Burlington's mayoral candidates are making their final appeals to voters during the final sprint before Town Meeting Day.

The flurry of last-minute campaigning includes debates for Democratic incumbent Miro Weinberger and his independent challengers, Carina Driscoll and Infinite Culcleasure.

Seven Days checked in to see how the Queen City mayoral hopefuls are spending their final seven days as candidates.

Weinberger found himself leaps and bounds ahead of his competitors in fundraising after Sunday's campaign finance filing deadline; he had raised $107,000, compared to $47, 000 for Driscoll and $10,500 for Culcleasure. But the six-year incumbent said he's not taking any chances.

Updated at 11:30 p.m.

A group of University of Vermont student protesters spent much of Monday occupying the Waterman Building, where leaders met with school deans and even university president Tom Sullivan to discuss the group's demands related to racial justice on campus.

Students started streaming into the Waterman Building shortly before noon, quickly filling up the lobby as well as the stairways and balconies. A line of people also started to form outside the building. Organizers estimated that the crowd at its height contained nearly 400 people.

Those in the building, lead by the NoNames for Justice group, chanted familiar slogans calling for the resignations of Sullivan, provost David Rosowsky and vice provost Annie Stevens.

Another contingent waited outside the office of Thomas Scott, dean of the College of Education and Social Services, as he met with group leaders.

The sides emerged shortly after 1 p.m. Scott explained to the crowd that he wouldn't join William Falls, dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences, in signing the list of demands.

"I can't mandate faculty to attend diversity training," said Scott. He said he'd continue to have talks with members of the student group. "This group has my support," he said.
Sophomore Nyria Stuart-Thompson, a member of the university's Womyn of Color Coalition, was one of those who met with Scott. "I really wished he would just sign it," said Stuart-Thompson. "If the dean of the biggest college said yes, I feel like we should all follow."

Nancy Matthews, dean of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, was the other dean who did sign the list.

Earlier Monday, Sullivan sent a memo to the campus community in which he outlined the steps the university would take to "expand [its] longstanding commitment to building a diverse, equitable and inclusive" community.

Among his pledges: to provide and require professional development to all faculty who teach diversity-related courses, and to provide funding to recruit, hire and retain diverse faculty and staff.

"Every school and college is fully on board with these additional steps," Sullivan wrote in a statement. "We are re-energizing our continuing commitment to these issues, putting these initiatives in concrete terms, and requiring systematic implementation throughout the university."
But those vows did not appear to appease the students. A smaller but still sizable crowd remained by early afternoon Monday and began putting up posters in support of the Black Lives Matter movement inside — and outside — of Waterman.

"This is Oakland," read one sign attached to columns in the front of the building, paying homage to the California city where the Black Panther Party was founded. "Our house!"

More students began streaming into the building again by 4:30 p.m. as NoNames for Justice leaders prepared to meet with Sullivan at 5 p.m. Those assembled chanted support for the student leaders during the negotiations.

For the next two hours or so, well-wishers sent the students pizza, snacks, fruit, soda and water. An employee from Leonardo's Pizza said the Peace & Justice Center had paid for $200 worth of pizza.

Shortly before 7 p.m., the students left a first-floor lounge, where a previously scheduled talk on the Holocaust by a guest lecturer from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was to take place. That event was eventually moved to a different location.

The students, meanwhile, relocated to classrooms where they did homework, talked or watched movies as they waited word on the negotiations.

By 9 p.m., campus police told students that they'd be arrested for trespassing if they didn't leave Waterman within the hour.

About twenty minutes later, NoNames for Justice leaders emerged to address the remaining crowd of about 100 students, telling them to take down the banners and posters before leaving.

Harmony Edosomwan announced that the student leaders would have another meeting with the administration on Wednesday. She declined to give more specifics because negotiations are ongoing. "A lot of things that I wanted them to do tonight, they didn't do," including using a mediator to oversee the discussion, Edosomwan said.

"I feel really supported by our faculty of color and people of color around us, and a lot of our white allies," said organizer Angelica Crespo. "But in terms of administration, it's still really difficult to try and get through [to them] and try to pass on these [demands]."

Around 10 p.m., university vice president for executive operations Gary Derr sent out an email describing the negotiations as "good, constructive discussions." But he described some of the protests as a "significant disruption" to campus.

"We are prepared to take all appropriate disciplinary and legal steps to address the situation should it continue," Derr wrote in his statement.

Monday's protest was the latest in what's become several days of on-campus agitating.

UVM staffer John Mejia started a hunger strike February 16 to protest racial inequality on campus and to demand the university address the issues. On February 20, students and Mejia occupied the Waterman Building in protest. Two days later, protesters blocked traffic at Main and South Prospect streets for three hours, calling on Sullivan to meet with them. Last Friday, Mejia — who uses the pronouns "they" and "them" — announced the end of their hunger strike as students assembled inside the Davis Center.

Updated at 6:48 p.m.

An innocent bystander was seriously injured early Monday after a man fired two gunshots into a crowd on Main Street in Burlington shortly after bars closed for the night, according to police.

Officers on patrol just after 2 a.m. heard the shots and caught 37-year-old Rashad Nashid not far from the shooting scene outside of Nectar's, police said in a statement. Nashid, a convicted felon, was allegedly intoxicated and armed with a .38-caliber Ruger pistol when a Burlington police sergeant arrested him on South Winooski Street.

“The chief of police would like to commend the sergeant for his bravery and restraint in confronting an armed, intoxicated suspect in the direct aftermath of a shooting, and the other responding officers for safely bringing order to a dangerous and chaotic crime scene,” the department said in a statement.

Burlington mayoral candidate Carina Driscoll earned a $1,000 campaign donation from her stepfather, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), but it wasn't enough to match Mayor Miro Weinberger's hefty war chest.

The two-term incumbent tallied $107,000 by Saturday's campaign finance filing deadline, more than double the $46,000 Driscoll raised. Infinite Culcleasure has $10,500 in his campaign coffers, including $5,500 amassed since the last filing deadline three weeks ago.

Weinberger, meanwhile, raked in $26,000 during that same time period, mostly in larger donations. With 10 days remaining until the March 6 election, he's on pace to come close to — or even surpass — his 2012 fundraising total of $118,000.

John Mejia, the University of Vermont staffer who vowed to refrain from eating until the university and the city of Burlington addressed a list of demands, ended their hunger strike Thursday after nearly a week of a water-only diet.

"I started this hunger strike because I wanted people who are supposedly our leaders to care. I wanted them to stop for a second, and they haven't," Mejia told a group of students at UVM's Davis Center late Friday morning.

"The unfortunate side effect is that I've negatively impacted my own community. There are plenty of people who are distraught at the thought of me dying ... who could not eat knowing that I was starving," said Mejia, who started the strike February 16.

A crowd of approximately 100 University of Vermont anti-racism protesters, waving signs, chanting and forming a human chain, caused rush-hour havoc Thursday in Burlington by demonstrating in the middle of Main Street.

Police shut down the busy roadway near the South Prospect Street intersection after students set up a roadblock around 5 p.m. and refused to leave until they met with UVM president Tom Sullivan. Diverted traffic flooded side streets in an effort to get to Interstate 89 after the demonstration began.

Many of those protesting said they stood in solidarity with John Mejia, a UVM staffer who has vowed to refrain from eating until the university and the city of Burlington address a list of nine demands.

Updated on February 21, 2018.

About 150 people, mostly University of Vermont students, gathered outside of the Waterman Building Tuesday afternoon to decry school administrators' response to campus racism.

The event kicked off with an address by John Mejia, a UVM staffer who has vowed to remain on a hunger strike until the university and the city of Burlington address a list of nine demands.

"As a non-black person of color, my place here is not to speak for my black family members," Mejia told the crowd. "My place here is as an accomplice, to throw my body into the twin, heartless gears of white supremacy and anti-black racism that run this city and university — to force them to grind to a halt."

The battle of the endorsements is on in the Burlington mayoral campaign.

Mayor Miro Weinberger on Monday trotted out a dozen supporters to sing his praises, including Burlington city councilors, legislators and union employees. The incumbent Democratic candidate also rehashed the list of endorsements he's tallied during his reelection campaign and announced another key backer: Republican Kurt Wright, a longtime city councilor, state representative and one of Weinberger's opponents in the 2012 mayoral race.

The laudatory press conference Monday appeared to be a direct response to independent candidate Carina Driscoll's announcement last week that the local chapter of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees had voted to back her campaign. The union represents more than 200 city employees, some of whom later pushed back against Driscoll's assertion that the endorsement was unanimous.

"I was extremely concerned when I read Carina's announcement characterizing her union support as 'the unanimous endorsement of the city's workers,' a statement that, as you can see here, is patently untrue," said City Councilor Joan Shannon (D-South District), a Weinberger supporter. "If there's one position in this city that's more important than the mayor, it's the one of city workers, collectively."

Members of a Burlington city employees union are pushing back after their president declared a "unanimous endorsement" of Burlington mayoral candidate Carina Driscoll Wednesday.

Several members of the local chapter of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees told Seven Days that they do not support Driscoll — and never knew about the endorsement vote.

"There was never an email, never a discussion, none of the union members voted," said Ted Miles, a Burlington code enforcement inspector who is a member of the AFSCME union. Miles, who said he'd cast his Town Meeting Day ballot for incumbent Mayor Miro Weinberger, also questioned the critiques that other union members had for the current administration.

"It was definitely not any kind of unanimous endorsement by any stretch of the imagination," Miles said.

Burlington police arrested two men who allegedly used BB guns to shoot 200 parked cars across the city over a span of two years.

William Bowler, 24, of Swanton, and Alexander Charbonneau, 30, of Burlington, allegedly committed six additional shootings before police arrested them late Wednesday. The men are each charged with felony and misdemeanor counts of unlawful mischief and are scheduled to appear in court on Thursday.

The shootings occurred throughout the Queen City with no discernible pattern and frustrated investigators for two years. The men targeted cars parked on or near streets and inflicted damage that ranged from $500 to $2,000 per vehicle, police said.