A MONTH IN THE HILLS

The city of Rutland has a new mayor after voters chose Mike Doenges over three-term incumbent David Allaire in the March 7 Town Meeting Day election.

Doenges, who had been president of the city Board of Aldermen for the past year, won decisively with 56 percent of the vote. His victory capped a campaign in which he called for reversing the city’s decades-long population decline through long-term strategic planning and stronger efforts to create more housing and attract new businesses.

Doenges was part of a slate of winning candidates endorsed by the group Rutland Forward, a local political action committee organized two years ago that has raised funds to support a series of progressive candidates in municipal and school board races in Rutland.

This year, in addition to Doenges, Rutland Forward backed six alderman candidates and two school board candidates, all of whom won. When combined with members elected last year, candidates backed by Rutland Forward now hold eight of the 11 seats on the Board of Aldermen.
John Atwood, the group’s treasurer, told the online news site VTDigger that Rutland Forward doesn’t espouse a political ideology and is not affiliated with any political party. Instead, he said, the group chooses to back candidates based on whether they’re invested in Rutland, don’t hold extreme views and are willing to work hard.

“We’ve worked with candidates of varying political persuasions,” Atwood said. “Yes, many of our candidates would call themselves progressive, but not all of them.”

In the motto at the top of its web page, Rutland Forward proclaims its goal of “making a Rutland for everyone.”

Doenges, who is not enrolled in any political party, set a pragmatic and optimistic tone for the Rutland Forward slate by focusing on the city’s challenges and putting forth strategies for solving them. And a number of the Rutland Forward candidates stressed the need to move past a pair of divisive culture-war debates -- over refugee resettlement and the choice of a high school sports mascot -- that have dominated the city’s political discourse in the past few years.
In the aftermath of Doenges’ victory, some suggested that Rutland Forward’s message of inclusivity helped to attract support from younger voters and relative newcomers who normally don’t participate in local elections. Doenges also won key supporters among the city’s business community, whose leaders have been pushing for a stronger response to Rutland’s demographic challenges.

Rutland throughout the 20th century was Vermont’s second-largest community after Burlington, but it fell to fifth place in the 2020 census – behind the Chittenden County towns of Essex, South Burlington and Colchester. The city has lost more than 18 percent of its population since 1970 and now has fewer than 16,000 residents, and some of its larger employers have been struggling to retain and recruit workers.

Allaire won the mayor’s office in 2017 after opposing then-mayor Chris Louras’ plan to resettle 25 to 30 families of Syrian refugees in Rutland. (Only a couple of the families made it to Rutland before the flow of Syrian refugees into the United States was cut off in the early days of the Trump administration.) More recently, though, Allaire had supported the resettlement of Afghan refugees in the city.

Alderman Tom DePoy, a consistent critic of the refugee resettlement efforts, also lost his bid for re-election last month after eight terms in office.

In other news from around the region in February and March:

Spa City leader seeks charge against activist
Police-reform advocates in Saratoga Springs have reacted with dismay and anger after a key City Council member filed a complaint of disorderly conduct against a Saratoga Black Lives Matter activist.

Public Safety Commissioner James Montagnino, a Democrat elected as part of pro-reform slate of candidates in 2021, lodged the complaint against Chandler Hickenbottom in the aftermath of a heated Feb. 7 council meeting. Montagnino contends Hickenbottom effectively forced the adjournment of the meeting when she refused to cede the microphone after her allotted two minutes in a public-comment period.

Hickenbottom, who had been using her time at the microphone to upbraid the council for its slow pace in carrying out promised reforms, was arraigned in City Court in early March on a charge of disorderly conduct and released pending a hearing that was postponed until this month.
The Times Union of Albany reported that at the March 7 City Council meeting, the night of Hickenbottom’s arraignment, more than a dozen Black Lives Matter activists took turns harshly criticizing Montagnino.

Saratoga BLM leader Lexis Figuereo, who is Hickenbottom’s sister, said Montagnino’s actions were especially disappointing to him after he had worked to help elect the commissioner based on his promises to bring reform and accountability to the management of the city police force. The city has been the focus of a series allegations of racial bias in policing, and it is facing a civil suit over its handling of the case of Daryl Mount, a biracial man who was mortally injured while fleeing city police in 2013.

“What’s going on, Jim?” Figuereo asked. “What happened? … What you did and what you are doing is wrong. Man up.”

Montagnino listened to the criticism but did not back down, and he rejected the suggestion that he should apologize or resign.

“Apologize, certainly no,” he told the Times Union the next day. “To my mind, it is very simple. They crossed the line by shutting down a government meeting.”

Mayor Ron Kim and the other three members of the City Council all have called on Montagnino to drop his disorderly conduct complaint against Hickenbottom, but as of March 29 he had not done so.
-- Compiled by Fred Daley