My name is Carter Neubieser, and I’m grateful to be serving our neighborhood on the City Council.

My partner and I just bought our first home on Riverside Ave. She’s a nurse in the UVMMC network, and I work at 350Vermont, a climate justice nonprofit. We co-parent her son Wally and have a little girl on the way, who is due in October!

I’ve been involved in our community in a variety of capacities since 2017.

• I currently serve as a City Councilor representing Ward 1.

• I formerly served on our Ward 1 NPA Steering Committee.

• I worked as a City Council Support Staffer for Councilors Hightower and Hanson. I helped pass a number of initiatives including universal rental weatherization, a charter change allowing the city to regulate heating in buildings, safe walk/bike infrastructure and ranked choice voting.

• I worked as a Campaign Staffer on a number of local, state, and national campaigns including Senator Sanders’ 2018 and 2020 campaigns, as well as Former Senate Pro Tempore Tim Ashe’s bid for Lt. Governor.

• In 2019 I served on Burlington’s Special Committee to Review Policing Practices.
  

I ran because I love Burlington - this is the community where I graduated college, started my career, bought my first home, and where my partner Sophia and I are starting our family.

As many folks know, I grew up seeing addiction and mental health challenges in my immediate and extended family - unfortunately I picked up some of those coping skills. Thankfully, at the age of 20, this community supported me as I got sober. Whether it was peers in recovery via a 12 step program or healthcare workers in the hospital, or all of my neighbors I’ve come to know better over the years.

Now, this community that has given me so much, is facing some really tough challenges, and I want to leverage my personal and professional experience to help address them.

• A climate crisis that is poisoning the air we breath, flooding the intervale, and preventing us from using our lake because of increased toxic algae blooms.

• An affordability crisis that is driving working and middle class people out of their homes and making our city a playground for the wealthy.

• A public safety, substance use, and houselessness crisis that is sowing mistrust among neighbors, and making our city feel less safe and less livable.

• Divisive rhetoric that isn’t bringing us together, but instead driving us further apart. 

These challenges can make us feel overwhelmed and powerless. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. These problems didn’t fall from the sky - they are a result of human decisions and can be solved through better, more holistic choices. But this change will not happen until we demand better from our political leaders - we must come together as neighbors around a shared agenda that prioritizes working families, our planet, and those communities too often left behind by the political system.

I am hopeful that over the next two years my colleagues, the Mayor, and I can …

1. Move forward big ideas like tax fairness reform, decarbonizing our energy, strengthening our local democracy, taking on our city’s housing crisis, and adequately addressing public safety challenges.

2. Deliver basic city services in an efficient and effective manner, help our constituents navigate city government, and help facilitate neighbors involvement in the political process.

3. Decrease the divisiveness that too often characterizes our city’s politics and instead focus on moving the city forward. That doesn’t mean avoiding disagreements and hard conversations, but rather engaging productively with empathy and grace when disagreements arise.