Voters soundly reject CVCC $149m bond

November 7, 2025 |  By David Delcore  |  The Times Argus

BARRE — Voters in the 18-town school district that operates the Central Vermont Career Center have rejected financing a $149 million new facility.

Ballots that were cast in towns around the region on Tuesday were finally commingled and counted at Alumni Hall in Barre on Thursday, yielding a result that wasn’t what members of the CVCC board were hoping for.

The $149 million bond issue failed, 5,751-3,873, on a day when 9,643 ballots were cast. Nineteen of them were blank.

Voters collectively concluded the CVCC board is welcome to “build futures” and “build Vermont,” as lawn signs and other campaign literature that circulated in the run-up to Tuesday’s special elections suggested, but building a new 167,000-square-foot center to provide full-day programming for up to 500 students was a non-starter.

Superintendent Jody Emerson, who spent the morning and a sliver of the afternoon watching a parade of election officials from across the district feed ballots into four tabulators, absorbed the results in waves. There were four of them, and none of the tabulators used to count ballots provided a glimmer of hope.

The closest was the first, which spit out a result that put the bond in a 166-vote hole. Based on ballots fed into that machine, the bond failed, 823-989.

The second tabulator reflected softer support for a bond. It indicated failure, 1,163-989, and when the district’s clerk, Tina Lunt, apologized before reading the results from the third machine — the bond failed 929-1,768 by its count — Emerson rolled with it.

“I think we know where it’s going,” she said.

The bond failed, 958-1,421, according to the fourth tabulator and, after some fast math, Lunt announced the combined result.

Emerson’s initial reaction would have worked regardless of the outcome.

“Thank you to everybody, she said. “It was a much larger turnout than we expected, so that’s great.”

Though the bond failed by 1,878 votes, Emerson said it could have been worse, and suggested the result was a product of concern about property taxes, and unanswered questions about an ongoing redistricting process that could transform public education in Vermont.

Emerson stressed it was not about the programs CVCC provides, the students it serves, and the jobs it helps create.

“I think what we overwhelmingly saw in social media and outreach from folks is that they support career and technical education, but they either didn’t support an increase in taxes, or this uncertainty of redistricting is too much uncertainty for people to feel confident in a vote,” she said.

Emerson said the board’s facilities committee would be meeting later in the afternoon, and while it had hoped to have a very different discussion of “next steps,” it will have to weigh what to recommend to the board when it meets on Monday.

Both the committee and the board have publicly hinted a “no” vote might not be the last word — repeatedly suggesting refining the project if the bond failed, and trying again on Town Meeting Day.

Emerson said that is still an option. So is waiting for the redistricting process to play out.

A lot will depend on how the committee, and ultimately the board, view the results of a special election that generated a Town Meeting Day-like turnout, but saw that bond proposal supported by only 40% of those who voted.

The bond proposal was a product of a process that predates the district, and its approval would have paved the way for construction of a modern new facility that could serve more students in Barre Town. The center has been located in a wing of Spaulding High School since it opened under a different name in 1969, and until relatively recently, had been overseen by a school board in Barre.

The seeds for the bond proposal, and in some ways the CVCC district, were first planted in 2018, when a consultant-led process explored the needs of the regional center.

Mounting demand for the programs CVCC offers, prompted a proposal to construct a standalone facility capable of accommodating more students. It would have meant severing ties with Spaulding, where the facility is dated, parking is limited, and expansion isn’t considered a viable option.

However, even some proponents of the concept suggested the cost was too high, the timing couldn’t be worse, and other options could surface as the redistricting process plays out.

That was the prevailing view of those who cast ballots on Tuesday, when the CVCC bond was the only reason voters in most of the district’s towns had to go to the polls on Tuesday. There were a few exceptions — Barre, Berlin, Plainfield, Warren, and Cabot all had local ballot measures — but some worried turnout could be an issue.

There are roughly 43,000 registered voters in the district’s 18 towns — a figure clerk’s around the region say is inflated some due to challenged voters who haven’t yet been purged from local checklists. On Tuesday, 9,643 of them — about 23% of them cast ballots. In some cases, — Barre — was stronger Tuesday than it was on Town Meeting Day.

CVCC towns have only voted as a bloc on four other occasions — once to create the autonomous district that operates the Barre-based center in 2022, and three times to approve its annual budget. Those votes were all held on Town Meeting Day, and Tuesday’s turnout exceeded two of those elections, including the one that created the district.

The collective decision of 9,181 voters, that measure passed, 7,493-1,688, on Town Meeting Day 2022. Fewer voters — a total of 8,341 — weighed in on the new district’s first-ever budget, approving that $4.1 million spending plan, 6,531-1,806, in March 2023.

Last year’s presidential primary boosted turnout, and 13,687 voters approved a $4.6 million budget for the career center, 8,754-933.

Earlier this year the district’s third budget — a $5.1 million proposal — was approved, 7,944-2,079. The 10,023 ballots cast in that regular election were only marginally more than those cast on Tuesday, and transported to Barre to be tabulated on Thursday.

It’s part of a now-familiar process, that requires ballots to be commingled before they are counted.

Voting machines containing ballots cast by voters in Barre, Barre Town, Montpelier, and Waterbury were brought to the third floor of Alumni Hall, where, with a couple of exceptions, election officials arrived two by two in 30-minute intervals with ballots cast in their towns. They all left with the ballots they brought, but not before running them randomly through the four voting machines so that they could be counted.

The process started at 9 a.m. and ended about three-and-a-half hours later.