A plan to resettle up to 100 Syrian refugees in Rutland continues to draw supporters, detractors and a lot of questions from people who just want to know more about what exactly it would mean for the city.
On Monday night a number of city officials, along with state lawmakers and representatives of the group Rutland First, which opposes the efforts of Mayor Christopher Louras to bring the refugees to Rutland, held a meeting at the Rutland Free Library.
After that meeting, opponents of the resettlement plan called on Rutland County senators Kevin Mullin, Brian Collamore and Peg Flory to sign a letter asking the U.S. State Department to block the plan until more of its details are made public, but the state lawmakers did not commit to signing the request following that meeting.
Reporter Jim Sabataso was at the Rutland library to cover the proceedings.
“It seemed to be a result of quite a bit of fact-finding that the Rutland First group had undertaken over the course of the summer,” says Sabataso. “There was a meeting back in late June early July, a lot of questions that were asked and the answers that needed to be sought. So looks like they took it upon themselves to go and do some of that research. And this meeting at the library was a presentation on what they found.”
City Treasurer Wendy Wilton, former Rutland Economic Development Corporation director David O'Brien and a member of the Board of Alderman from Manchester, New Hampshire, Patrick Long, spoke at the meeting; Sabataso estimates that 60 to 70 people were in attendance.
Mayor Louras was not at the meeting, though he released statements both before and after the meeting, Sabataso says, including a rebuttal to statements made by Treasurer Wilton about the cost of settling refugees in Rutland.
“He [Louras] took issue with … her presentation on local costs that it was going to be a 35 percent increase in property taxes over five years. And Louras took issue and said she was flat out wrong on that based on how he was looking at the budget,” Sabataso says.
The closure of the library at 9 p.m. forced an early end to the meeting, and Sabataso says that many in the audience were disappointed that they hadn’t had a chance to speak.
“Right at the beginning, the Rutland First group made it clear that questions are going to be from local elected officials,” Sabataso says. “It seemed like if there was time they might have opened it up to people in the crowd, and a couple of people interjected from time to time.”
According to Sabataso, Rep. Douglas Gage, who was also at the meeting, noted that there are a number of Christian Syrians who are in need of resettlement, and Gage “was questioning why they were not more part of the conversation ... It seems that there's a lot of talk about the Syrian Muslims who would be arriving here and he want to know something on the lines of why we couldn't have refugees who are more like us as American citizens.”
At a meeting on July 5, the board of aldermen decided to send a letter to the State Department requesting more time to consider the resettlement of Syrian refugees.
“The way I understand the timeline right now is within the next several weeks, the State Department will be issuing a decision whether or not they have been selected,” Sabataso says.
If the State Department does select Rutland for resettlement, refugees “would start arriving sometime possibly in December, or the first of the year.”
Sabataso says there are no additional opportunities for public input “on the immediate horizon,” but he expects further discussion.
“It seems that people still want to get information, still have questions," he says. "You know, there's an informational series going on right now in town about Muslim culture and Syrian culture that people have been attending, Arab language tutorials, things like that."
