A white man shouted racial slurs as he drove a truck through a yard in Richford and rammed a porch where a Black resident was, that resident told police.

The truck driver, Anthony Mason, 27, was reported to have threatened to kill the resident during the incident, police said in a press release.

He was later arrested at his Richford home. He is expected to be charged with attempted second-degree murder, grossly negligent operation of a motor vehicle and unlawful mischief. The three charges will be filed with a hate-crime enhancement, police said, which can add more time to prison sentences.

Police said 27-year-old Michael Wilson called authorities shortly after 9 a.m. Wednesday to report that Mason, whom he knew, drove over a dirt bike before hitting his porch near him and his dog. Police say Mason caused "considerable" damage to Wilson's dirt bike and yard.

On Wednesday evening, a judge ordered that Mason be held at the Northwest State Correctional Facility for lack of $10,000 bail. He’s scheduled to be arraigned at 1 p.m. Thursday at the Vermont Superior Court in St. Albans.

Mayor Miro Weinberger’s preliminary budget proposal for fiscal year 2022 relies heavily on federal coronavirus relief funds to close the revenue gap created by the ongoing pandemic.

The spending plan also calls for investing in racial equity by hiring additional staffers for the city’s Office of Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, a promise that Weinberger made in his State of the City address last month.

The mayor said he hopes the influx of federal cash will help tamp down tax increases after what has been an economically challenging year.

“This creates a complex and an exciting challenge,” Weinberger said at a virtual press conference on Wednesday. “With this budget, we must restore full city operations, make structural progress on strategic priorities and really carefully steward this unprecedented infusion of one-time resources.”

Landlords of the North End Studios' two primary locations, in Winooski and Burlington, are terminating their leases with the organization in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations levied against cofounder Ben Bergstein. 

The majority of the board members for the Vermont Performing Arts League, a nonprofit that oversees the organization, have also resigned — as has one of their replacements.

The shakeup comes weeks after VTDigger.org revealed substantial allegations of sexual misconduct against Bergstein, who founded the performing arts league in 1978 alongside his wife and business partner, April Werner.

The Burlington School Board voted unanimously on Tuesday to terminate a $70 million high school renovation project, paving the way for plans to build a brand new building at a yet-to-be-determined location in the Queen City.

The board’s decision came after Superintendent Tom Flanagan recommended that the district halt the project because of widespread contamination from polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) on the high school campus.

“I feel strongly, after collaboration and consultation with my team and with our experts in this work, that it is no longer possible to meet our stated goals of the ReEnvisioning Project,” Flanagan told the board. “The PCB contamination and remediation that will be needed to address the contamination pushes us over the threshold of what is possible in this building, and I believe that we need to start fresh with a new build.”

Burlington voters approved a $70 million bond in November 2018 to undertake the extensive renovation of the city’s high school and technical center. As part of the project, the school district was required to perform environmental testing of the property.

The state Department of Labor doesn’t have a timeline for reopening its online claims filing system, saying that reverting to its old system of taking claims only by phone has dramatically reduced a flood of fraudulent claims.

The department disabled its online application last week after a surge of fraud that started in mid-April. Individuals or groups in the U.S. and internationally have been using people's names, addresses and other personal information to file fraudulent claims, collecting the money through direct deposits.

On Monday, Labor Commissioner Mike Harrington said 2,300 new claims came in April 27, and 1,700 on the following day. After the department disabled its online application, the numbers plummeted to just 159 on Thursday, 154 on Friday, and 30 on Saturday, said Harrington.