BURLINGTON BUZZ BY MIKE MORIN
Meet
Mayor Miro Weinberger You spent a week at Burlington High School recently. What did you learn? I look back on my Week in School at Burlington High School as the most inspiring and optimistic week of my first year as mayor. I experienced ninth-grade teachers collaborating and stretching themselves to create a new kind of classroom fit for our evolving world; I saw the careful work our School Resource Officers do to keep our children safe; and I ate lunch daily in the most ethnically diverse room in Vermont—the BHS cafeteria. Social studies teacher Dov Stucker captured the reality of BHS today, saying, “This is where democracy happens.” Burlington prides itself on being greener than most cities. How will the recent Smarter City grants help? Burlington was fortunate and honored to be one of 100 cities around the world (and the smallest US city) to receive an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grant based on IBM’s recognition and belief in our city’s strong vision for a sustainable energy future. The Smarter Cities team focused its time in Burlington on creating a strategic plan to economically reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors, including energy, heating, and transportation, by leveraging the city’s recent smart grid 92 www.bestofburlingtonvt.com
SHAYNE LYNN PHOTOGRAPHY
T H E C I T Y ‘ s e n e r g etic new leader
investments; the long-standing political will of the city, the state, and Burlington institutions; and ongoing energy efficiency and renewable energy resource development efforts. How have city decision-makers brought Burlington back from the brink of the financial cliff? We closed on the Fiscal Stability Bond, an initiative supported by 72 percent of the voters and nearly every city councilor, which has moved us away from the financial brink by reducing the city’s reliance on short-term borrowing. Together, we completed a similarly successful effort at the airport, stabilizing the fragile finances of a
critical institution that had seen its credit rating degraded to junk-bond status. How do you, your wife Stacy, and daughter Li Lin like to spend family time together? I love my job serving the amazing people who make up our Burlington community. The demands of the job require tremendous love and support from my wife, Stacy, and my daughter, Li Lin. We work hard to have family dinners together as often as possible. During the winter we make as many family trips to Bolton Valley to ski as we can, and during baseball season my Vermont Senior Baseball League games are often a fun family afternoon. w