NATALIE WILLIAMS
AND BY THE FUTURE I MEAN WITHIN THE NEXT FEW SEMESTERS. D AVID L IT TL E F IE L D
creating beauty.” Buying the diocese property wasn’t necessarily a bad decision, in Baird’s judgment, but “what happened was we took on this debt and then the emphasis became how to get out of the debt.”
Plunkett’s Problems
SEVEN DAYS FEATURE 33
When she took over Burlington College, Plunkett inherited her predecessor’s multi-million-dollar problem. The college’s annual audits document a rocky transition. To get a look at those reports, Seven Days filed a public records request with VEHBFA, which receives the independent assessments as a condition of the loan it brokered for the bank. Responding to a litany of problems identified in Burlington College’s 2012 audit, Plunkett described her first year at the helm as “one of the most challenging in Burlington College’s recent history.” The college had agreed to pay Sanders roughly $200,000 over two years, Plunkett explained in a letter to
08.20.14-08.27.14
— 20 percent annually until the college doubled in size. To some, that prediction seemed starry-eyed, especially for such a tiny school. VanderHeyden remembers wondering how Burlington College could attract more students amid a trend of declining enrollment. “Even though I admired their nerve and their courage, I had to sometimes wonder because the kind of student they were drawing in was such a highly specialized niche.” Whether from increased enrollment or targeted fundraising, Sanders wasn’t raising the money she was expected to, according to anonymous sources in news stories from the time. Under pressure from the board, she resigned in 2012, and Plunkett, her CFO, was selected to replace her. “A difference in vision” was the vague explanation offered for her departure. According to lawyer Baird, that’s around the time the school started losing sight of its mission to build a “community that’s just and humane and interested in
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stable at the time of the real estate transaction. And Sanders predicted that a more spacious campus would attract hundreds of additional students, and she had plans for a $6 million capital campaign called “The Sky Is the Limit.” “Burlington College made a very good case. Jane Sanders … was a very dynamic individual. I think she seemed to be in a position where she was poised to take the college to the next level,” recalled Robert Giroux, executive director of the Vermont Educational and Health Buildings Finance Agency (VEHBFA), the state entity that supplied the tax-exempt bonds purchased by People’s Bank. The board based its decision, in part, on an outside firm’s financial analysis, which noted that enrollment had increased 13 percent — from 142 full-time students in 2006 to 160 in 2010. During the same period, applications nearly tripled, from 78 to 207, and the tuition price went up. The Sanders administration projected continued growth
FILE: MATTHEW THORSEN
FILE: MATTHEW THORSEN
belt-tightening for many schools. But Sanders took a different tack: She convinced the board of trustees the best way to preserve Burlington’s most enigmatic institution of higher learning was to buy 32 acres of lakefront land from the Roman Catholic Diocese, including a behemoth brick building and a stone cottage, and create a real campus. “I thought it was a very daring move,” recalled Marc vanderHeyden, president of St. Michael’s College from 1997 to 2007. Daring, because the tiny college took on $10 million in debt — $6.5 million in tax-exempt bonds held by People’s United Bank and a $3.5 million loan from the diocese, which sold the property to pay off settlements it owed as a result of lawsuits stemming from priest sexual abuse. Tony Pomerleau, the 97-year-old philanthropist who is Burlington’s most senior developer, helped to broker the deal — and also contributed a $500,000 bridge loan. The school’s finances were relatively
Yves Bradley
I THINK THERE IS VERY LITTLE HOPE FOR THE INSTITUTION TO SURVIVE IN THE FUTURE, NATALIE WILLIAMS
FAIL
Christine Plunkett