses that are here than to have them leave and try to attract new ones and tell them this is a good place to do business.”

The construction is part of the city’s “Great Streets” initiative, which aims to make roadways friendlier to walkers and cyclists. But the project has vexed business owners, who have contended with road closures for more than a year. They’ve urged officials to reopen the road to one-way westbound traffic, to no avail. Last month, however, councilors took up the cause with a resolution that directed public works officials to come up with a plan.

Meantime, the project, which was slated to end in November 2026, is running ahead of schedule, officials have said.

On Monday, Public Works Director Chapin Spencer presented councilors with several options for restoring traffic. The first was to stay the course, which wouldn’t cost anything but would maintain the status quo, a situation that some businesses have said is untenable.

Two other options, which Spencer didn’t recommend, included the council’s initial recommendation to completely open a westbound travel lane at a cost of nearly $1 million. Another would have paused construction for 90 days — and pushed the end date to June 2027.

Businesses surveyed by the city had mixed opinions, with the majority of 87 respondents preferring the two-way traffic plan. Downtown businesses specifically, however, were nearly split between that option and staying the course.

Councilors eventually chose the two-way plan. The deal says the road will reopen at 5:30 p.m. each weekday, “with possible exceptions” for certain construction activities. The traffic shift will start Friday on the section of Main Street between Pine and Church streets, and as soon as August 1 for the block between Church and South Winooski Avenue.

Still, councilors had some reservations about the plan. In an interview before Monday’s meeting, City Council President Ben Traverse (D-Ward 5) said he’s concerned that businesses open during the daytime won’t benefit from the change. That includes Muddy Waters and the Cafe HOT., both of which have been vocal on social media about how the roadwork has affected sales.

At the meeting, councilors raised concerns about using TIF-related money to cover the expense, noting that Burlington has been dinged in previous state audits of its TIF districts. The earnings on the TIF bond, which was issued in 2022, could also be used to pay off interest on the debt or for other improvements, an opportunity some councilors though the city should consider. Others countered that using TIF money was a good alternative to taxpayer dollars.

Councilors also debated the merits of dragging out the construction timeline. Doing so was a non-starter for Councilor Kane, who said he’d prefer to stick to the original schedule.

“Getting this done, even if it’s a month or two sooner, seems to me like it’s in everyone’s interest,” Kane said. “I appreciate the work that’s gone into this recommendation, but I am not persuaded by it.”

Councilor Becca Brown McKnight (D-Ward 6), meantime, said a potential delay is worth it to get people driving down Main Street again.

“This is just a really hard decision,” she said. “We don’t have any option that’s going to fix everything.”

Traverse said Democratic councilors are pushing to include additional funding to support downtown businesses in the coming year’s budget, which the council is slated to approve at a special meeting on Wednesday.

Also on Monday, councilors agreed to amend a development agreement with the owners of the Burlington Square project, formerly known as CityPlace.

Developers originally had until June 30, 2026, to complete the so-called “North Tower,” which is slated to house a hotel and hundreds of new apartments. The revised agreement extends that deadline to September 2027 to account for “ongoing volatility in construction markets,” according to a city memo.

“Inflation, interest rate uncertainty, global supply chain disruptions, and increasing costs associated with tariffs on key building materials have delayed financing and construction activities,” Kara Alnasrawi, director of the city’s Business & Workforce Development department, wrote in the memo. “These market conditions have affected not only this project but a wide range of construction efforts across the region.”

Meantime, the South Tower on Bank Street — which includes apartments, retail space and a Marriott AC Hotel — is nearly complete.

The amended agreement is the latest update in the yearslong saga to bring the project to completion. First proposed in 2014, CityPlace was conceived as two 14-story towers at the site of the former Burlington Town Center mall. Then-owner Don Sinex demolished the shopping center in 2017, but work at the site eventually stopped, leaving behind a barren plot that came to be known as “the Pit.”

Years later, Sinex sold his shares to three local businessmen: Dave Farrington of Farrington Construction; Al Senecal of Omega Electric and Scott Ireland of S.D. Ireland. The team broke ground in late 2022, and work has continued in earnest since.

“This is really an exciting moment of reactivation of this block,” Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said on Monday evening. “I appreciate all the work that’s gone into this and the continued commitment to the city.”