Supporters of former Burlington diversity director Tyeastia Green converged on city hall on Monday to condemn a report that alleged Green and her staff had mismanaged finances for the city's annual Juneteenth celebration.

Wearing black clothing and white shoes to symbolize stamping out white supremacy, activists gathered in City Hall Park ahead of Monday’s council meeting. They demanded that Mayor Miro Weinberger apologize to Green — the former and first-ever director of Burlington’s Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Office — and Casey “Jersey” Ellerby, a former event planner for the department. Both women are Black.

The report, released last week, found no evidence of fraud but alleges “mismanagement or carelessness” leading up to the 2022 Juneteenth celebration, which was held after Green left her job with the city. The 2021 event was widely lauded as a success.



The 18-page document, and a 15-page list of exhibits, also includes recommendations for ways the city could improve financial oversight and policies.

After a lengthy public forum on Monday, councilors referred the report to a subcommittee to consider how it affected Green, Ellerby and their families. The committee will also consider revamping policies “to combat anti-BIPOC and gender-based discriminatory practices.”

Activists said bias drove Weinberger’s decision to audit Green’s former office and that the report was defamatory.
“If you shift her color, if you shift her tone, if you shift her gender, she would not be on blast here right now,” Ferene Paris Meyer, a friend of Green’s, said at the rally in the park.

In a statement to Seven Days early on Tuesday morning, Green defended her work and said the meeting's discourse showed that Burlington values having "a safe, thriving, vibrant community where all our contributions and talents are respected."

She added: "It also showed us that there are just a few politicians who use our differences to divide and distract us."
Green left Burlington in March 2022 for a similar position in her hometown of Minneapolis; three managers in Green's office left soon after. Green didn’t comment on her departure at the time, but close friends said she felt unsupported by Weinberger.

A year later, Burlington hired local firm Sheehey Furlong & Behm to review Juneteenth expenses after learning Minneapolis officials were questioning Green’s management of an event there. Green overspent her budget, and attendance was lower than expected, according to news coverage.

The Burlington report says Green told city officials, before she left, that she’d secured as much as $300,000 in private donations for the 2022 Juneteenth celebration. Green, however, says the report misconstrued her words and that she’d only expressed a hope to raise that amount.

In the end, donors gave just over $100,000 for the event, which cost about $414,000 to put on. The city council passed a resolution to cover the $131,000 difference.
Burlington paid the law firm $41,000 to conduct the probe, which involved reviewing more than 77,000 emails and interviewing 10 current and former city employees, according to the mayor’s office.

Neither Green nor Ellerby had seen the report when the city released it last Thursday, though the mayor’s office had already sent it to councilors and the media, under an embargo. That rankled Green and Ellerby supporters, who hosted an Instagram Live last week to defend the women.
On Monday night, Councilor Zoraya Hightower (P-Ward 1), one of two Black women on the council, charged that Weinberger did this as a calculated move.

“He silenced the voice of Tyeastia, the voice of Jersey, my voice, to ensure there would be a narrative that Tyeastia was somehow the cause of any mistakes made in 2022,” Hightower said.
Weinberger didn’t speak during Monday night’s meeting, but his office has previously defended the report as necessary due diligence. The mayor's communications director, Samantha Sheehan, said Weinberger has advanced racial justice in Burlington, including by creating the office that Green once led.

Green was in attendance on Monday but didn’t speak. Plenty of others did on her behalf, both denouncing Weinberger for questioning her integrity and lauding Green’s work on the city's first Juneteenth celebration in 2021. Kiah Morris, a former state lawmaker who organized Monday’s rally, called the celebration “some of the most triumphant days that I’ve had since calling Vermont my home.”

“It is foul to cast aspersions on the events and the transformative work that was helmed by former director Green,” she said. “Mayor Weinberger and his administration are proving how dangerous unchecked misogynoir and bias can be to the lives and livelihoods of Black women and femmes in Vermont.”



White allies also showed up for the cause, including former Progressive city councilors Rachel Siegel and Max Tracy, who said white, male department heads haven’t been scrutinized as closely as Green despite their questionable behavior.
Siegel specifically noted former airport director Gene Richards, who wasn’t subjected to a financial audit even though an investigator found that he’d used the airport gas station to fill up his personal vehicle dozens of times. The council fired him in 2021.

Tracy said the disparity needed to be called out. “That is racist, plain and simple,” he said to applause.

Council President Karen Paul (D-Ward 6) had to pause the meeting at one point after one attendee began shouting about "black supremacy and white supremacy." The speaker, Todd Lacroix, continued to yell even as the crowd shouted over him and an audience member attempted to take the microphone from him. He eventually left the auditorium.
“How can you ensure that we are safe in this meeting?” Harmony Edosomwan said, addressing Weinberger from the audience. “You let this violence happen, and you keep trying to move on without addressing it. This is the problem.”

Council debates typically drag on for hours, with each member speaking in turn. Monday night, however, councilors yielded the floor to Hightower, who read the Progressive caucus’ official response to the report, then added some comments of her own.

Hightower skewered the report as a “gotcha moment” that suggests Green is incompetent when the city itself has been criticized for its financial practices, most recently in a damning audit of the city's tax-increment financing districts.
Hightower said Weinberger has repeatedly dismissed her suggestions for how to achieve racial justice, including his decision to remove Green from overseeing a review of the police department in 2021. Weinberger suggested then that Green was too biased to do the job and assigned it to a white, male department head. He then reversed course when he caught flak for the decision.

“It shouldn't have to take an outcry for someone to do what is right,” Hightower said.

Correction, August17, 2023: An earlier version of this story misquoted Todd Lacroix. The story has also been updated to reflect that an audience member grabbed the microphone while he was speaking.

Watch the full meeting below, courtesy of Town Meeting TV.