Final curtain
Canary in a coal mine
Palace 9 shows its last film
Red spruce rebounds in Vermont
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South Burlington’s Community Newspaper Since 1977
the NOVEMBER 30, 2023
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VOLUME 47, NO. 48
City seeks expanded school board, vote to be set COREY MCDONALD STAFF WRITER
South Burlington is moving forward with a proposal to increase the number of members on the city’s school board and is aiming for a Town Meeting Day vote. Originally shelved earlier this year, the city council is now decoupling a proposal to increase the number of school board members from other proposals that were laid out by the city’s charter committee, which spent much of the year exploring different governing models for the city and school board. “We are now under a really tight timeline to get something on the Town Meeting Day ballot, so we need to give direction to the city attorney to start drafting language,” city manager Jessie Baker said. The charter committee’s final report, sent to the council in August, recommended adding members to both the school board and the city council and keeping the city manager over switching to mayoral-based administration. The debate to switch from an at-large election system to a ward system, however, has found little consensus. Councilors at a September meeting decided to put those conversations on hold, and “did not appear ready to discuss expansion of the council or make any change,” councilor Meaghan Emery said. But community members had reached out to the council and asked to allow the school board expansion proposal to move See VOTE on page 12
PHOTO BY COREY MCDONALD
Patricia Weaver stands in front of the land her family had owned since the 1920s and sold to the city in 2013.
Hubbard Park naming
Resident says city reneged on promises COREY MCDONALD STAFF WRITER
In 2021, a friend sent Patricia Weaver a photo taken from the property that was once a sprawling dairy farm belonging to Weaver’s family for decades. It showed a new sign honoring Tom Hubbard, the city’s longtime deputy city manager who retired that year. Weaver was taken aback. When she and her three siblings sold the land to the city, she had been assured the city would honor her late father Richard Underwood, who died in 1998 just days after retiring as the city’s tax assessor for 29 years. When the property was sold to the city in 2013, it represented the single largest city purchase of land since it acquired the Wheeler Nature Park in the early 1990s. Sandy
Miller, the city manager at the time, said the city council had “warmly received the family’s request for some kind of recognition, though none was discussed or decided upon.” “I kind of went on good faith when we made this agreement,” Weaver said. “That’s where my mistake was.” As a task force was formed and moved through different iterations of what the property could be, Weaver and her siblings said they were initially included in the discussion, were asked for their input and were invited to meetings to discuss the best use of the land for public access and recreation. But as the years went on, communication between the city and Weaver began to slow, they said — as did plans for building out recreational uses on the property in the city’s southeast quadrant, an area featuring
some of the wealthiest property that, were it its own municipality, would be the richest in the state. “Everything was going as planned,” she said. “They were including us in everything and inviting us and asking for our opinion. Then it just stopped.” She followed up with the city in 2021, and in a letter to Holly Rees, then the city’s recreation and parks director, reiterated her family’s wishes for naming the park. Rees, in an emailed response to Weaver, told her that there had been a “misstep in not reaching out directly to your family to provide an update,” according to public records. “On behalf of the city, I would like to See PARK on page 12