Brattleboro Sunrise Rotary — Meeting Minutes
Call to Order — 7:15
Guests welcomed: Mark Anderson, Windham County Sheriff ; and Cynthia Houghton, here on behalf of the
Friends of Island Park .
Honduras Scholarship Letter
Before announcements, Roger invited Tristan to read a letter — carrying on the club's
tradition of sharing updates from the students it supports in Honduras. Tristam
translated the most recent letter from Nidia Michelle Cárcamo Buendía, the student the
club is currently sponsoring (letter dated San Pedro Sula, August 7, 2026), and Ben gave
it a dramatic reading.
Nidia reported an average grade of 93% in the first semester. She wrote that her mother
is now out of work, which has made the club's support especially important, and that
without it continuing her studies would be very difficult. She singled out two favorite
classes: business legislation, and plant pathology (phytopathology) — the scientific
study of plant diseases caused by pathogens and environmental conditions. She
thanked the club warmly and closed with respect and good wishes.
Tristam added that he had requested the letter from the school's director and Nidia's
response came back within two weeks, a sign of how close and responsive the
relationship with the school is.
Announcements and Event Recaps
Blood Drive
Dan asked to pass the sign-up sheet around again. He has only two volunteers so far and
needs someone to work the check-in desk from 2:00 to 4:00 on September 15 — which,
as Roger noted, is right around the corner.
Trivia — Help Needed (Melissa)
Melissa has printed September's trivia announcement and will post it around town.
Anyone who has a good place to display one — a workspace or storefront — is welcome
to take a copy; Roger took one for the post office.
The larger ask is for help running trivia's social media. Melissa is working on becoming
the Facebook promoter for the event but would like to hand that off to someone
comfortable and efficient with Facebook, since she and Diane are both heavily booked. A
member's aside drew a laugh — that Melissa doesn't really want help, she wants
someone else to take it over entirely — and another framed it as an easy way for anyone
with spare capacity to pitch in, keeping with the club's practice of not stacking too many
tasks on the same few people.
Friday Gallery Walk and Raffle —
Friends of Island Park (Cynthia Houghton)
Cynthia Parker Houghton introduced herself as a member of the Friends of Island Park, a
group she was drawn into about two years ago out of a love for the river and Island Park
— the club's downtown river-access point. She recapped the situation for those who
didn't know it: the bridge to Hinsdale (the Lucy Hunt [Marks?] Bridge) is managed by
Hinsdale, and the Hinsdale Police Department has had to handle issues arising there, so
a gate, barbed wire, and negative signage went up. The future of the crossing is under
discussion, with the possibility — three to five years out — of opening it as a pedestrian
park, which raises unresolved questions of who would manage and be responsible for
the space, and how Hinsdale as well as Brattleboro would benefit. [Bridge name and the
town/village names should be confirmed; the audio garbles Hinsdale badly. ?]
Cynthia was asked to make a mural to beautify the fence and shift the story back toward
hope — she painted the site's history, including the elephants from a circus that once
operated there, alongside contemporary circus figures modeled on friends. When the
mural couldn't go on the fence, the group, with Brett's push, mounted an art show
instead. It is up now and runs a couple more weeks, opening Friday at The Latchis. [?]
Community members contributed paintings of the bridge and river.
The fundraiser: one local painter donated a small painting — an island and its reflection,
understood to be the little island visible from the bridge — to be raffled off for the
Friends of Island Park. Raffle tickets are $10, sold in person by Cynthia (there is no
online link; it's all offline). Donations without entering the raffle are also welcome, and
the group is looking for help selling tickets. Melissa noted she had emailed the group
about the Gallery Walk last week and offered to resend it with a photo of the painting.
Disc Golf Tournament
Nick reported the tournament is in its final stretch, a little over a month out. Sponsorship
is roughly halfway to goal; the list of prospects still to be contacted is available
(currently with John), and Nick asked anyone willing to make calls to coordinate with
him. He plans to build the day-of volunteer SignUpGenius this weekend and will bepromoting it — including at the other club — over the two or three weeks leading up to
the event.
Acts of Service
Tristam reported that he and Wendy live above the confluence of the Rock River and the
West River, a popular swimming spot. Over time they watched the trash accumulate, and
finally went down and filled an entire Green Up bag with garbage from the parking area
down to the river — including a tire, which Dan good-naturedly agreed to take and
dispose of. Wendy then made signs, now posted on four trees, telling people to take their
trash home. They do this most years, but this year the mess had become especially bad.
A member from the visiting club [the noon-time / Ludlow AG — see Open Questions ?]
turned the moment toward the flooding disaster in Nepal, praising the response of
Rotarians and young people already on the ground there, and noting that both clubs and
the district are actively discussing how to respond. Shelter Box came up as an option —
the disaster-relief organization that deploys immediately. Roger said he would raise it at
the board meeting the next day, and the member added that the club could also consider
contributing directly rather than tapping international funds. Josh offered to do what he
did for the Venezuela effort: include a slide with a QR code in the notes linking straight to
a Shelter Box donation. [?]
Nick shared an act of service he'd witnessed. He and Diane were in Washington last
week, unaware it coincided with a march on Washington. From the top of the Lincoln
Memorial steps after the event, with the area left a mess, they watched a park ranger
begin collecting the discarded water bottles and trash — and at least four bystanders
went down to help her, unprompted. Nick spoke with the ranger afterward; she was
genuinely moved, having had no expectation of the help. He compared it to the way the
"Tartan Army" cleans up after itself, and found it a heartening thing to see at that kind of
event.
Brags
A member bragged about a round of golf on Sunday,
playing with her friend John (a two-handicap) and paired with two women from the
league. On the par-four fifth hole she made an eagle — a 225-yard drive, then her utility
wedge from about 100 yards straight into the cup — with people there to see it. She
added that she has since driven the ball 250 yards, and noted how rare an eagle is,
especially for an amateur.
Nick brought two brags. First, a business meeting in Boston that changed the trajectory
of his role with his firm — opening opportunities for growth he'd wanted for a long time,
and sparing him from having to change firms. Second, and the bigger one for him: his
son Jackson, a freshman, made varsity soccer and started the season opener under the
lights against Green Mountain — a 6–0 win in which Jackson scored a goal, added an
assist, and had two more goals called back. Nick reflected on the roughly eleven seasons
and thousands of hours he coached that group of boys from U9 on, four of whom made
varsity as freshmen, and called seeing the payoff "the ultimate dad lesson." His
daughter, a new seventh grader, also made a big jump from a class of 15 to a class of
150.
Ben brought two brags: a hole-in-one at mini golf in Maine with Shannon [?], gently
corrected by a member that a mini-golf ace is not the same as an eagle; and a brag for
Desi Grace [Desi Price? — the name is heard both ways ?], a recent BUHS graduate who
had spoken to the club. As part of an independent study she completed a mural on the
Elm Street building near New England Youth Theater on Flat Street. Ben encouraged
everyone to go see it and said it looks fantastic.
Josh brought a couple of brags. First, his daughter Ayla got her driver's license Sunday
at 7:00 a.m. — he joked that if you see a big gray van with a Vermont plate, give her
space. Second, he welcomed Mark Anderson warmly: beyond being Windham County
Sheriff, Mark is also president of the noon-time Rotary club, and Josh has been
impressed by the energy Mark brings there. Josh recounted meeting Mark on a porch a
couple of years ago and pitching him on Rotary within five minutes — only to learn the
noon-time club had already recruited him — and said it's great to have Mark present as a
prospective Sunrise member.
Guest Speaker —
Sheriff Mark Anderson — Regional Policing and Act 104
Anderson began his career with the Windham County
Sheriff's Office in 2004, is a BUHS graduate and local, was appointed sheriff in 2019 and
again in 2022, and has focused on pragmatic, continual-improvement work: updating
department headquarters, deploying regional animal control, partnering with an EMS
provider on paramedic education, and developing the regional policing pilot in Windham
County.
What a Sheriff Actually Does
Anderson opened by describing the disorientation of becoming sheriff in 2019 after
fifteen years in the department: he had built tangible things — policies, training, the
manual — and suddenly his job was to build vision rather than things, and to answer
questions he didn't yet know the answers to. He asked the room who knew what a sheriff
does; only about two out of a club of roughly 35 did, which he said is standard.
He laid out the pieces. The Vermont State Police handle certain consolidated law-
enforcement and rescue functions. Towns are empowered — but not required — to run a
municipal police department; Brattleboro has one, many smaller towns don't, largely
because standing up a department costs roughly half a million dollars before hiring
anyone, more than some towns' entire annual budgets. The sheriff's own statutory duties
are civil process (serving eviction, repossession, and other court papers — "a glorified
mailman for the court"), court security, and transporting prisoners between correctional
facilities and court ("a bus service"), plus assisting parties with domestic-violence court
orders in retrieving property.
On top of the statutory minimum, Anderson has pushed into creative service delivery:
policing contracts with 15 towns and villages, a 24/7 regional dispatch center, a regional
animal-control program in 10 towns, and — most recently — becoming the newest
grantee in HUD's lead-abatement program, a public-health initiative.
He gave an extended aside on why Vermont has almost no county government: the
sheriff is one of only three elected county officials (the other two being the assistant
judges responsible for the county courthouse), a legacy of New England's historical
distrust of the corrupt county governments of the colonial South. His summary: for good
county government, "look west, don't look south."
The Origin of the Pilot — George Floyd, and "What Do You Need?"
Anderson traced the pilot's origins to the period after 2019: six months of uncertainty,
then COVID, then the murder of George Floyd, which exposed how few relationships the
office had with critical community groups. He began meeting people he'd never talked to
— the NAACP, and Black Lives Matter, groups often seen as opposed to police. Locally,
he said, they found common ground: much of the "defund" agenda, as he understood it,
matched roughly eight of ten things Vermont law enforcement had been saying for
twenty years — chiefly that police should not be the default mental-health responders
but are, for lack of funding and coordination.Out of that came his working question to the towns: "What do you need?" He described
the existing arrangement as a "60% solution" — good enough to get voted for, but 30
years past its prime, and the source of endless frustration when a caller gets bounced
between multiple dispatch centers or is told they live "ten feet in the wrong town" and
must call the state police instead.
The Problems Are Governance and Funding
Over about four years of meetings with select boards, municipal leaders, and the public,
Anderson said the towns ultimately chose to build a better system rather than patch the
old one. The two core problems of regional policing, he stressed, have nothing to do with
policing itself — they are how to govern it and how to fund it.
On governance, he pointed to two local sore spots that illustrate why towns guard
control: the collapse of the regional solid-waste district about ten years ago after one
town exited, and the recent decision by "the town of Brattleboro" [corrected in the room
— see below] to create its own EMS service, which unsettled every other town served by
Rescue about whether they would lose EMS. A member interjected on this point: because
several members were part of Rescue and were happy with it, "the town of Brattleboro"
was the wrong phrasing — the decision was the Selectboard's, not the town's. Anderson
accepted the correction, saying that when he refers to a "town" he means its governing
body, and called it fair.
On funding, he explained the pilot's mechanism. The current model runs on contracts —
enforceable only by lawsuits that taxpayers ultimately fund — and county government is
normally blocked from providing policing resources, viewed as regressive and
distrusted. Act 104 (formerly S.255, sponsored by Senators Harrison and Hashim [?] of
Windham County, with broad delegation support) authorizes a Windham County pilot to
test a shared regional model. He offered his standing analogy: every town with dirt roads
needs a grader, but not every town needs to own a $2–3 million grader — the same logic
of sharing applies to policing, EMS, fire, education, and waste, all of which run into the
same governance-then-funding wall.
How the Pilot Works
The pilot created the Windham County Law Enforcement Governance Council, which met
for the first time about a month ago. Its single job is to develop a budget for a shared
service among member towns. Ten towns have opted in; each is represented by a
Selectboard appointee, and no town is forced to join — a town that declines simply
keeps the current (no-service) arrangement. Anderson described his own role as
negotiating with the council over the service level they choose to fund; he is technically
not a member of the governing council.
He praised Act 104 as one of the most impressive things he's seen the Legislature do in
his tenure: it empowered a pilot body, set to expire in eight years, to "figure it out" and
report back. His deeper point about dispatch: a single 911 call about one car crash can
currently route through as many as five different dispatch centers — the caller's cell
carrier, New Hampshire, Vermont 911, the state police, and finally his office or Brattleboro
PD — five taxpayer-funded layers where a single-stage dispatch center could send fire,
EMS, and law enforcement in one call. The infrastructure to fix this is old and expensive,
tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.He tied it back to the Four-Way Test, which he called a genuinely useful tool for
navigating the "pains, feelings, and fiefdoms" of the work: he can't dictate to towns, can't
simply demand more money without losing public support to high taxes, and needs a
system whose employees can afford to live locally. The affordability problem is circular
— towns fund him, he needs to pay enough to hire and retain people, and those people
need to be able to live in the area.