A sign at downtown Brattleboro’s Transportation Center lists prohibited behaviors. Photo by Kevin O’Connor/VTDiggerBRATTLEBORO — In a 76-55 vote Thursday night, a citizen-petitioned special Town Meeting rescinded new municipal rules that supporters said would help rehabilitate offenders through civil rather than criminal penalties for such acts as illegal drug use and dealing, physical threats and property damage.The local selectboard voted 3-2 in September for an “acceptable community conduct” ordinance after hearing complaints from residents about a 16% increase in police calls and serious crimes.“Think of it as the ‘we’d really prefer not to arrest you’ policy,” selectboard member Elizabeth McLoughlin said in a recent follow-up statement. “It gives people the chance to seek social services for their issues without getting slapped with a criminal record.”But residents who believed the new rules were nonetheless stigmatizing or simply wrapping existing laws in another layer of administrative red tape collected signatures from 5% of Brattleboro’s more than 9,000 registered voters to trigger the special Town Meeting.Speaking Thursday night to a standing-room-only crowd at Academy School, petitioners offered two different reasons for wanting to overturn the ordinance — which, as a result of its rejection, will see law enforcement revert back to longtime statutes.Resident Cristina Shay-Onye said she spearheaded the rescission effort because she believed the new code just reiterated past practice while requiring more bureaucracy.“This particular ordinance is poorly thought through, sloppily written and introduces an entire new system of civil charges that we don’t have a system to support,” Shay-Onye said in an interview before the meeting.Others who signed a separate change.org statement charged the new rules were “criminalizing poverty and addiction.”“We are concerned with the speed and nature of decisions being made, without input from those most vulnerable and at risk of violence,” a group of nearly 400 signers wrote in the change.org statement. “Town resources should be allocated to meeting human needs, not to penalizing ‘bad behavior.’”Both supporters and opponents of the ordinance acknowledged local problems with everything from public overdoses to such crimes as assault and burglary. They simply differed on the solution.Some residents expressed support for both the new rules and a recent selectboard decision to boost the budgeted count of local police officers from 27 to 30 and to add up to six support staffers for a new Brattleboro Response Assistance Team, or BRAT.But others called for helping people who spend much of their time on the streets by increasing such services as public bathrooms, showers and drinking-water dispensers; storage lockers, mental health workers and medics; overdose-reversing nasal spray and syringe-disposal containers.The ordinance has sparked weeks of informational sessions and media coverage, including dueling opinion columns sent to meeting attendees and reprinted in local newspapers.In one, former Town Manager Peter Elwell, now board president of the local Groundworks Collaborative human services nonprofit, expressed his personal concerns about the new rules.“While the waiver provisions of the ordinance give the appearance of compassion and support, they lack detail and may not work,” Elwell wrote. “The ordinance’s restorative process ‘off ramps’ depend on overloaded systems (for drug treatment and/or mental health support) that are beyond the town’s control, thereby diluting or defeating their effectiveness as alternatives to punishment.”In a response, McLoughlin said she and other municipal officials viewed the rules as an attempt to bring about change.“Do we wish to maintain the existing status quo?” McLoughlin wrote. “What we are doing now — with a broken and circular criminal justice response and pleas from outreach teams to access help on a purely voluntary basis — is not working.”Read the story on VTDigger here: Special Brattleboro Town Meeting rescinds new public conduct rules.