Essex Junction is a village in the town of Essex, Chittenden County, Vermont, United States incorporated on November 15, 1892. The population was 8,591 at the 2000 census. Essex Junction is home to the Champlain Valley Exposition which hosts the Champlain Valley Fair at the end of each summer. Amtrak, the national passenger rail system, provides daily service to Essex Junction, which serves as a focal point for rail travel in the greater Burlington area, which includes Essex and Winooski. Amtrak operates its Vermonter from St. Albans, VT to Washington, D.C.

 

The Village of Essex Junction is also one of three voting districts (District 6-2) in the Town of Essex, with Districts 6-1 & 6-3 together comprising the town outside the village. The Village and Town each operate their own fire department, library, parks department, and municipal services, and contain separate school districts for grades K–8. Both governments operate a unified police department, and the unified Essex High School.

Essex Junction is home to IBM's Burlington Design Center and 200mm wafer fabrication plant. IBM is the state's largest private employer, with approximately 6500 employees.

Town vote to merge
District	2006-11-07		2007-01-23
	Yes	No	Yes	No
6-1 (outside village)	1,283	2,319	690	2,528
6-3 (outside village)	365	822
6-2 (within village)	2,728	1,026	2,009	362
Townwide total	4,376	4,167	2,699	2,890
Village vote to accept
	2,922	1,085

The Village of Essex Junction was formed—within the Town of Essex—on 1892-11-15. The Village was formed to provide services (such as sidewalks, water, and sewers) to the villagers that the rest of the, mostly rural, town citizens did not want, and did not want to pay for.

As the town outside the village developed, they gradually added similar serves for themselves, and by 1958, the first hints of merger showed up in a voter petition. Since then a series of votes (often contentious) had defeated or passed merger in each community, but never at the same time in both. (which was required by the state legislature for them to sign off on the merger)

This temporarily changed on 2006-11-07 when merger passed in the town as a whole, and in the village. Everyone in the Town got to vote once on approving the merger, and the Villagers got to vote in a second ballot to accept the merger if it passed the townwide vote. This was confusing enough that the large regional paper misreported the results as a defeat of the merger, based solely on the vote results outside the village.^[1]

The next day the correct results were reported in both the town’s paper,^[2] and as a correction in the regional paper.^[3]

On Thursday, 2006-12-07 it was reported by the Burlington Free Press that a petition to reconsider the merger was submitted to the town. The petition contained signatures totaling more than 5 percent of registered voters, which is the threshold required to force a re-vote. ^[4]

The revote was held on 2007-01-23 with a result that overturned merger by 191 votes, rejecting the current merger proposal.^[5]

If the results had stood, a multi-year merger process would have resulted in a new Town of Essex Junction replacing the current governments of the Town of Essex and the Village of Essex Junction.