Hinesburg at a Crossroads
FY2027 town budget proposal contains major increases for fire and police; department heads say why they must reach critical mass in their staffing in order to make Hinesburg safe.
By Geoffrey Gevalt
Managing Editor
The first round of deliberations by the selectboard on the fiscal 2027 town budget begins this Wednesday (Nov. 19), and they’ll face a proposal that would require a $680,000 increase in tax revenue to pay for major increases, mostly in the fire and police departments.
Town leaders and department heads agree that Hinesburg residents are faced with a difficult choice as to how much they are willing to pay for public safety at a time when taxes – and other costs – are rising.
The budget proposal inherently asks residents to determine whether they still think of Hinesburg as a small, rural town or whether its population – and related issues – warrants well-staffed professional public safety departments.
As Town Manager Todd Odit puts it, “Hinesburg is at a critical juncture.”
Odit supports the increases proposed but recognizes that the selectboard is under great pressure to keep property taxes lower, particularly with the rising costs in housing, healthcare and food that citizens are facing.
The two public safety chiefs argue that the future of their departments and the town’s public safety are at stake.
Fire Chief Prescott Nadeau says his department is unable to respond to nearly 20 percent of its calls, which are mostly for emergency medical needs. He adds that without adding two additional firefighters, retention of full-time staff and on-call personnel will continue to be a major problem. His proposed budget if approved, he said, will shave current off-hours response time by 40 percent and the department will be able to respond to all calls.
Interim Police Chief Frank Bryan puts his department’s situation more bluntly: If the department does not regain, at minimum, the staffing levels it had even in 2024 and 2022, “the department will disappear” because more officers will leave and the town will face an uphill battle to find new officers in a county where most towns already cannot fill all their openings.
The police department has faced community backlash before, notably when the initial police budgets were voted down in 2020 and 2022.
Odit adds another wrinkle in the police budget debate: The town is in the process of recruiting a new police chief. What candidate will want to step in, Odit wonders, without knowing whether the town will support a full complement of officers?
The Record believes that an informed community will deepen understanding and engagement, so we will be covering the budget process as closely as we can as it unfolds over the next few months. Today we present a general overview of the public safety department heads’ points of view, shown against the backdrop of their difficulty in hiring and retention, the safety and effectiveness of their current staff levels, the impending growth of the town from new development and the increasing need for the services to maintain public safety.
Below is a summary of the points of view of both Nadeau and Bryan. The sound clips reflect the “elevator pitches” The Record asked each to give at the start and conclusion of one-on-one interviews.
Fire Department
Nadeau is asking for a total fire and emergency medical services budget of $855,848, an increase of $230,169 (36 percent) over the 2026 fiscal budget of $625,679. The bulk of the increase is to add two additional firefighters. This would allow the department to staff the fire station 24/7 with new 24-hours-on/72-hours-off shifts which will keep someone in the fire station at all times. The budget also calls for an increase in salaries to reflect pay levels of the rest of Chittenden County.
“The two most important reasons for this budget increase,” he said, are the fact that the department has been unable to respond to approximately 100 calls so far this year because of its lack of staff - both those at the station and those on call.
“Arguably equally as important is the retention of the staff that we currently have.”
The retention issue is complicated. Currently there are two full-time firefighters (plus Nadeau) who cover the station weekdays. Evenings and weekends, on-call firefighters respond. For any on-call firefighter, the average response time is much higher (nine minutes average) than those responding from the station (five minutes).
Another problem is that on-call firefighters respond to the situation alone even though some emergencies need more than one person. An additional serious problem, he said, is that there are no opportunities for a more experienced firefighter to mentor one with less experience.
Currently there are 13 available on-call firefighters. To keep the firefighters up to standard, the department requires that on-call firefighters participate in at least two calls a month and that is getting more difficult. In the pool of 33 on-call firefighters, he said, 20 are not currently eligible. The issues are, as he puts it, “they have lives” and often can’t respond because of travel, family events, vacations or whatever.
In terms of existing staff, Nadeau said, particularly for on-call firefighters, “it costs almost twice as much money to bring a new person on than to retain somebody we already have. And unfortunately, we’ve been finding that we have been a revolving door of personnel. In looking at that and doing some exit interviews, one of the items that has consistently been brought up is the fact that regular mentorship in the form of training, in the form of somebody to respond to calls with them to help them do basic care and learn how to grow in their skills, just isn’t happening because we are overtaxing our current people more than we expected we would.”
Nadeau points out that the 24-hours-on/72-hours off shift is a popular shift among firefighters. Hinesburg, he said, would be the only community in the county offering it which should be a draw.
Odit said the department is going to implement those shifts in the next few weeks “as a trial run” with the existing two firefighters.
Many in town remember when the Hinesburg Fire Department was primarily volunteer. Over the years, Hinesburg (as with most other growing towns in the state) has been unable to get the in-town volunteer staffing needed to stay all-volunteer and gradually added full-time staff. Even Nadeau’s position had been half-time until he was hired last December.
Hinesburg’s fire department is now unable to respond to about 18 percent of the service calls that come in each year, a situation Nadeau calls “a crisis.” The number of calls are increasing – 515 in 2023, 617 in 2024, and nearly 600 through September of this year. The number of eligible on-call personnel is dwindling and 45 percent have only two years experience.
In a world where retention is an issue, Nadeau believes Hinesburg needs to be on par with or offer different incentives than the rest of Chittenden County in order to attract and keep new firefighters.. And in the next few years, he notes, Hinesburg will be adding upwards of 200 new homes and 500 new residents which only means the issues are going to get more severe.
Police Department
Interim Police Chief Frank Bryan, a lieutenant who’s been with the department since 2017, is asking for $1,014, 672, a $166,004 (20 percent) increase over this year’s budget of $848,668. Bryan gives a blunt assessment of the department’s situation:
“Do you want a police department in Hinesburg or do you not want a police department in Hinesburg? (It) basically comes down to just that,” he said.
“Essentially, if the budget can’t be increased to the point where we can afford to pay officers and get officers here, there won’t be any officers. The (pay level) is currently roughly the same as it was five years ago when we were paying guys with five years’ experience less than $25 an hour. Right now, the average starting pay for officers with no experience in Chittenden County is, I think, is $34 an hour. Our budget hasn’t changed to reflect that.
“We’re down to three officers, (when) we really need a minimum of six, preferably eight. And that’s kind of it.”
Police are in the same situation as the fire department in that, for the most part, officers respond alone. “All our training is for two officers responding,” he said, particularly in a domestic disputes or tense disturbance or emergencies of any kind. More and more, he said, a backup is needed in traffic situations and arrests.
This year has been tougher than many. Earlier this year, after the chaotic departure of Chief Anthony Cambridge and Hinesburg’s curtailing its agreement to cover much of Richmond’s policing needs, two other officers left and for a while HPD was down to two officers. A third was hired in July.
At the same time, the need for police in Hinesburg has risen, in part, Bryan said, “because of the spill-over from Burlington.” Several weeks ago thieves again broke into Kinney Drugs and this time made off with its ATM. (Hinesburg police are assisting state police because it seems to be a ring – several other Vermont towns have been robbed of ATMs.)
In addition, “drug activity is getting out of control and so are thefts. We’ve had two felony-level retail thefts at Aubuchon just in the last two days.”
Bryan provided some general statistics:
“In 2023, with five full-time officers and three part-time officers; the HPD had 1,411 calls to service, conducted 694 traffic stops and made 38 arrests (we made 19 arrests in 2022). In 2024, with six full-time officers, HPD had 1,578 calls to service, 733 traffic stops, and made 62 arrests. So far in 2025, with essentially three officers for majority of the year (12 hours of coverage each day), we have had (as of Oct. 20) 923 calls to service, 542 traffic stops and 41 arrests. … State police (who are on call for protection for the rest of the time) have made 11 arrests in Hinesburg this year, five of which were during what are normally HPD hours of coverage.”
The current three officers, he said, are loyal to the town.
“The thing I like about Hinesburg is you can see you’re making a difference.” Bryan said. “I really do feel that towards the end of last year – when we were fully staffed – we had 62 arrests in one year, and by about December of last year, we started to notice, ‘Hey, you know, we had put two or three people in jail that had been big problems for us.’ We could see that we could see that a difference was being made.”
The budget issue, he said, “is not just a matter of, ‘Well, we’ll worry about it next year.’ The guys who are here, myself included, like Hinesburg, and we like working here, and we want to stay here.
“But it’s kind of a do-or-die at this point. … I question whether or not there’ll still be a police department in six months if we can’t come to some agreement about the budget. We need six guys; we need to pay them this much.”
And, as Odit said, in the wings is the town’s recruitment of and intention to hire a new police chief. Applications are open and are being screened. Interviews with finalists will be conducted by a committee made up of a selectboard member, possibly a former selectboard member, a policeman, and possibly two members of the public. (If you are interested, contact Odit.)
But, Odit asks, what candidate offered the position is going to say yes or even be interested if the town votes down a full budget, as it did in 2020 and 2022?
Below find a pdf of the proposed F2027 budget for all Hinesburg departments. The budget year goes from July 1, 2026, to June 30, 2027. This Wednesday the selectboard will begin discussions about the budget. As the board often says, they are eager for citizen engagement and response.
The Record would like to know what you think as this budget process unfolds. Write us a letter. Should the town increase the staffing of the fire department and restore and slightly increase the police department staffing? Why or why not?
Comment or take the poll below. Send a letter to editor@hinesburgrecord.org
Your voice is important.