As Town Meeting Day approaches, if the media are talking about elections anywhere, they’re probably talking about school budgets across the state and the Burlington City Council. However, I think the strongest contender for the most interesting municipal elections this March is just three exits up the Interstate from the Queen City in Milton, home of the fighting Yellow Jackets.
Milton is the red sheep of the Chittenden County flock, with a penchant for electing hardline conservatives and MAGA-types at the state and local level and veering ever-closer to voting for them at the federal level too. However, Milton is growing and changing. As the high prices of Burlington push young professionals, retirees from the Burlington suburbs, and New Americans further out into the exurbs, this conservative bastion has become noticeably more purple. Democrats came within 200 votes of capturing a Milton-based house seat in 2024 and within 100 votes of the same seat in 2022, the closest they’ve gotten to a win in almost twenty years.
Milton’s political establishment is not reacting well to this shifting terrain. Their selectboard purged former Democratic House candidate Henry Bonges from several town committees last year after he sent an email to the Milton House delegation that criticized their environmental voting records. No doubt it was pure coincidence that three of the five selectboard members (uncle-nephew duo Leland and Michael Morgan and Brenda Steady) are also Republican state reps and that Town Manager Chris Taylor is also a Republican representative who was on the selectboard until his appointment to his present post last year. Milton is also home to some of the most aggressive Facebook politicking I have ever seen, with online activists swarming like piranhas to dull the luster of their opponents.
And I expect that trend to continue this year. In March, for the first time in a good long while (or at least as far as I know), Milton voters will see contested races for every position on their Town Meeting Day ballot – for selectboard, school board, and library trustee. Normally I would make some kind of crack here about the role of library trustee being a vaunted position like that of HOG REEVE or WEIGHER OF COAL, but in Milton, home of “Vermont Parents Against Critical Theory” (VPACT), a right-wing activist group dedicated to thwarting the imagined scourge of diversity in our schools, I imagine that who oversees the library is more important than in other Vermont towns.
Here are the Milton races that I’ll be watching closely:
Library Trustee: Bonges v. Tatro. The aforementioned Bonges is seeking a seat on the Library Board of Trustees. His opponent, Sean Tatro, is a prominent conservative gadfly on social media whose publicly viewable Facebook page includes the following denunciation of a bar that made him wear a mask in 2021:
School Trustee (2 Year Term): Duquette v. DeVita. This seat is currently held by Allison Duquette, a conservative culture warrior and one of the leading lights behind VPACT who narrowly won a seat on the board in 2024 against a divided field following previous failed runs for school board and the House. Her previous campaigns railed against the imaginary menace of CRT and the horrors of in-school dental hygienists. Her opponent, Nick DeVita, is a Milton High School alumnus who works for the Grand Isle Supervisory Union. DeVita seems like a solid candidate with a real chance to knock Duquette off the board.
School Trustee (3 Year Term): Metcalf v. Vadnais. Incumbent Jeremy Metcalf defeated Duquette in her previous bid for the school board by a narrow margin. His opponent, Cathy Vadnais, currently serves as a library trustee, previously served on the school board, and was a Republican candidate for Justice of the Peace last year.
Selectboard (3 Year Term): Paret v. Steady. Incumbent Brenda Steady was unopposed when she won this seat in 2023. Steady is a close ally of Duquette’s in the crusade against le wokisme. She narrowly beat Democrat Julia Andrews of Westford in a 2024 House race and has, since then, served in both bodies. Steady has drawn a noteworthy opponent in Planning Commission Chair Betsy Paret. Paret is a relative newcomer to Milton (she’s only lived there for ten years) but has a resume tailor-made for local government. If Paret, who seems more interested in municipal planning than fighting the culture wars, can beat Steady, who’ll have the full backing of the MAGA Machine, that’ll be a real sign that the political winds are shifting up Milton way.
That’s my pitch for you to pay attention to what’s going on in Milton. Will someone kick the yellowjackets’ nest? Who might get stung? Milton’s voters will decide, and you can read more about it wherever fine blogs are sold!
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