Despite Deadline, Burlington Lacks Plan for Lunch Program

Updated at 8:50 p.m.

Burlington officials do not have a plan to permanently relocate a free food distribution program that’s rankled downtown business owners, despite a city council measure that directed the mayor to come up with a proposal by Monday.

Meanwhile, the food program, run by a mutual aid group called Food Not Cops, has moved on its own accord, without permission, from a city-owned parking garage to City Hall Park.

Both Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak’s office and Democratic city councilors agree that the new location is not ideal — but no one has come up with an alternative that’s acceptable to all.

“It certainly changed some of the dynamic in terms of what our next steps may be,” City Council President Ben Traverse (D-Ward 5) said on Monday. He put the onus on Food Not Cops, which he said needs to decide whether it will cooperate in discussions about a new, long-term location for what’s known as the food “distro.”

If the group continues to “thumb their nose at the city in setting up shop in City Hall Park or setting up shop in a municipal garage, we’re gonna need to figure out how to put an end to activities that are not in alignment with our rules and regulations as a city,” Traverse said.

Since 2020, Food Not Cops has been dishing out free home-cooked meals, mostly to homeless people, in the city’s Marketplace Garage. But the gathering has drawn the ire of downtown business owners who say it attracts an unsavory crowd that scares off shoppers in an already tough economy.

City leaders had been in talks with Food Not Cops for months about moving out of the garage, which is just off the Church Street Marketplace. Those discussions hadn’t resulted in any change when, in May, more than 100 business leaders circulated an open letter that said the program was harming downtown and should be moved. At a May 19 meeting, city councilors passed a resolution to address concerns about downtown, including moving the lunch. An amendment proposed late in the meeting by Councilor Allie Schachter (D-East District) gave the mayor’s office a deadline — July 14 — for coming up with a plan.

At the time, Progressive councilors warned that setting a deadline would cause Food Not Cops, which operates with anarchist principles, to dig in its heels and refuse to leave. They encouraged the Dems to allow Mulvaney-Stanak more time to discuss the issue with the group and find a solution.

“Now we’re seeing the implication of that in real time,” Councilor Carter Neubieser (P-Ward 1) said on Monday. “I think the mayor continues to try to solve this. And the council ought to be supportive of those efforts, rather than creating a politicized debate around it and actually setting us backward.”

Neubieser said he’d spoken to downtown business owners who were less concerned with the lunch than they were about construction-related road closures and a need for more police foot patrols. He said the council had made progress on several of those fronts.

Councilor Becca Brown McKnight (D-Ward 6) was less forgiving about the lack of progress with Food Not Cops. In an interview on Monday, she said the mayor had failed to keep to a commitment she’d made to have a plan, something that is of “serious disappointment and concern” to McKnight.

“In a real proposal, what I would expect would be two or three options for alternative locations, a report back on the willingness of Food Not Cops to move and the willingness of partners to host,” McKnight said. “Instead, we just have nothing, and I think that’s unacceptable.”

She did say Food Not Cops’ decision to move the lunch out of the garage has been a good thing in eliminating some of the “antisocial behavior” there. Since the group left in early July, the Chittenden County Sheriff’s Office reported a 50 percent decline in people shooting up drugs, smoking crack, or defecating and urinating in the garage, according to McKnight. The city has been paying the sheriff’s office to patrol the garage, which was deemed a public safety “hot spot” by the mayor’s administration.

“I think that that can be seen as a success in some part,” McKnight said. “On the other hand, it raises great concerns if that behavior is going to be relocated to City Hall Park.”

The city council was scheduled to meet on Monday evening — July 14 — but its agenda contained no planned discussion about Food Not Cops nor its May 19 resolution. 

Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak was out of town and instead provided an update in a memo. She noted that the city had offered the group $10,000 to relocate but had received “no request for funding support.”

The group’s move to City Hall Park earlier this month, the mayor wrote, was something “the Administration was not involved in, nor informed about.”

She offered no clear proposal but vowed to “keep open lines of communication with Food Not Cops, while also considering the needs of all who enjoy City Hall Park, including families, and camps for children.”

“The administration is committed to supporting people accessing food in our City given the high number of community members living with food insecurity, while also remaining committed to everyone being able to access and safely use public spaces,” she wrote.

In an interview before the meeting, Traverse said he agreed with the mayor’s sentiment about providing food but he was “unsatisfied” with its lack of a firm proposal for a new location. The group’s move from the parking garage was a good thing, Traverse said, but city leaders now need a new plan from a group that hasn’t shown much interest in compromise.

“In my opinion, they’re not permitted or licensed to be doing what they’re doing right now,” Traverse said of Food Not Cops. “Hopefully we can cooperate with them in a positive way. But if they refuse to do that, then there will be other considerations in play.”

Food Not Cops acknowledged its move to the park in a July 4 post on Instagram. But it didn’t seem interested in taking direction from anybody.

“In light of the silly commotion brought about by some business owners and city officials, we met as a community and decided we might as well stretch our legs and come out of the shadows,” they wrote. “FNC is not for sale, and we’re committed to practicing mutual aid wherever makes the most sense, not where capital interests and politicians want us.”