Here is what happened this week at the State House: the Vermont House rewrote S.193, the bill that would create the state’s first secure treatment facility for people who commit violent crimes and are found mentally unfit for trial.

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The rewrite was significant — the facility would now be run by the Agency of Human Services, not the Department of Corrections. That’s progress. The House deserves credit for it.

Here is what didn’t happen

The facility didn’t get funded.

It didn’t get a location.

It didn’t get a timeline shorter than two years.

And it didn’t change the fact that right now — today — there are people in at least seven Vermont counties who have been found mentally unfit for trial after being charged with violent crimes, are in state custody, and could eventually be released back into the communities they victimized because Vermont still has no secure facility and nowhere else for them to go.

Those counties, identified in testimony by Kim McManus of the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs: Windsor, Rutland, Bennington, Orleans, Chittenden, Franklin, and Washington. That’s half the state. And McManus has testified that all 14 state’s attorneys and all 14 sheriffs can name individuals in their communities who they know pose a risk but who are unsupervised — because there is nowhere for them to go.

Kelly Carroll, the Bennington mother whose daughter Emily Hamann was murdered in 2021 by a man who had cycled through exactly this gap, put it plainly in a letter to House committees on May 13: “Continuing to delay action does not make the gap disappear. It only guarantees Vermonters more victims.”

The facility won’t exist until 2028

Under the rewritten bill, the statutory framework for the facility would not take effect until January 1, 2028. Before anything is built, the Agency of Human Services must produce a feasibility plan — covering the proposed location, design, bed count, staffing levels and qualifications, estimated construction and operating costs, physical security, discharge procedures, and a community monitoring plan. The committee set a deadline of this summer for that plan.

That’s another study. The fifth in five years.

The current fiscal year budget — FY27 — does not include funding for the facility. Committee members acknowledged that staging implementation into FY28 and beyond was “realistic.” Several members pushed for interim restoration services for the five to seven people currently held without any competency restoration pathway — but there is no funding mechanism for that either. The committee discussed having AHS propose interim programming and bring a funding request to the joint justice oversight committee.

That is another ask, another process, and another wait — for the same families who have been waiting since 2021.

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What this means for your community

On May 13, Carroll wrote to House committees identifying seven Vermont counties where, according to testimony from Kim McManus of the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs, individuals charged with violent crimes who have been found mentally unfit for trial are currently in state custody and could eventually be released back into the communities they victimized — because Vermont still has no forensic system and nowhere else for them to go.

Those counties: Windsor, Rutland, Bennington, Orleans, Chittenden, Franklin, and Washington. That’s half the state.

“Continuing to delay action does not make the gap disappear,” Carroll wrote. “It only guarantees Vermonters more victims.”

The bill’s narrow scope hasn’t changed — it applies only to defendants charged with offenses punishable by life sentences, including murder, aggravated sexual assault, and kidnapping. The estimated population at any given time remains five to seven people. But McManus has testified that the broader population of violent-felony defendants with competency issues extends far beyond that number, touching every county in the state.

The debate that remains

Committee members agreed on one thing: the people inside the facility should be treated by clinicians, not corrections officers. Therapeutic programming and living units would be staffed by AHS or clinical personnel. The bill builds in multiple safeguards — six-month competency reevaluations, a 60-day dangerousness hearing if someone is found not restorable, periodic court review, and victim notification at every stage.

But divisions remain. Some members wanted a side-by-side comparison of a facility run entirely outside DOC versus one that uses DOC for perimeter security. Others warned that asking for two competing plans could bias the analysis and delay the process further. At least one member proposed excluding Wellpath — DOC’s current healthcare contractor, which declared bankruptcy in 2024 with $644 million in debt and more than 1,500 lawsuits — from any interim restoration contracts.

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And Representative Quatt raised concerns about whether people with long histories under Act 248 — Vermont’s existing framework for people with developmental disabilities in the justice system — should be eligible for the new facility at all, noting four decades of community placement practice for that population.

The committee was working toward a vote. The chair indicated the bill could move to the House floor as early as this week.

Where this stands

If the House passes the rewritten S.193, it will go back to the Senate for concurrence — since the House version is substantially different from the 29-1 bill the Senate passed on April 1. If the Senate doesn’t concur, the bill goes to a Committee of Conference. All of that takes time the session may or may not have.

Carroll, who has testified before five committees across four legislative sessions and written letters to every committee that has touched this issue, captured the gap between what lawmakers experience and what families live with in her May 13 letter: “Your frustration is noted but the difference is that victims didn’t choose the situation the VT House has put us in.”

Meanwhile, in Burlington, a man who shot three Palestinian college students on his porch in 2023 sits in jail awaiting trial — locked up, supervised, accounted for. The system worked for that case because the defendant was found competent. For the people on McManus’s list — the ones every sheriff and every prosecutor can name — the system has no answer. Not today. And under the rewritten bill, not until 2028.

Carroll has been asking for urgency since January 18, 2021 — the morning her daughter was killed on the Riverwalk in downtown Bennington.

The legislature gave her a rewritten bill. It did not give her a facility. Not yet.

This is the latest in a series of Compass Vermont reports on Vermont’s competency gap. Read the full series for background on the bill’s legislative history, the families affected, and how other states have addressed this issue.

Compass Vermont is free, independent, and has no ads, no sponsors, and no corporate owner. If you value reporting that gives you the full picture and lets you draw your own conclusions, please consider subscribing or upgrading to a paid subscription.

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Vermont is on the verge of making it significantly more expensive to get a tractor-trailer stuck in Smuggler’s Notch — and the legislation doing it is smarter than most people realize. Whether it’s smart enough is a different question.

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S.326, which passed the Vermont Senate in March and is moving through final House review this week, rewrites the penalty structure for operating a prohibited vehicle on Vermont Route 108 through Smuggler’s Notch. The base fine jumps from $1,000 to $10,000. If the stuck vehicle substantially impedes traffic — which a 48-foot tractor-trailer blocking a mountain pass tends to do — the fine doubles to $20,000. A second offense within three years doubles it again. If signed into law, the new penalties would take effect July 1, 2026.

That alone would be a straightforward deterrent story. But the bill goes further.

Under S.326, when a driver is operating in the scope of employment, the fine doesn’t go to the driver. It goes to the employer — the carrier, the trucking company, the business that dispatched the vehicle. If the driver was on a personal trip, the operator pays. The Vermont Legislature drew a line that most states haven’t bothered to draw.

It’s a meaningful distinction. The problem of trucks getting stuck in the Notch has never been primarily a driver problem. It has been, increasingly, a routing problem — GPS navigation apps and dispatch systems sending commercial vehicles into a mountain pass where there is, as VTrans’s website puts it, “no physical way for large vehicles to fit.” The decision to turn onto Route 108 is often not made by the person sitting behind the wheel. It’s made by an algorithm, confirmed by a dispatcher in another state, and executed by a driver who trusts the route they’ve been given.

Vermont’s new law reaches the employer. That matters.

Except that reaching the employer on paper and reaching the employer in practice are not always the same thing.

Josh Klein, Deputy Communications Director for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, told Compass Vermont this week that OOIDA sees both the five-point penalty and the $10,000 fine as significant consequences. But on the question of who ultimately bears the cost, Klein was direct: “While the bill language seems well-intended by penalizing the carrier, most fines we’ve seen in other states ultimately are passed along to the driver.”

Employment contracts, lease agreements, and carrier policies have a way of redirecting statutory liability back to the person behind the wheel, regardless of what state law specifies.

And there’s a second consequence in S.326 that no employment contract can redirect.

Alongside the fine structure, the bill adds Smuggler’s Notch violations to Vermont’s point assessment schedule under 23 V.S.A. § 2502 — five points, assessed to the individual operator’s driving record, every time, regardless of whether the employer pays the fine. For most drivers, five points is an inconvenience. For a commercial driver, five points on a CDL is something closer to a career event.

The driver who followed the dispatcher’s GPS route into the Notch — who may not have known the road, may not have had a choice, may have trusted the system that was supposed to know better — takes that hit personally. The employer writes a check. The driver carries the record.

The House Transportation Committee, in its amended version of the bill, added one more provision the Senate hadn’t included: a direct mandate requiring VTrans to update the signage at the Notch entrances to reflect the new penalty amounts. It is a small addition, but it acknowledges something that transportation officials have struggled with for years.

Vermont has tried myriad approaches to the signage problem. Signs in English and French. Pictographs. Physical chicanes installed in 2024 that dropped annual stuckages from five to one. And language that VTrans itself describes in plain terms — that no matter what a GPS says, there is simply no physical way for an over-length vehicle to navigate the Notch.

Todd Sears, who led the Notch management effort for VTrans, told Vermont Public in November 2024 what every sign designer eventually confronts: “Our signage was very clear, saying that you will get stuck. Do not attempt to drive through the Notch, and don’t trust your GPS — but they would try anyway. I mean, it’s a mystery.”

Colorado wrestled with the same mystery on I-70 east of Denver, where CDOT officials interviewed truck drivers about how they experienced a specific stretch of road before writing warning signs in language drawn directly from those conversations. The result cut fatalities in half even as traffic volume grew. The lesson was clear: signs work when they address the specific cognitive moment the driver is in, not when they restate the legal prohibition. Applying the same approach to Independence Pass produced more mixed results — incidents continued despite better language and higher fines.

Physical reality, it turns out, communicates more clearly than any sign. The chicanes proved that. Updating the signs to say $10,000 instead of $1,000 may reinforce it.

S.326 is in its final days at the Statehouse. When the next truck turns onto Route 108 — and based on recent history, one eventually will — Vermont will have a sharper set of tools than it has ever had before. A $10,000 fine. Employer liability on paper. Five points on a CDL regardless of who pays. Updated signs at the entrance.

What Vermont still won’t have is a way to reach the dispatcher who chose the route, or the routing platform that recommended it, or the carrier policy that didn’t flag the restriction before the truck left the yard.

The law is smarter. The gap it can’t close is structural.

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Written responses from sources are on file. S.326 statutory text and legislative history reviewed in full by Compass Vermont.

On Polymarket today, Phil Scott is priced at a 95% chance to win the Republican gubernatorial primary on August 11. Aly Richards leads the Democratic field at 57%. The Republican line sits at 78% to win the November general election. The site lists three active markets on Vermont’s 2026 governor’s race, with a combined trading volume of roughly $89,000.

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None of those prices was set by a Vermonter.

Polymarket’s international platform — the one where these three Vermont markets live — geofences U.S. users out. The site’s own metadata flags both primary markets as ineligible for U.S. trading. A separate entity, Polymarket US, is operated by QCX LLC, a CFTC-regulated designated contract market that Polymarket acquired in 2025. That entity is currently in invitation-only beta and lists only sports contracts. As of today, no Vermonter can legally trade on the Vermont governor race on either platform.

The contracts are still being priced. They will continue to be priced through the August 11 primary and through November 3. The bettors who set the price are everywhere except here.

That’s the structural fact worth understanding alongside H.913, the short-form bill Rep. Tom Stevens (D-Waterbury) introduced on February 25 to criminalize political prediction-market contracts in Vermont. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs the same day. It has had no recorded committee action in the eleven weeks since, and with the biennium nearing adjournment, no realistic procedural path forward this session.

Stevens’s bill treats betting on Vermont elections as a Vermont problem to legislate. The premise rests on the assumption that Vermont’s gambling regulations have something local to act on. They don’t. The behavior the bill targets is already not happening here, because federal regulatory geometry — not Vermont law — has made it impossible for Vermonters to participate.

H.913 is dying in committee. The market is running anyway.

What the market thinks it knows

The bigger problem with treating Polymarket as a source of insight into Vermont politics — which national outlets increasingly do — is that the platform’s curators have made editorial choices that don’t reflect the actual race.

Polymarket is not user-generated. The company’s own help center states plainly that “users cannot directly create their own markets,” though users can suggest ideas through Discord or social media. Polymarket’s internal team decides what events get listed and which candidates appear as outcomes. Industry reporting on emerging competitors describes Polymarket’s model as closer to Netflix than YouTube — the platform, not the user base, picks what’s on offer.

For the Vermont Democratic primary, Polymarket’s team picked four candidates on December 11, 2025: Attorney General Charity Clark, State Treasurer Mike Pieciak, 2024 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Esther Charlestin, and Aly Richards. None of those choices has aged well.

Clark announced on May 4 that she is running for re-election as attorney general, not governor. Pieciak has not announced any 2026 race. Charlestin announced in January that she is running for lieutenant governor. That leaves Richards — the listed candidate at 57% — with no actual challenger in the contract slate. And yet Polymarket has not added Amanda Janoo, who declared her candidacy on March 10 and will appear on the August ballot.

If Janoo wins the primary, the market has no clean way to resolve. Her name doesn’t exist as an outcome the contract can pay out on.

On the Republican side, Polymarket has Lieutenant Governor John Rodgers listed at 5% in the gubernatorial primary. Rodgers announced his re-election bid on February 3 — for lieutenant governor. He is not on the August ballot for the office Polymarket has him listed for. Governor Scott himself has not formally announced a re-election bid, though his campaign has been circulating petitions since early April ahead of the May 28 filing deadline.

The trading data is equally instructive. Of the $65,470 in volume on the Democratic primary market, roughly $51,500 — about 79% — was placed on Clark, who never entered the race. Another $5,101 was wagered on Pieciak. The current Democratic favorite, Richards, has zero recorded trading volume on her contract; her 57% implied probability comes from automated bid-ask spreads, not from anyone putting money behind her. On the Republican primary market, Rodgers has more trading volume ($1,714) than the incumbent governor projected to win at 95% ($1,278).

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In short: the bettors most active in these markets spent most of their money on people who aren’t running.

Why this matters anyway

The natural response is to dismiss thinly-traded prediction markets that miss the basic facts. Vermont’s race is small. Total volume across all three markets is less than what a single national political market can clear in an hour. The signal-to-noise ratio is poor.

But the prices still appear in national coverage, in punditry, and in screenshots circulated on social media. A 95% reading on Phil Scott’s re-election, broadcast through the architecture of what Polymarket calls “the world’s largest prediction market,” carries narrative weight regardless of how few traders set it. And the people most affected by that narrative — Vermonters — have no mechanism to correct it from inside, because they cannot enter the market.

H.913 would do what Stevens’s bill proposes: criminalize the contracts on the books. But that’s a regulatory action against a behavior Vermont’s residents are already excluded from. It does nothing about the market itself, which exists on platforms outside Vermont’s jurisdiction, listed by a company that has decided Vermont’s race is worth pricing, with a candidate slate it doesn’t appear to maintain against reality.

The state’s authority ends at its borders. The market’s reach doesn’t.

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Editor’s note, May 14, 2026: Compass Vermont emailed Rep. Tom Stevens on May 12, ahead of this piece’s publication, with detailed questions about H.913 in light of the federal regulatory issues described above. Stevens did not respond before publication on May 13. On the morning of May 14, he sent a response offering three clarifications, which Compass Vermont has independently verified and adds here.

Scope. H.913 applies more broadly than this piece described. As drafted, the bill covers prediction-market contracts on sports, contests, natural persons, politics and campaigns, disasters, war, all-hazards, or death. This article focused on the gubernatorial contracts on Polymarket, which fall under one of those seven categories.

Mechanism. H.913 includes both criminal and civil provisions. In addition to amending Vermont’s criminal statutes governing wagering, the bill would amend state contract law to render prediction-market agreements void and allow civil recovery of lost funds. Stevens describes the contract-law route as deliberately designed around federal preemption — declaring such contracts unenforceable in Vermont where the state lacks authority to criminally enforce a ban on what federal law treats as a commodity. This piece described the bill as a criminalization measure; that description is incomplete.

Committee record. The Vermont legislature’s official bill-status page for H.913 shows no formal committee action after the bill’s February 25 referral. Stevens states that the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs took testimony on H.913 and H.133 on April 14, with the understanding that neither bill would advance this biennium. The bill-status page logs formal procedural actions and does not necessarily reflect hearings or testimony. This piece relied on the status page and did not separately check committee schedules.

Stevens also notes that the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission has been operating with reduced commissioner capacity and, in April 2026, sued Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois over their efforts to regulate prediction markets — limiting the federal consumer-protection actions available and constraining the legal space within which state action can operate. He frames H.913 as Vermont’s attempt to respond within that narrow space.

The broader analysis in this piece — that Polymarket has selected the wrong candidates in Vermont’s 2026 governor’s race, that Vermonters cannot legally trade these markets, and that the market exists and operates regardless of state action — is unchanged by these clarifications.

Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources is asking the public to weigh in on a proposed rule that will govern how the state manages roughly 370,000 acres of public land for the next generation. The comment period closes June 18.

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The agency’s press release describes the rulemaking in four procedural bullet points. The 11 pages of operative rule text describe something broader: a management framework that touches Vermonters who own land near state forests, recreate on public land, work in the forest products economy, sit on selectboards in towns adjacent to ANR holdings, or live downstream of headwaters that begin on state property.

Here’s what the rule actually does, who it reaches, and what the agency’s public materials leave out.

Who’s affected

The rule does not regulate private property. The Economic Impact Analysis ANR filed with the Secretary of State states the rule “does not regulate any business or entity and thus does not have an economic impact on businesses or entities conducting business in Vermont.”

That framing is narrow. The rule’s substantive effects reach into a broader cross-section of Vermont:

Landowners whose property abuts ANR-managed land. Roughly 6% of Vermont is owned by ANR. If your property line touches a State Forest, State Park, or Wildlife Management Area, this rule changes what your state-owned neighbor can do on the other side of that line.

Hunters, anglers, foragers, hikers, paddlers, and other recreational users. Decisions about specific trails, ponds, beaches, ridges, and access points on state land are made through Annual Stewardship Plans, which the rule explicitly exempts from public input. If a specific place on state land matters to you, the framework for changing it does not require advance notice or comment.

Loggers, sawmills, foresters, and timber landowners. Vermont’s working-forest economy depends in part on state stumpage contracts and on a stable supply of high-quality state timber. The two new sub-classes added by the rule create administrative pathways that could move some state land toward classifications with less active management.

Selectboards and town officials in municipalities adjoining major state holdings. Section 5.1(c) of the rule requires ANR to notify towns “in which the state land is located” of upcoming planning processes. Vermont municipalities that depend economically on adjacent state land — through tourism, recreation infrastructure, working-forest tax base, or hunting and fishing visitor traffic — have interests in those plans.

Anyone who drinks water from a Vermont watershed. Many of Vermont’s headwaters originate on ANR-managed land. The rule’s management framework governs how those watersheds are managed for water quality and flood resilience.

Vermont’s recognized Abenaki Tribes. The rule requires consideration of “Cultural Resources” in management plans but does not specifically require consultation with State and Federally recognized Tribes — a gap conservation groups flagged in the 2024 pre-rulemaking comments.

That is most adult Vermonters, in one form or another.

What the rule actually does

The press release lists four changes: a category of “Universal Management Actions,” clarified content requirements for Long Range Management Plans, “two new land classifications,” and a new Statewide Plan. Each one is more substantive than the press release describes.

Universal Management Actions

What the press release calls “routine maintenance activities,” the rule’s Section 4.1.1(a) actually defines as a list that includes hazard tree removal, “forest health mitigation activities such as treatment or removal of disease[d] trees,” “invasive species management and eradication,” “limited” vegetation management, and “limited” habitat management. The word “limited” is not defined.

Once the rule is adopted, those activities can occur on ANR-managed land without a Long Range Management Plan and without a parcel-specific public-comment process.

Zack Porter, executive director of the conservation organization Standing Trees, called the category “such enormous exceptions that they swallow the rest of the rule. There will be little reason for ANR to develop Long Range Management Plans if it can simply do whatever it wants, whenever it wants.”

Long Range Management Plan content

The rule requires every new LRMP to include resource analysis covering ecological, forest, water, fisheries, cultural, recreation, and climate change considerations, along with a public responsiveness summary in the appendix. These are real procedural improvements. The climate change requirement is new at the rule level.

But Section 2(c) of the rule provides that LRMPs whose public scoping started within the last five years are not required to be restarted under the new framework. That provision excludes the Worcester Range Management Unit LRMP, completed in 2024, and the Birdseye Wildlife Management Area LRMP from the new requirements. Both are recent plans that drew significant conservation-group objections.

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Two new sub-classes

The press release says the rule creates “two new land classifications.” The rule actually retains the four existing classifications — Highly Sensitive, Special, General, and Intensive — and adds two new sub-classes within them: Research Natural Areas (1.9), designated for “no-trace forest ecosystem monitoring and research,” and Ecological Enhancement Areas (2.12), which the rule describes as areas where “active management in the near-term may create or restore conditions that will qualify these lands as a Highly Sensitive Management Area in the long-term.”

The 2024 pre-rulemaking press release described the same new sub-classes as enabling “the establishment of ecological reserves on ANR lands.” The 2026 press release does not use that phrase. “Ecological reserves” is the same statutory term used in H.276, a bill currently stuck in the House Environment Committee.

Dana Doran, executive director of the Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast, said in a written response that PLC opposes the additions. “The state already has sensitive management areas as well as natural areas which provide for passive and/or no management,” Doran wrote. “Thus, there is no reason from our perspective to further dilute and/or expand the designation classifications.”

The Statewide Plan and Annual Stewardship Plans

The Statewide Plan is described in the press release as a document that “identifies management goals and standards.” The rule’s Section 4.1.1 gives it broader authority: to define the full Universal Management Actions list, to set management standards that “shall apply universally across all ANR lands with a LRMP,” and to establish generally applicable management goals across all 370,000 acres.

Below the planning level, the rule formalizes a separate document: the Annual Stewardship Plan. ASPs determine what specific projects — timber sales, road construction, trail relocations, habitat work — ANR will undertake on a given parcel in a given year. Section 4.4.2(a) of the rule states that ASPs “shall be developed by ANR staff and are not subject to public input.”

That provision is in the rule. It is not in the press release.

The communication gap

ANR’s Concise Summary, filed with the Secretary of State and required to communicate the essence of the rule in 150 words or less, runs 112 words. It uses the word “planning” three times and defines none of its key terms. The April 30 press release is four bullet points. The FPR website’s Q&A on the rule is largely procedural.

The August 2024 pre-rulemaking draft drew 62 public comments. The agency’s Statewide Stakeholder Email List, used to publicize the draft, contained 65 organizations and 130 individuals. That is the response a rule governing 370,000 acres of public land generated through ANR’s outreach apparatus.

For Vermonters who do not work in environmental law, do not subscribe to an advocacy organization’s email list, and do not have time to read an 11-page rule plus its supporting filings, the agency’s public-facing materials are the entire universe of available information. That universe is significantly narrower than what is in the rule itself.

How we got here

Standing Trees, with the Environmental Advocacy Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School, has been pressing ANR through lawsuits and petitions since 2022 to formalize state-lands rules. The agency committed in writing in November 2022 to issue rules in a “timely” manner. The formal rule was filed roughly three and a half years later, on April 23, 2026. A Vermont state court denied the agency’s motion to dismiss the most recent Standing Trees lawsuit on April 9, 2026 — two weeks before the rule was filed.

H.276, the Vermont Climate Resilience and State Wildlands Act sponsored by Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury, would address similar policy through legislation. The bill has not advanced out of the House Environment Committee, which Sheldon chairs, since being introduced in February 2025. The biennium ends this month.

Rep. Sheldon and Hannah Phillips, the State Lands Administration Program Manager listed as the rule’s primary contact, did not respond to questions from Compass Vermont before publication.

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How to engage

ANR is accepting public comment on the proposed rule through June 18, 2026. Comments may be submitted by email to ANR.StateLandsPlanning@vermont.gov with “Planning Rule” in the subject line, or through the comment form on the FPR website. The full proposed rule and supporting documents are posted on that page.

Four public hearings are scheduled:

• Wednesday, June 3, 5:30 p.m. — Lyndonville Public Safety Building, 316 Main Street

• Thursday, June 4, 5:30 p.m. — Waterbury Municipal Offices, Steele Community Room, 28 North Main Street

• Tuesday, June 9, 5:30 p.m. — Okemo Mountain Resort, Jackson Gore Inn, Cornerstone Room, 111 Jackson Gore Road, Ludlow

• Thursday, June 11, 5:30 p.m. — Virtual, via Microsoft Teams

The Secretary of State has assigned the rule an adoption deadline of December 23, 2026.

The press release describes a rule that updates a planning process. The rule itself describes a broader management framework. What’s in front of Vermonters this summer is whether the public engagement process that closes June 18 will be informed by what’s actually in the rule.

Compass Vermont is an independent, reader-supported Vermont news outlet. To support this work, subscribe at compassvermont.com.

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BETA Technologies released its first-quarter 2026 financial results before the market opened on May 12 — the South Burlington company’s first quarterly report as a publicly traded company and its first since being named to seven of eight federal eVTOL Integration Pilot Program projects on March 9.

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The headline numbers cleared Wall Street’s bar. Revenue of $10.1 million topped the analyst consensus of approximately $8.7 million. The reported net loss per share of 53 cents came in narrower than consensus loss estimates among analysts following the company. Commercial backlog grew by $375 million during the quarter to $3.9 billion across 991 aircraft. The company’s nationwide charging network expanded by 16 sites to 123.

Alongside that operational momentum, BETA recalibrated one element of its full-year 2026 outlook. It held its revenue guidance steady at $39 million to $43 million and widened its projected Adjusted EBITDA loss to a range of $355 million to $445 million, from the $305 million to $395 million range it issued on March 9. The change reflects accelerating spending on research, development, and infrastructure ahead of the federal program’s summer start.

First post-IPO quarters frequently bring updated guidance as newly public companies refine their forecasting against actual operating data and ongoing analyst feedback. For Vermont readers, the more useful question is what the Q1 release says about the program that may put BETA aircraft over Lake Champlain this summer — and what it suggests about the trajectory of a company that, as of VTDigger’s February 2026 reporting, employed approximately 1,200 people, with roughly 90 percent based in Vermont and plans for 1,000 additional positions in the next 18 months.

What Changed in the 2026 Outlook

The guidance change is straightforward in mathematical terms: a $50 million widening on both ends of the projected Adjusted EBITDA loss range, with the revenue forecast held flat. The press release does not characterize the direction of the revision, but the underlying drivers are visible in the Q1 numbers themselves.

Research and development expense was $91.7 million for the quarter, up 58 percent from $57.9 million a year earlier. General and administrative expense was $47.1 million, up 68 percent from $28.0 million. Stock-based compensation more than tripled to $23.4 million from $7.3 million — a consequence of equity-linked employee compensation now flowing through the income statement at public-market valuations rather than the private valuations that applied a year ago.

Capital expenditures were $24.2 million for the quarter, compared with $6.7 million in Q1 2025. The Florida Department of Transportation charger agreement, the expansion of the nationwide charging network, the preliminary design review of a hybrid-electric turbogenerator with GE Aerospace, and the company’s deepening preparation for eIPP operations are the kinds of investments that produce both the spending ramp and the operational milestones BETA is reporting. In a pre-revenue or early-revenue aerospace company approaching certification, the relationship between spending acceleration and operational progress is the central business question.

BETA ended Q1 with $1.589 billion in cash, down $121 million from $1.710 billion at year-end. Using the midpoint of BETA’s updated 2026 Adjusted EBITDA loss guidance as a rough proxy for annual cash burn, the company’s cash balance would support several years of operating runway. The calculation is approximate and does not account for changes in capital expenditures, working capital, or any future financing activity.

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What the Quarter Said About the Vermont Mission

In our March 20 piece on BETA’s selection to the federal eIPP program, Compass Vermont identified four open questions that would determine whether the Lake Champlain medical and cargo flights actually begin in summer 2026. The Q1 release answers some of those questions, leaves others open, and surfaces a new one.

The OTA terms. The Other Transaction Agreements between BETA and the FAA — the documents that define operational envelopes, safety thresholds, and reporting requirements for each eIPP participant — are not mentioned in today’s release. Compass Vermont asked BETA’s investor relations team whether the OTA covering the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey project — which includes the Vermont and upstate New York medical and cargo logistics operations with Metro Aviation — has been signed. BETA’s investor relations team did not respond to a request for comment by deadline. The U.S. Department of Transportation has publicly stated that eIPP operations could begin by summer 2026, with June 2026 referenced as the operational target by participating agencies.

The start of summer 2026 is approximately six weeks away. Industry signals on OTA timing vary across program participants. Joby Aviation has publicly indicated its eIPP OTAs may not be finalized until the third quarter of 2026, with operations beginning in the second half of the year. Whether BETA’s Port Authority project timing aligns with that broader industry pattern or runs ahead of it is not addressed in the Q1 release.

The certification timeline. BETA’s H500A electric engine — a prerequisite for full commercial certification of the ALIA aircraft — was targeted for FAA type certification in the first half of 2026, according to the company’s prior guidance. Q1 brought additional progress: more than 85,000 hours of flight and ground testing, including completion of high-risk test conditions in lightning, icing, and durability. The release does not announce a certification milestone. Seven weeks remain in the first half of 2026.

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The infrastructure funding trail. BETA’s global charging network grew from 107 sites at year-end 2025 to 123 sites by quarter-end, a net addition of 16. The company signed an agreement with the Florida Department of Transportation under which FDOT will fund 34 chargers and thermal management systems — a public-private cost-sharing model that demonstrates one workable approach to the infrastructure question. No equivalent Vermont-specific charging infrastructure agreement was announced in Q1. BETA’s existing Vermont charging assets remain concentrated at its Burlington International Airport manufacturing campus.

The backlog. A question in our March 20 piece was whether BETA could continue adding firm orders after a Q4 2025 quarter that included none. Q1 brought $375 million in additional commercial backlog, bringing total commitments to 991 aircraft worth $3.9 billion at quarter-end — up from 891 aircraft and $3.5 billion at year-end. The largest new commitment is the previously announced partnership with Surf Air Mobility for Hawaii service. BETA does not break out firm orders versus options in the Q1 release; that detail is typically disclosed in the 10-Q filing that follows an earnings release by several days.

The Defense Pivot Is Now Visible

One thread in the Q1 release that did not appear with similar clarity in earlier disclosures: BETA’s defense and military business is moving from the background to the foreground.

Three data points in the Q1 release point in the same direction. First, the company completed a preliminary design review with GE Aerospace for a hybrid-electric turbogenerator system that — per BETA’s own description — will “initially support our MV250 VTOL.” The MV250 is BETA’s defense variant. The word hybrid is doing meaningful work in that sentence: it acknowledges that the range and endurance requirements of defense missions exceed what pure-electric propulsion can currently provide, and that BETA’s pathway into the defense market runs through hybrid systems rather than all-electric ones.

Second, the company disclosed additional contracts with General Dynamics for undersea propulsion work — electric propulsion technology applied to submarine systems, a market segment with no commercial-aviation analog.

Third, a recent BTIG analyst note flagged the MV250 hybrid military VTOL program as a primary use case for the proceeds of BETA’s October 2025 IPO.

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For Vermont readers, this matters as context for the workforce picture. BETA’s reported work spans civil aviation, charging infrastructure, defense propulsion, and dual-use programs. Segment revenue breakdown is not disclosed in the Q1 release. That diversification of work is a strength: it reduces dependence on the timing of any single certification milestone or commercial program. It also means the company’s Vermont workforce will, over time, include defense-related roles that come with different security, contracting, and supply-chain requirements than purely civil aviation work. SEC filings over coming quarters may begin to surface that distinction.

How the Market Read It

BETA shares closed at $18.59 on May 11, the trading session before the Q1 release. By 2:00 p.m. Eastern on May 12, following the pre-market earnings announcement and the company’s 8:30 a.m. investor conference call, shares had declined to $17.79 — a drop of approximately 4.3 percent on the day.

The decline places the day’s reaction on the side of investors weighting the wider full-year loss range somewhat more heavily than the Q1 revenue and earnings beats. It does not, on its own, indicate a fundamental reassessment of the company. BETA’s 52-week range runs from $13.43 to $39.50, reflecting the volatility typical of pre-certification eVTOL companies, and the day’s move sits well within that range. Sell-side analyst price targets cluster around $34 to $40, with BofA Securities at $37 (Buy), Cantor Fitzgerald at $38 (Overweight), and BTIG at $40 (Buy) — meaningfully above the current trading level.

The IPO itself was an unusually strong reception by recent standards: BETA’s IPO priced at $34 per share and raised approximately $1.02 billion, meaningfully above the company’s earlier price-range expectations. The share-price pattern since IPO — a strong opening, a six-month decline, a recent stabilization, and today’s volatility around earnings — reflects sector-wide pressure on pre-certification eVTOL companies, with Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation showing similar patterns. A Vermonter evaluating the stock as a potential investment is looking at a company whose business fundamentals and trading dynamics are moving on somewhat different timelines: operational milestones are accumulating in roughly the direction the company has promised, while the share price reflects the broader market’s calibration of how long the path to certification and scaled commercial revenue will take.

What the Q1 Report Does Not Say

For a Vermont reader trying to assess whether BETA’s federal program selection translates into electric aircraft flying over Lake Champlain this summer, the Q1 release is most useful for what it does not yet address.

It does not address the OTA status. It does not announce H500A type certification. It does not provide a Vermont-specific charging infrastructure timeline. It does not break out civil versus defense revenue. It does not specify when within “summer 2026” Lake Champlain operations would begin.

None of these gaps is unusual for a quarterly earnings release. Each is a legitimate matter of public interest in a Vermont company that has made formal commitments to a federal program, employs more than 1,000 Vermonters, and trades its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The Q1 10-Q filing — the more detailed SEC document that typically follows an earnings release by several days — will close some of those information gaps. The Vermont stakes warrant attention to what that filing does and does not contain.

What to Watch

The next four to six weeks will determine more about BETA’s 2026 Vermont trajectory than the Q1 release does. Three milestones stand out.

The signed OTA for the Port Authority project. The OTA is expected to define the operational terms and revenue authorities under which any eIPP flight in Vermont could be conducted.

FAA type certification of the H500A engine. BETA has guided to first-half 2026; the calendar is closing.

The Q1 10-Q filing. The document will disclose firm-versus-option backlog composition, segment revenue detail, and the risk factors BETA describes to investors — language that often differs from earnings-release framing and that offers the most complete public picture available of how the company sees its own challenges.

Compass Vermont will continue tracking the publicly available documents — SEC filings, FAA OTAs once published, state transportation budgets, and airport authority records — that will collectively determine whether the commitments made on March 9 translate into electric aircraft flying over Lake Champlain in summer 2026. The public record shows continued operational progress, while the execution details that matter most for Vermont remain unresolved.

Sources linked throughout. Q1 2026 financial data from BETA Technologies’ Q1 2026 earnings release. Prior guidance from BETA’s full-year 2025 release of March 9, 2026. Federal eIPP program details from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Analyst consensus estimates from Investing.com. Stock price data from Google Finance.

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A prescribed burn, announced Monday by the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department, targets a Dry Pine-Oak-Heath Sandplain Forest — a fire-dependent natural community that once covered roughly 15,000 acres in Chittenden County before European settlement.

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Only about 1,000 acres remain today, or 6.7 percent of the original total, according to Fish & Wildlife’s natural community fact sheet. The rest has been converted to housing developments, airports, commercial areas, graveyards, sand extraction operations, and agricultural fields.

“Species that depend on natural disturbance from fire, such as pitch pine, as well as several threatened and endangered plants are found at the Sandbar WMA,” State Botanist Grace Glynn said in the announcement. “This prescribed burn is part of ongoing restoration work to help the rare sandplain natural community at Sandbar by mimicking natural fires in an intentional, safe way that improves habitat for a diversity of plants and wildlife.”

Why fire

Pitch pine, the signature tree of these forests, has bark that protects mature trees from light fires while killing competitors. The species germinates best on bare mineral soil exposed after fire burns away leaf litter. Without periodic fire, the duff layer thickens, pitch pine seedlings cannot establish, and the canopy closes — gradually converting the community to a different forest type and crowding out the rare plants that depend on open, sunny conditions.

A number of Vermont’s threatened and endangered plant species reach their northern range limit in these sandplain forests, where warm climate and sunny openings provide habitat unavailable elsewhere in the state.

Who is doing the work

The burn will be conducted by fire professionals from the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks & Recreation, the New Hampshire Division of Forests & Lands, and the U.S. Forest Service, working alongside biologists from Fish & Wildlife.

“Prescribed burns are planned and conducted with safety as the first priority,” said Kathy Decker, Forest Protection Program Manager with Forests, Parks & Recreation. “One key element is working within specific weather parameters. We will conduct this prescribed burn only under favorable weather conditions and use proven techniques to minimize smoke impacts to the public.”

Route 2 impact

The burn area is just west of U.S. Route 2 in Milton. Signs will be posted along the highway to notify drivers and residents on active burn days. Professional teams will remain on site for the full duration of the burn, which is scheduled to take place over several days starting Tuesday, May 12, with exact timing dependent on weather.

The bigger picture

Of the small acreage of Dry Pine-Oak-Heath Sandplain Forest that remains in Vermont, the natural community fact sheet notes that one very small example sits in a town park and another much larger example is under active ecological management that includes the use of prescribed fire. No large example currently has permanent legal protection.

The community type is restricted in Vermont to the warmer biophysical regions — the Champlain Valley and the Southern Vermont Piedmont — with the most significant remaining stands in western Chittenden County, where the Winooski, Lamoille, and Missisquoi rivers deposited the deep, well-drained sands these forests require.

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Near the end of a two-week medical mission in Ziguinchor, Senegal, U.S. Army 1st Sgt. Tim Farrow learned that a man working at the gas station near his team’s hotel had been living with severe pain. The man could not afford dental treatment.

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Farrow, a flight paramedic with the Vermont Army National Guard, picked up the phone.

By the time the exercise ended on May 8, he had coordinated treatment between the patient, the Senegalese military hospital, and an Austrian dental team that had flown in for the same exercise. The Austrians treated the man pro bono.

“Those are the things that we hope will go back to the citizens in the neighborhoods of Ziguinchor and greater Senegal and bolster the rapport that our nations will be maintaining in years to come,” Farrow said in an account released Saturday by the National Guard Bureau.

The mission was called MEDREX — a multinational medical readiness exercise conducted from April 25 to May 8 as part of African Lion 2026, U.S. Africa Command’s largest annual joint exercise. AL26 ran from April 20 to May 8 across Ghana, Morocco, Senegal, and Tunisia, involving more than 5,600 personnel from over 40 nations.

Vermont’s role grew out of the Department of Defense State Partnership Program, which has paired the Vermont National Guard with Senegal since 2008. The partnership also includes a sister-city relationship between Burlington and Thiès, Senegal. The MEDREX brought military medical personnel from the United States, Senegal, Austria, and Italy together across three hospitals in southern Senegal: Ziguinchor Regional Hospital, Hospital De La Paix, and the Military Hospital of Ziguinchor.

Three Vermonters were named in the National Guard Bureau’s release: Farrow, Capt. Nicholas LeBeau, and Capt. Lance Jandreau. Over two weeks, the multinational team logged 350 patient encounters.

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So why does Vermont send trained medical personnel to West Africa for two weeks?

Three reasons.

1. Readiness.

On May 6, at Hospital De La Paix, Capt. LeBeau — a nurse with the Vermont Army National Guard — scrubbed in to assist Senegalese providers performing an emergency cesarean section.

“By working in these more austere environments, we learn what to do without,” LeBeau said.

That is the readiness argument in one sentence. A Vermont nurse who can perform surgical assistance with limited supplies, in a hospital he has never worked in before, with colleagues who do not speak his first language, is a more capable nurse when he comes home — and a more capable nurse if he is ever called to deploy somewhere harder.

In the same operating room, Italian Army Capt. Simone Campani supervised a Senegalese anesthesiologist placing an epidural. Campani had spent the previous days training with the same anesthesiologist on epidural and emergency anesthesia techniques. Skills moved in both directions.

Elsewhere across the three hospitals, multinational teams exchanged Tactical Combat Casualty Care techniques, repaired medical equipment, and treated dental patients alongside Senegalese clinicians.

2. Relationships.

Vermont’s State Partnership with Senegal is now in its 18th year. Vermont also has SPP relationships with North Macedonia (since 1993) and Austria (since 2022) — which is why Austrian medical personnel, including the dental team that treated the gas station worker, were embedded in the exercise.

Campani, the Italian physician, put the relationship case directly.

“When you want to build cooperation and trust,” Campani said, “one way that is always better is to work on health care.”

This is the part of military operations that does not generate headlines. There is no combat, no contested territory, no politicized debate. There is a Vermont nurse, an Italian physician, an Austrian dentist, and a Senegalese anesthesiologist standing in the same operating room. They will remember each other. They will pick up the phone for each other later. That is the asset being built.

3. Helping people who need it.

Capt. Jandreau, a behavioral health officer with the Vermont National Guard, conducted counseling sessions at Hospital De La Paix with hospital workers and patients facing a range of serious mental health challenges.

“The problem isn’t them,” Jandreau said. “The problem is a challenge they are facing, but they have an equal amount of power and ability to overcome it and change it for themselves.”

A small team of interpreters supported providers throughout the exercise.

And then there was the man at the gas station — not a planned patient, not part of the formal exercise schedule, just someone Farrow heard about and decided to help.

U.S. Army Col. Christopher Gookin, commander of the Vermont National Guard Medical Readiness Detachment, summarized the mission this way:

“Over the past two weeks, our team worked side by side with our Senegalese partners, completing 350 patient encounters. That’s the greatest strength of these Medical Readiness Exercise missions — not just what is provided, but what is gained through partnership.”

Vermont news comes from all directions. Sometimes it comes from a hospital in Ziguinchor.

This story is aggregated from a release by Sgt. 1st Class Christy Sherman of the National Guard Bureau, published May 9, 2026, with additional detail from a closing-ceremony release by Capt. Katherine Sibilla, May 7, 2026. All quotes are from those releases. African Lion 2026 was co-led by U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa.

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Vermont’s General Assembly did not finally adjourn on Friday, May 8, 2026.

That date had been listed by legislative-session trackers as Vermont’s planned adjournment. The chambers passed it without acting. They took the weekend off under J.R.S.52, a joint resolution relating to weekend adjournment on May 8, 2026. The chambers do not meet again until Tuesday morning.

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As of Saturday morning, based on a review of the Legislature’s bill database, no 2026 joint resolution setting a final adjournment date or a veto-session reconvening date had appeared.

The absence of any analogous 2026 resolution at this point is one clear procedural sign that the session’s endpoint remains unsettled. Leadership has not committed in writing to when this session ends or under what conditions it could be called back.

Why It Did Not Happen

The central unresolved issue is H.955, the House’s education transformation package.

Until the Senate produces a version that the House and the governor can both accept, the budget cannot reach the governor’s desk in a form that will be signed, the Yield Bill that sets statewide property tax rates cannot be finalized, and lawmakers cannot go home.

The House passed H.955 on April 17, 2026, on a 79-62 roll-call vote. That margin falls well short of the two-thirds supermajority the House would need to override a veto. Governor Phil Scott has stated repeatedly that the bill, which builds around voluntary district mergers facilitated by seven new Cooperative Educational Service Areas and which delays a new education foundation funding formula from 2028 to 2030, does not go far enough. The Senate now controls what version becomes law.

The Senate Education Committee has held the bill since mid-April. The committee has six members — three Democrats and three Republicans, a structurally even split unusual on a Senate where Democrats hold a 16-13-1 overall margin. Chair Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, told Vermont Public in March that “reams of testimony” from rural Vermonters had convinced him districts should be permitted to merge voluntarily. “We’re really trying to listen to the needs of rural Vermont, and the notion of losing contact with their district is something that really scares people a lot,” Bongartz said. “I think what we’ve heard a lot of is, ‘Let it happen organically.’”

H.955 appears next on the agenda Tuesday, May 12 at 3:00 p.m., with one staffer — Legislative Counsel Beth St. James — listed and no outside testimony scheduled. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons are listed as “TBA.” The committee will be in Room 10 — the larger committee room — all week.

What Is Left

The unfinished business divides into four categories.

There are the must-pass money bills. H.951, the FY27 “Big Bill” state budget at $9.4 billion, passed the Senate April 29 and is heading to a conference committee. Differences include a Senate proposal to draw $15 million from the Higher Education Endowment Trust Fund — including $12 million for the proposed UVM Multipurpose Center — and a $700,000 Read Vermont literacy program funding fight.

Senate Appropriations Chair Andrew Perchlik, D/P-Washington, told VTDigger Friday that the literacy money “has been spent” in the Senate version and that adding it back “makes it a substantial change” of the kind conference committees procedurally are not supposed to make.

H.949, the Yield Bill that sets statewide property tax rates, passed the Senate at a projected 3.8 percent average increase, against a 6.7 percent figure in the version the House had earlier passed. That spread, plus disagreement about how much one-time General Fund money to use to buy down rates this year versus next, will be resolved in conference. H.944 (FY27 Transportation Program) and H.952 (capital construction and state bonding) are also still in motion.

There is the political headliner: H.955, sitting in Senate Education as described above. Resolving it is the gating condition for adjournment.

There are bills that moved this week and now await one more procedural step. Six advanced; the table below summarizes status.

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S.325 partially repeals Act 181, eliminating both the “road rule” — which subjected certain road-construction projects to Act 250 review — and the conservation-focused Tier 3 designation. S.329 sponsor Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, has been pursuing similar legislation as a Burlington charter change since the 2025 session; Governor Scott has previously said he would veto a similar Burlington version.

The S.209 expansion adds public libraries, polling places, healthcare facilities, places of worship, state buildings and offices, social services establishments, licensed children’s camps, and travel to and from school to the locations where civil arrests, which include some immigration arrests, are prohibited in Vermont; courthouses are already protected, and Scott has not said whether he would sign the bill.

H.941 follows a 2025 Vermont Supreme Court ruling, originating in an Essex Junction zoning dispute over backyard ducks and cannabis cultivation, that municipalities could enforce local zoning against farming activities not meeting the state’s required agricultural practices definition.

H.816 — the first Vermont attempt to restrict how mental health professionals may use artificial intelligence with patients — would require the Office of Professional Regulation to issue further rules by January 15, 2027.

Bills in Motion

And there are bills still in motion. H.606, banning machine guns and conversion devices including “Glock switches,” is expected on the Senate floor next week.

H.775, a housing production package, is awaiting a final Senate committee vote. A separate data privacy bill is being finalized in the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee.

S.190, on reference-based pricing and Green Mountain Care Board authority, continues moving through the House and is part of an emerging healthcare cost-containment package alongside S.197 on primary care payment reform and Ways and Means premium-assistance language.

Several smaller bills remain in committee or awaiting final votes, including S.323 on miscellaneous agricultural subjects, H.542 on terminating PCB testing in schools, S.214 on prekindergarten in geographically isolated districts, S.255 on a Windham County law-enforcement governance pilot, S.198 on tobacco regulation and taxation, and H.957 on amendments to the Williston town charter.

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One bill was killed this week. Governor Scott vetoed S.218, an act to reduce chloride contamination in state waters by curbing road salt use, on Wednesday, May 6. Scott’s veto letter said the bill could increase liability for municipalities and businesses sued over slip-and-fall injuries. The override math is unfavorable; an override is unlikely.

ANALYSIS: What the Historical Pattern Says About Timing

The historical record offers four reference points for what comes next.

Memorial Day this year falls on Monday, May 25. For final passage of H.955 by Memorial Day, the Senate Education Committee would need to vote out a bill, the Senate would need to schedule second and third readings on different days under regular rules, the bill would need to receive any further committee referrals required, the House would need to either concur in the Senate version or refuse and send the bill to a conference committee, and any conference committee would need to file a report that both chambers then approve.

That path appears procedurally possible if Senate Education votes a bill out by Wednesday or Thursday next week. Each day past that compresses the path.

The harder outer deadline is July 1, the start of the next state fiscal year. Joint Fiscal Office Deputy Fiscal Officer Emily Byrne told House lawmakers Thursday that if there is no enacted budget by July 1, the state government would shut down, with significant uncertainty about which state employees would continue to work, when contractors would be paid, and how Medicaid and SNAP benefits would be administered during the gap. A shutdown could also affect Vermont’s bond rating, increasing future borrowing costs.

What to Watch Next Week

The next substantive action on H.955 is scheduled for Tuesday, May 12, at 3:00 p.m. in Room 10 of the State House, livestreamed at the Senate Education Committee’s YouTube channel. Floor sessions in both chambers begin Tuesday morning under regular rules.

The other indicator worth watching is whether a final adjournment joint resolution gets filed and adopted. The 2025 version (J.R.S.28) and the 2024 version (J.R.S.56) followed the same template: one document setting both an adjournment date and a reconvening provision. A 2026 equivalent has not yet appeared in the bill database.

If H.955 has not cleared Senate Education by the end of next week, Memorial Day final passage is no longer realistic and the session resembles the 2025 timeline more than the 2024 timeline. The reasonable projection from the current record is that final adjournment lands somewhere between late May and mid-June, with a veto session likely on top of that.

Compass Vermont. We bring the data. You form the opinions.

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Vermont’s waterways are getting saltier. Eight streams across Chittenden County and northwestern Vermont are listed as chloride-impaired by ANR’s Watershed Management Division — meaning road salt runoff has pushed contamination levels beyond what state standards allow.

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A ninth is proposed. The Winooski River, which drains much of central Vermont, shows one of the steepest upward trends in the state.

Lawmakers knew this. They spent four years building a bipartisan fix. On February 17, the Vermont Senate passed it 29-1. On April 15, the House passed it 85-54. On May 6, Governor Phil Scott vetoed it.

But the veto wasn’t where the bill’s fate was sealed. That happened on the House floor on April 15, in a voice vote that left no record of who voted which way, on an amendment that the Vermont League of Cities and Towns says would have made the whole thing work.

Understanding what happened in that 24-minute window — and who was in the room — is the real story of S.218.

What the Bill Actually Did

Before getting to what killed it, it’s worth establishing what S.218 actually was — because Governor Scott’s veto letter mischaracterizes it in a way that matters.

Scott wrote that the bill works “by requiring Vermont’s municipalities and commercial businesses to reduce the amount of salt” they use. Section 1362(a) of the bill says otherwise. The program was established explicitly for “the voluntary education, training, and certification of commercial salt applicators.” Participation was optional. No municipality or private contractor was compelled to enroll.

Washington County Sen. Anne Watson, the bill’s lead sponsor, made this point publicly after the veto. The bill text confirms she was right.

What S.218 would have done is create a voluntary certification program run by the Agency of Natural Resources. Commercial applicators and municipal road crews who completed training in best management practices for salt application would receive a certification. In exchange, they would receive an affirmative defense against slip-and-fall lawsuits — meaning if someone was injured on an icy surface they maintained, they could argue in court that they had followed state-approved practices and therefore shouldn’t be held liable.

The program was modeled after New Hampshire’s Green SnowPro certification, which has been operating since 2013 under RSA 508:22. The program has been cited by water quality advocates as evidence that states can reduce road salt usage without impacting public safety.

There was one catch. The entire program was contingent on a General Fund appropriation under Section 6 of the bill. Even if Scott had signed it, nothing would have happened until the Legislature separately funded it.

VLCT’s Position — and the Ask Nobody Met

The Vermont League of Cities and Towns represents every city and town in the state. Its members maintain more than 13,000 miles of public roads — 83 percent of Vermont’s road miles, according to VLCT. Whatever S.218 required of municipalities, VLCT’s position on it mattered.

When Josh Hanford, VLCT’s Director of Intergovernmental Relations, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on March 31, his organization’s official position was neither support nor opposition. He told the committee that VLCT appreciated the training component and recognized that municipalities want to reduce salt use — it’s expensive, supply is inconsistent, and no road crew wants to apply more than necessary. But the liability protection the bill offered wasn’t sufficient to get VLCT to yes.

What VLCT wanted was the same liability caps the State of Vermont has carried under 12 V.S.A. chapter 189 — $500,000 per person and $2 million per occurrence, in effect since 2011. Vermont municipalities have no equivalent protection. A slip-and-fall lawsuit against a municipality faces no statutory cap on damages.

New Hampshire, whose Green SnowPro program Vermont’s bill was modeled after, has carried a municipal tort cap statute — RSA 507-B — since 1975, and a specific provision — RSA 507-B:2-b — protecting municipalities from liability for snow and ice hazards when acting under a written winter maintenance policy. Vermont has neither. The result is that Vermont municipalities operate under unlimited liability exposure that their New Hampshire counterparts do not face, independent of anything a salt reduction program does or doesn’t provide.

Without that floor, Hanford told the committee, municipalities that enrolled in the program and then failed to meet one of its conditions — missed a training year, left a gap in their per-event recordkeeping — would find themselves worse off than if they’d never participated at all. The affirmative defense the bill offered was, in VLCT’s assessment, a trap as much as a protection.

The 24-Minute Window

S.218 came to the House floor on April 15 with a path forward. Reps. Boutin of Barre City, Priestley of Bradford, Galfetti of Barre Town, and Soucy of Barre Town proposed an amendment directly addressing VLCT’s concern.

The amendment was simple. It added a single subsection to Section 4 of the bill stating that if a municipality failed to qualify for the affirmative defense — missed a training, left a recordkeeping gap, fell short on any of the bill’s conditions — any resulting tort claim would be treated the same as a claim against a State employee under the Vermont Tort Claims Against the State Act. The municipality would lose the affirmative defense but retain the state’s liability caps as a backstop.

This was precisely what VLCT had asked for. It required no new funding. It added one paragraph to a 13-page bill.

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At 1:22 in the afternoon, the Chair declared a recess. At 1:46, the House came back to order. The House Journal records only that the question “was disagreed to.” No roll call was demanded. No yea/nay breakdown exists.

The Vermont Association for Justice — the statewide organization representing Vermont’s trial lawyers — appeared in committee through attorney Chris Maley and its paid lobbyist Adam Necrason, according to the House Judiciary agenda. VLCT has identified VTAJ as the only organized opposition to the amendment.

The Vermont Association for Justice was contacted for this story and asked to explain the basis for its opposition. A response had not been received by publication time.

VTAJ’s opposition aligned with the direct financial interests of its members. Trial lawyers representing injured plaintiffs recover more in cases where municipal liability is uncapped. The Boutin amendment would have reduced that exposure in exactly the category of cases — slip-and-fall injuries on icy surfaces — that S.218 addressed. VTAJ did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

After the amendment failed, the House passed S.218 itself 85-54. Three of the four amendment sponsors — Boutin, Galfetti, and Soucy — voted no on final passage. Priestley voted yes. The bill that VLCT said could have worked with one paragraph added went to the Governor without it.

What’s Left

An override would require 93 votes — eight more than S.218 received on final passage. Democrats do not have enough votes in the House to reach that threshold without significant Republican crossover. Unless lawmakers revive the issue through another vehicle, the proposal is dead until at least the 2027 session.

What remains is the problem the bill was designed to address. Eight Vermont waterways are listed as chloride-impaired by ANR’s Watershed Management Division: Sunnyside Brook in Colchester, a tributary to Muddy Brook in Williston, Potash Brook in South Burlington, Englesby Brook in Burlington, Centennial Brook in Burlington, Morehouse Brook in Winooski, Bartlett Brook in South Burlington, and Stevens Brook in St. Albans. A ninth is proposed in ANR’s 2026 listing cycle, currently posted for public comment through May 22.

Several of those waterways — Bartlett Brook, Englesby Brook, Potash Brook, and Stevens Brook — are formally designated warm water fish habitat under Vermont Water Quality Standards, carrying water quality obligations that, according to ANR’s own monitoring data, the state is not currently meeting.

Bethany Sargent, Deputy Director of ANR’s Watershed Management Division, confirmed in response to questions from Compass Vermont that the state has no data on commercial salt application volumes anywhere in Vermont and no municipal-level data outside a handful of communities covered by stormwater permits. “We do not have data at the municipal level broadly,” Sargent wrote, “or have any data about commercial salt application, even in MS4 communities.”

S.218 would have created Vermont’s first mechanism for tracking commercial salt use. That too is gone.

The Winooski River, which drains the watersheds of Montpelier, Barre, and much of Washington County before reaching Lake Champlain, shows one of the two steepest upward chloride trends among Lake Champlain’s major tributaries, according to ANR’s long-term monitoring data.

Every winter without a program, the baseline moves.

In September 2022, plastic from a Brattleboro paper mill began floating down the Connecticut River. It happened again three weeks later. In December, wastewater was being pumped through a hose over a lagoon berm and into the woods toward the riverbank.

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The plant’s wastewater treatment system had been operating without a licensed operator for months. And in the lagoons, sludge was accumulating — sludge that testing would later show contained mercury, PCBs, and cyanide.

On May 7, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark announced a $145,000 settlement with Long Falls Paperboard LLC to resolve a lawsuit filed against the company in October 2024. The Attorney General’s press release described the settlement as “a good outcome that will result in site cleanup.” The court order and the complaint that preceded it tell a more complicated story.

Ten Counts, Five Years, $145,000

The complaint filed by the State in Windham Superior Court documents ten separate counts of environmental violations at the Long Falls Paperboard plant at 161 Wellington Road in Brattleboro — a 39-acre parcel that runs along the Connecticut River. The violations span the entirety of Long Falls Paperboard’s ownership of the plant, beginning in February 2019, the company’s first month of operation.

According to the State’s complaint, the violations include: effluent limits for biochemical oxygen demand exceeded on thirty separate days between February 2019 and May 2022; discharge monitoring reports submitted late to the Agency of Natural Resources twenty-four times; the plant’s clarifier — the primary wastewater treatment component — broke in August 2021 and operated impaired for four months without ANR notification as required by the facility’s permit; plastic discharged into the Connecticut River in September and October 2022; wastewater discharged through a hose into woods adjacent to the river on multiple occasions in December 2022, after ANR had informed the company the practice was a violation; and over 3,000 cubic yards of sludge stockpiled on site in piles up to ten feet high.

The facility also operated without a licensed wastewater treatment operator for twelve consecutive months — from October 15, 2022, to October 12, 2023.

Under 10 V.S.A. § 8221, the civil enforcement statute used by the Attorney General in this case, courts may assess civil penalties of up to $85,000 per violation or up to $42,500 for each day a violation continues. The twelve-month unlicensed operation period alone represents 365 days of theoretical statutory exposure under the per-day penalty provision. The State resolved the case through a $145,000 settlement, payable over six months.

Court filings in a 2021 federal lawsuit brought by an unpaid contractor stated that Long Falls Paperboard had lost nearly $14 million since acquiring the plant, had defaulted on a $2 million loan from the Vermont Economic Development Authority, and had failed to repay a $500,000 bridge loan from the Windham County Economic Development Program — all while environmental violations were accumulating.

The Attorney General’s office declined to answer Compass Vermont’s questions about how the penalty figure was calculated. In correspondence with Compass Vermont, the office cited concerns about the publication’s accuracy. When Compass Vermont asked the office to identify specific errors, the office cited one correction that had been made the same day it was identified. Compass Vermont received no further response before publication.

Mercury, PCBs, and Cyanide

The settlement order requires Long Falls Paperboard to remove all stockpiled sludge from the site and to conduct soil sampling, while stating that certain broader contamination issues — including potential brownfields — are outside the scope of the order.

The complaint provides context for why broader contamination questions may matter. On August 30, 2023, sludge from the facility’s lagoons was sampled at the company’s direction. Test results showed mercury, PCBs, and cyanide at levels the complaint described as “unacceptable for use of the residuals in compost.” The settlement was announced roughly seventeen months after the August 30, 2023 sludge sampling described in the complaint.

The contamination question is not new. The site has carried environmental concerns since before Long Falls Paperboard’s ownership — the EPA grant awarded to BDCC in June 2019 was specifically for a site described as having a long history of industrial use. In June 2019, BDCC received a $500,000 EPA Brownfields grant for Phase II environmental assessment and cleanup work at the site. The settlement order now requires soil sampling specifically beneath the sludge stockpiles that accumulated during Long Falls Paperboard’s operation.

If that sampling reveals contamination beyond the sludge stockpile, responsibility for any further investigation or remediation could become a separate legal question involving the landowner, operator, prior owners, or other potentially responsible parties. Any broader contamination finding could lead to separate regulatory or legal proceedings not resolved by the current settlement order.

The Attorney General’s office declined to respond to questions about what prompted the broader contamination carve-out or what ANR’s soil testing expectations are.

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Who Controls Long Falls Paperboard

A review of corporate records across multiple state registries, supplemented by Vermont municipal property records reviewed by Compass Vermont in May 2026, reveals the following ownership structure.

Long Falls Paperboard LLC is a Washington State foreign limited liability company registered to do business in Vermont, with a principal address listed as 618 Powers Road in Starbuck, Washington — a town with a population of about 130, according to U.S. Census data. Its mailing address on file with the Vermont Secretary of State is a registered agent service in Newark, Delaware.

The company is controlled by two members. The first is Northrich US Holding Company — a Delaware domestic corporation formed February 5, 2019, two months after Long Falls Paperboard acquired the plant operations — which serves as both member and manager. Northrich US Holding Company is connected through shared ownership and address to Les Cartons Northrich Inc., a paperboard company based in Granby, Quebec. The second member is Long Falls Group LLC, a Washington State company whose governors are Richard Normandin personally and Cammenga Investments LLC, which prior reporting has linked to Mike Cammenga, identified in that reporting as a co-owner and former plant manager.

The land and buildings at 161 Wellington Road tell a separate but connected story. When Long Falls Paperboard acquired the plant operations in December 2018, BDCC purchased the land and buildings for $1 million as part of a public-private structure described at the time as helping enable the sale. BDCC held the property for three years — receiving a $500,000 EPA Brownfields grant in June 2019 to conduct environmental assessment and cleanup work at the site.

On January 14, 2022, BDCC sold the property to 161 Wellington Road Real Estate Holding, Inc. — a Delaware corporation registered in Vermont twelve days later, with Richard Normandin listed as its sole director. The corporation’s address on the Brattleboro parcel record is 222 Rue St-Urbain, Granby, Quebec — the same address associated with Northrich’s headquarters.

The timing of that transaction is notable. In a single month — January 2022 — three things happened simultaneously at the Brattleboro plant: BDCC transferred the land and buildings to Normandin’s newly created holding company on January 14; the facility’s licensed wastewater operator resigned on January 3; and ANR conducted a hazardous waste inspection on January 27 that, according to the State’s complaint, found 52 containers of improperly stored waste totaling approximately 21,000 pounds — unlabeled, frozen, leaking, and stored without fire suppression equipment.

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Corporate and property records reviewed by Compass Vermont show Normandin listed in positions connected to the land, buildings, and equipment through separate entities in multiple jurisdictions. Those records repeatedly list Normandin and the Granby, Quebec address associated with Northrich.

Company materials reviewed by Compass Vermont describe Normandin’s Long Falls tenure in terms of sustainability and innovation. Northrich marketing materials describe its products as made from 100% recycled fiber and emphasize environmental stewardship principles.

In response to questions from Compass Vermont, Normandin attributed the violations to the plant’s closure. “When the mill was forced to shut down in the wake of COVID-19 and amid broader economic challenges affecting the paperboard industry, certain byproducts accumulated in the facility’s treatment lagoons and were not immediately removed,” he wrote.

The State’s complaint, however, alleges violations beginning in February 2019 — more than a year before the pandemic reached Vermont. Asked specifically to account for violations that predated COVID-19, Normandin responded that the cited issues “originated under prior ownership and management of the facility” and represented “legacy conditions that were not created under Long Falls Paperboard’s stewardship.”

The complaint states that Long Falls Paperboard assumed ownership of the facility on January 1, 2019, and that the first documented violations occurred in February 2019 — the company’s second month of operation. As part of the settlement, Long Falls Paperboard admitted the factual allegations covering that entire period, as set forth in the settlement order.

What the Settlement Requires

Under the court-approved settlement order, Long Falls Paperboard must complete sludge removal to native soil within 100 days, submit a soil sampling plan to ANR within 90 days, and report test results to ANR within seven days of receipt. The $145,000 penalty is paid in six installments over 150 days.

The order binds Long Falls Paperboard and all successors and assigns. Any change in ownership does not alter the company’s obligations under the order.

The violations admitted in the complaint are deemed established as prior violations in any future state proceeding — including permit reviews and future penalty calculations.

The court and ANR reserve continuing jurisdiction to ensure compliance.

The Vermont House passed S.325 on a 141-0 vote Wednesday, sending the Act 181 reform bill back to the Senate with amendments repealing the Road Rule and Tier 3 — and rejecting, by a 60-83 margin, the one amendment that would have created the broadest new housing opportunity in the bill.

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What the bill does

S.325 repeals Act 181’s Road Rule, which restricted development along Class 3 and 4 roads, and eliminates Tier 3 jurisdiction, which had subjected large tracts of undeveloped land to Act 250 review. Speaker Jill Krowinski, in a statement issued Thursday, said the passage directly responds to Vermonters’ property rights concerns while preserving Act 181’s environmental framework.

“Act 181’s core framework protecting headwaters, wildlife corridors, intact forests, and sensitive natural resources from unchecked sprawl remains intact,” Krowinski said.

The amendment record

Before reaching final passage Wednesday, the House considered four contested roll call amendments.

A proposal by Rep. Burditt of West Rutland to strengthen Tier 1A eligibility — requiring demonstrated municipal or regional planning commission planning capacity — failed 63-80.

A proposal by Rep. Burtt of Cabot to exempt accessory on-farm businesses from Act 250 permit requirements for storage, sales, and on-farm processing of qualifying agricultural products passed 77-66.

A proposal by Rep. Charlton of Chester to push three implementation deadlines from 2028 to 2030 failed 66-76.

A proposal by Rep. Dobrovich of Williamstown to exempt up to 50 units of mixed-income housing within village centers from Act 250 permit requirements through January 1, 2031 — with a municipal opt-out — failed 60-83.

“Only a starting point”

Five members filed written vote explanations after final passage. All five voted yes. All five said the bill doesn’t go far enough.

“In my region, projects don’t fail because demand is too high — they fail because the process is too difficult,” wrote Rep. Bailey of Hyde Park. “S.325 begins to reduce that friction... But for many communities like mine, this is only a starting point, not a solution.”

Rep. Luneau of St. Albans City wrote that Vermont’s current system is not producing enough housing and that S.325 “does not go far enough to address the barriers facing our rural communities.”

Rep. North of Ferrisburgh connected the housing shortfall to Vermont’s demographic trajectory: “If we are serious about reversing demographic decline, S.325 is just the beginning; we will need to go further.”

What happens next

S.325 originated in the Senate and now returns there with the House’s proposed amendments. The Senate must concur — or request a Committee of Conference — before the bill goes to the Governor.

Vermont households are absorbing inflation above the national average, according to state-level calculations by the Democratic members of the Joint Economic Committee, while the farms that supply local and organic food are facing sharp increases in fertilizer and diesel costs, according to an April survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation.

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The two pressures are converging on anyone trying to eat well and eat locally in Vermont.

What Vermont households are paying

According to state-level calculations released in April by the Democratic members of the Joint Economic Committee, the average Vermont household has paid $2,500 more for goods and services since January 2025. That figure — based on Bureau of Economic Analysis household spending data and Consumer Price Index data through March 2026 — places Vermont above the national average of $2,357.

Vermont’s above-average number is driven primarily by housing. The state’s average housing cost increase since the current administration took office is $659, compared to $477 nationally, reflecting Vermont’s already-constrained rental and homeownership market. Transportation adds $351 per Vermont household — slightly below the national average of $368. Because Vermont’s transportation increase falls below the national figure, the JEC data suggests housing is the main category pushing Vermont’s total above the national average. The two categories combined still account for more than $1,000 of the total increase before accounting for food, clothing, health care, and other essentials.

On groceries specifically, a JEC Democratic Minority report from January 2026 found the typical American family paid $310 more for groceries in 2025 compared to 2024. That is a national figure; Vermont-level grocery cost data broken out separately is not yet published for the current period. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index rose 3.3% over the 12 months ending in March 2026, up from 3.0% in January 2025, with gasoline prices rising 21.2% over the month of March. BLS also reported that food prices were unchanged month-over-month in March, with grocery prices down 0.2%. The grocery squeeze is largely cumulative from 2025 price increases rather than a sudden spring spike. The American Farm Bureau Federation notes that higher farm input costs are expected to put upward pressure on food prices in coming months, though timing and magnitude remain uncertain.

What Vermont farmers are paying

On the supply side, Vermont’s 690 USDA-certified organic farms — about one in ten of the state’s 6,537 total farms, according to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture — are entering the growing season with input costs the American Farm Bureau Federation describes as the most volatile since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A survey of more than 5,700 farmers conducted by the AFBF between April 3 and April 11 found that nitrogen fertilizer prices have risen more than 30% since late February, with urea prices specifically up roughly 47%. Farm diesel has risen 46% over the same period.

The price spikes are tied to supply chain disruptions following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. According to the AFBF and the Fertilizer Institute, countries in and around the Persian Gulf account for approximately 49% of global urea exports and 30% of global ammonia exports. Rystad Energy places those figures lower, at roughly 21% and 15% respectively, reflecting different methodologies for measuring seaborne versus total global trade. Higher energy prices have compounded the cost pressure regardless, since nitrogen fertilizer production relies heavily on natural gas as a feedstock.

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The AFBF survey found that around 70% of farmers nationally said they could not afford all the fertilizer they needed for the 2026 growing season. In the Northeast — Vermont’s USDA region — the figure is 69%. Smaller operations are the most exposed: in the Northeast, only 24% of the smallest farm operations had pre-booked fertilizer ahead of the season, compared to 35% of mid-sized farms and 67% of the largest. Because smaller farms are less likely to lock in prices in advance, they face full exposure to in-season cost spikes with less margin to absorb them.

Vermont’s certified organic sector maps closely to that most-exposed profile. According to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture, more than three-quarters of Vermont’s farms are family-owned operations, and the state’s 690 certified organic farms are concentrated among smaller producers selling directly to consumers through farmers markets, co-ops, CSAs, and farm stands — channels that require the farm to absorb cost increases before, or instead of, passing them along. Farmers who set their 2026 CSA share prices before the late-February input cost spike may have limited ability to raise prices during the season, making it difficult to pass along new costs until the next pricing cycle.

The convergence

That is the structural squeeze: Vermont households with less budget flexibility than the national picture suggests, buying from farms whose operating costs have risen sharply in the span of ten weeks. Certified organic production does not use most synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, but diesel remains unavoidable — it powers field equipment, transport, and refrigeration across every type of operation. The AFBF estimates combined fuel and fertilizer expenses are running 20% to 40% higher this spring depending on the specific farm.

Those cost increases have not yet fully worked their way to retail prices. The USDA’s 2025 Organic Survey — which will provide updated Vermont-specific farm input and expense data — is expected to be published October 30, 2026.

U.S. Senator Peter Welch visited a Middlebury food shelf and a Charlotte grain operation this week to hear from Vermonters about food costs. The underlying data, from federal statistical agencies and the nation’s largest agricultural organization, frames what he heard.

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At today's press conference, Governor Scott, law enforcement, and the mother of a murdered Bennington woman laid out a simple case: Vermont has no secure facility for people who commit violent crimes and are found mentally unfit for trial. The legislature has two days to act.

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Here is what Governor Phil Scott wants you to understand: if someone in your community commits murder, sexual assault, or kidnapping and is found mentally unfit to stand trial, Vermont has nowhere to put them.

No secure treatment facility. No program to restore their mental fitness so they can face trial. And in many cases, no supervision after they are released back into the community.

At his press conference today, the governor stood alongside prosecutors, law enforcement officials, a state commissioner, and Kelly Carroll — a Bennington mother whose daughter Emily Hamann was murdered in 2021 by a man the system had already identified as dangerous, released, and left without formal supervision. The governor made his case for a bill that would begin to close this gap. The legislature has two days before the session ends.

They know who these people are

Kim McManus, a legislative and policy attorney for the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs, put the scope of the problem in plain terms.

“All 14 of our state’s attorneys, all 14 of our sheriffs could name individuals in their community who they are worried about,” she said. “Who they know pose a risk, but who are out in our communities because they have been found incompetent. And there is nowhere for them to go.”

The bill currently before the House would apply to a narrow group — people charged with crimes punishable by life sentences who have been found mentally unfit to participate in their own defense. That’s an estimated five or six people at any given time. Most of them are already being held in state custody. But McManus said the broader population of violent offenders with competency issues is much larger, and broadening the bill’s scope “will be the next step.”

When the governor was asked whether any of these individuals are currently living in the community unsupervised, his team said they would need to check — but acknowledged that people in this situation have been placed in the community before. Carroll’s daughter was killed by one of them.

Why the debate keeps stalling — and what most people don’t know

For five years, the legislature has argued about where to put this facility. One side says it should be run by the Department of Mental Health. The other says the Department of Corrections. Each side has blocked the other’s proposal. Nothing has been built.

What most Vermonters probably don’t know — and what today’s press conference made clear — is that the mental health option may not be available at all.

Vermont’s existing psychiatric facilities, including the Vermont Psychiatric Care Hospital in Berlin and the River Valley Therapeutic Residence, are classified under federal rules as Institutions for Mental Disease. If those facilities accept this population, they risk losing their Medicaid funding — the federal dollars that keep them running.

Carroll, who has followed this issue through four legislative sessions, explained it directly: “The legislature’s tried to push this through DMH and DAIL, but because our facilities are what they call IMD institutions, they cannot take these patients because they will lose all Medicaid funding. And we cannot afford to lose Medicaid funding for the Berlin Psych Hospital or River Valley.”

That leaves two realistic options. Build a brand-new standalone facility under a health agency — which testimony has estimated would take five to ten years. Or use clinical space inside an existing correctional facility, which is what the bill proposes and which could be operational almost immediately.

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“It’s not perfect,” Carroll said. “But it’s basically where we’ve kicked that can down to. This is our only alternative to get something started.”

What this would actually look like

The facility would not be a prison ward. Clinical services would not be provided by corrections officers. According to the DAIL Commissioner, Dr. Davone, who has worked in forensic psychiatry in New York and Pennsylvania, restoration services would be delivered by providers with specialized forensic training — and overseen by the Agency of Human Services, not DOC.

“What’s most important is what happens inside the facilities, not which facility they are in,” Dr. Davone said.

The DOC Commissioner confirmed that the department is already housing several individuals who would qualify under this bill. “We are doing that with the staff that we currently have,” the Commissioner said. The bill would formalize what is already happening — and add the treatment component that doesn’t currently exist.

What Carroll wants you to hear

Carroll has testified before five committees across four legislative sessions. Today she spoke to the public.

She traced her daughter’s killer through Vermont’s system: violent assaults in 2015 and 2016, an attempted murder of a family in Pownal in 2018, release in 2020 into the custody of a local mental health agency, a violent incident the night before her daughter was killed — and Emily Hamann’s murder the next morning.

“Each time it gets through the Senate, but then it hits a roadblock in the House,” she said. “And the only result is more years of studies and more delays. And with every delay unfortunately comes more victims.”

She addressed lawmakers who have told her that victims don’t belong in this debate. “We have been told that we do not understand or have the experience or the knowledge to understand the complexity of the issues at stake,” she said. “And that is not true. We are not asking for punishment. We are asking for a system — one that provides monitoring, supervision, programming, treatment, and accountability. Because right now Vermont doesn’t have one.”

Two days

The governor said he hopes the House will not “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” He acknowledged that a DOC-based facility is not the ideal long-term answer. But he said it is the only option that can provide immediate relief while the state works toward something better.

The bill is currently in House Judiciary. It is also being reviewed by House Human Services, House Corrections and Institutions, and House Health Care. None of the four committees has voted. The session adjourns Friday.

Amy Farr, director of Victim Services for the Vermont State Police, noted that the bill would do something no previous law has done: give victims notice and a voice in proceedings that have historically been closed to them. “For the first time, it offers a pathway for resolution and accountability in cases that would probably most likely otherwise be dismissed,” Farr said. “And this is a huge step forward for victims and communities.”

Carroll has been asking for this since January 18, 2021 — the morning her daughter was killed on the Riverwalk in downtown Bennington.

This is the latest in a series of Compass Vermont reports on Vermont’s competency gap. Read the full background, including the legislative history, the families affected, and how other states have addressed this issue.

Compass Vermont is free, independent, and has no ads, no sponsors, and no corporate owner. If you value reporting that gives you the full picture and lets you draw your own conclusions, please consider subscribing or upgrading to a paid subscription.

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According to a post on the Department of Environmental Conservation’s official Facebook page, state water quality staff visiting Lake Carmi in Franklin last week recorded a spring water clarity reading of 6.3 meters using a standard Secchi disc, the tool scientists lower into a lake until it disappears from view.

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Using a newer Secchi viewscope, the reading reached 7.2 meters. DEC has been conducting spring clarity measurements on Vermont lakes since 1970 and on Lake Carmi specifically since 1977 — across 29 sampling visits over nearly five decades, the lake’s spring average was 2.6 meters. Last week’s standard Secchi reading was nearly two and a half times that average. The previous all-time spring record, set in 2002, was 3.8 meters.

DEC Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamman accompanied field crews for the visit, which combined routine spring monitoring with a first look at results since the alum treatment concluded. DEC described the results as “just a very initial observation, but it sure is encouraging,” noting that lab analysis of collected samples and continued monitoring throughout the season will determine whether the improvement holds.

What the treatment involved

Beginning the week of September 22, 2025, and running through October 30, contractors applied a mixture of aluminum sulfate and sodium aluminate — the primary compound commonly known as alum — across the lake from a barge stationed at Lake Carmi State Park’s boat launch. The project was designed by Barr Engineering of Minneapolis following a 2024 feasibility study; the physical treatment was administered by SOLitude Lake Management, a Virginia-based lake restoration firm. The final cost was $3.7 million, according to DEC Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamman’s January 2026 briefing to the Vermont House Committee on Environment — up from an early estimate of $3.5 million reported by Vermont Public before the project began. The project was funded through Vermont’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund and Clean Water Revolving Loan Fund; Franklin Select Board Chair David Bennion said at the time the town would bear none of the cost.

Alum works by bonding to phosphorus already present in a lake’s water column and sediment, forming a dense material called “floc” that sinks and creates a barrier preventing phosphorus already stored in the lakebed — called legacy phosphorus — from cycling back into the water to fuel algae blooms. The treatment is not designed to address new phosphorus entering the lake from the surrounding watershed. According to DEC, treatments typically remain effective for 10 to 15 years, though continued phosphorus runoff can shorten that window.

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A lake in crisis for decades

Lake Carmi, covering 1,375 acres in Franklin County and reaching a maximum depth of 33 feet, is the fourth largest natural lake located entirely within Vermont. DEC listed it as “impaired” for phosphorus in 2008, meaning it failed to meet Vermont Water Quality Standards. In 2018, Vermont’s Secretary of Natural Resources designated it the state’s only Lake in Crisis — a designation established under Act 168 and codified in 10 V.S.A. § 1310 — due to the long-term presence of toxic cyanobacteria blooms that periodically close the lake to swimming and recreation late each summer.

The state’s response over the past decade-plus has included agricultural best management practices throughout the watershed — manure injection, cover crops, reduced tillage — along with a zero-discharge wastewater system at Lake Carmi State Park, shoreline vegetation projects by private landowners, and road erosion controls. By 2021, DEC reported that phosphorus reductions from agricultural practices alone had exceeded the targets set in the lake’s Total Maximum Daily Load plan. But the blooms continued, sustained by legacy phosphorus already built up in the sediment over decades.

In 2019, the state installed an aeration system in the lake in an attempt to oxygenate bottom sediments and reduce phosphorus release. It did not work — DEC’s own documentation states the system “was not able to effectively reduce surface water phosphorus concentrations or cyanobacteria blooms and seems to have had the opposite effect.” The system was not operated in 2024, and its removal was planned for 2025. Barr Engineering was then contracted to conduct a comprehensive alum feasibility study, which led directly to last fall’s treatment.

The complication: clearer water, more weeds

State regulators have cautioned against treating the Lake Carmi intervention as a broad template for other impaired Vermont waters. A DEC official told Vermont Public in July that the state would be “hard-pressed” to recommend alum more widely and that regulators would rather focus resources on preventing phosphorus from entering lakes in the first place.

Part of the reason is an unintended consequence already observed elsewhere in Vermont: greater water clarity allows sunlight to penetrate deeper, which can accelerate the growth of invasive aquatic plants. Vermont Public reported that a similar dynamic followed the alum treatment at Lake Morey in Fairlee, requiring an early herbicide application to manage invasive Eurasian milfoil. Franklin Select Board Chair Bennion has identified invasive plant growth as a concern to watch at Lake Carmi this season.

What’s next

DEC stated that lab results from last week’s samples are pending and that monitoring will continue throughout the 2026 season. The department’s real-time monitoring data, collected through a platform buoy operated jointly by DEC and the University of Vermont, is available at the UVM EPSCoR Lake Carmi portal. Full documentation of the restoration effort, including meeting minutes, historical data, and reports, is at dec.vermont.gov/watershed/restoring/carmi.

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Brendan Kinney, the chief operating officer of Vermont Public, has been selected as the next chief executive officer of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the nonprofit parent organization of VTDigger, Vermont’s largest online news outlet.

Kinney, who spent 16 years at Vermont Public and its predecessor Vermont Public Radio — including a year as interim CEO — was chosen unanimously by the trust’s board following a national search. He grew up in central Vermont and holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Saint Michael’s College.

He succeeds Sky Barsch, who joined VTDigger as CEO in April 2023 and announced her departure in January. Barsch’s tenure included reducing the organization’s annual financial losses and completing a new four-year union agreement with newsroom staff. Her last day is June 1.

Kinney inherits an organization that has made measurable financial progress but remains in the red. According to the Vermont Journalism Trust’s public tax filings, the organization posted a net loss of just over $1 million in 2022, which had been reduced to approximately $726,000 in 2023 and $76,000 in 2024. The newly signed union contract and the cost of sustaining a newsroom of roughly 30 people add to the financial pressure Kinney will face as he works to close the gap.

VTDigger was founded by Anne Galloway in 2009.

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When the Economy Turns, Maine Has a Playbook. Vermont Doesn’t.

When COVID-19 shut down the economy in March 2020, Maine’s budget officials didn’t have to guess what was coming. They pulled out a stress-test report their state had published two years earlier, ran the severe recession scenario, and estimated a revenue shortfall of roughly $200 million for the remaining quarter of the fiscal year. They determined the state could absorb it without emergency cuts. They were right — the actual shortfall came in at less than half that figure.

Vermont had no comparable published budget stress-test report to reach for. It still does not.

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A database maintained by The Pew Charitable Trusts, updated through April 2026, tracks which states have adopted two analytical tools that Pew and all three major credit rating agencies identify as best practice for sustainable state budgeting: long-term budget assessments, which project revenues and spending across multiple years, and budget stress tests, which model what happens to a state’s finances when a recession hits or a major funding source disappears. Vermont does not appear in either category.

Only eight states have both tools. Twenty-five states have at least one. Vermont has neither.

Josh Goodman, who helps lead Pew’s research on fiscal management and long-term budget sustainability, confirmed Vermont’s status directly. “Vermont is one of 25 states that has used neither of these analytical tools,” Goodman said, adding that Vermont’s absence from Pew’s records dates to at least 2018, the start date of the organization’s research on the subject.

Why It Matters Now

What makes this more than an abstract governance gap is the moment Vermont finds itself in. The state’s General Fund relies on personal income tax for 50 percent of its revenue — a source Vermont’s own fiscal experts have flagged as highly volatile over the business cycle. Federal funding uncertainty has become a concern for state budget writers, including around agricultural programs, which saw freezes and cancellations as of early 2025, and Medicaid reimbursement, which faces potential cost shifts to states under federal legislative proposals currently moving in Washington. Taken together, those factors point to a period of elevated fiscal risk — without a formal model for how that risk plays out.

Vermont’s Own Report Said So

Vermont’s own government acknowledged this gap in December 2024.

Pursuant to Act 87 of 2024, the Legislature directed the Treasurer’s Office to produce a State Reserves Study and a Stress-Testing Report, in consultation with the Department of Finance and Management and the Joint Fiscal Office. The resulting 28-page report, submitted to the Joint Fiscal Committee on December 15, 2024, directly acknowledged the gap.

On reserves, the working group delivered good news. The report noted that Vermont is rated AA+ by S&P, Aa1 by Moody’s, and AA+ by Fitch — each the second-highest available rating — and that prior downgrades were related to Vermont’s longer-term economic and demographic outlook, not to reserves or financial management, which the agencies continue to score very highly. The General Fund alone holds $306.6 million in reserves, representing 14.6 percent of prior-year appropriations.

On stress testing, the working group delivered something different: an acknowledgment that the gap is real, paired with a recommendation to act only “should personnel and financial resources become available.”

The full sentence from the report is worth reading: “Should personnel and financial resources become available, Vermont could consider conducting a one-time stress-testing and multi-year budget projection exercise to determine its value to the State’s planning and budgeting process.”

One-time. Consider. If resources become available.

The working group was also candid about a structural gap that stress testing is designed to reveal. Vermont currently has a multi-year revenue forecast, produced by the State Economist. It does not have a corresponding multi-year expenditure forecast. That asymmetry means policymakers can see one side of the ledger into the future — but not both sides at once, which is precisely what a stress test requires.

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What State Officials Say Now

Adam Greshin, Vermont’s Commissioner of Finance and Management and one of the co-authors of the December 2024 report, said the work has not moved forward — but not for lack of agreement on its value.

“We have not, not because we disagree with the proposal but because we have many other projects on our plate,” Greshin said.

He described the multi-year expenditure forecast as an ongoing internal discussion. “Producing a multi-year budget has been, and continues to be, an active discussion in the executive branch,” he said. “The fluidity of our revenue streams, federal and state, has dissuaded us in recent years but the discussion continues.”

The phrase is notable: federal funding uncertainty — the very condition that makes a stress test most valuable — is also, by Greshin’s account, part of what has made one harder to produce.

Greshin also raised a potential path forward that the December report did not explore. Asked what it would realistically take to conduct a one-time stress-testing exercise, he said the state might not need to build internal capacity at all. “This may be something we could contract out,” he said.

He noted Vermont’s current financial position as context: the state set aside more than $100 million in last year’s budget to meet contingencies, and statutory reserves are fully funded. According to the December 2024 State Reserves Study, Vermont’s unrestricted cash balance peaked at $2.6 billion in June 2023 and stood at over $1.6 billion as of November 2024, though it is expected to decline further as pandemic-era federal funds are drawn down.

Catherine Benham, Chief Fiscal Officer of the Legislative Joint Fiscal Office and a co-author of the December 2024 report, said conversations about closing that gap are already underway — though they were not reflected in the report itself.

“We have talked to Pew about working with Vermont on learning more about, and perhaps developing a stress test for Vermont,” Benham said. “I expect to continue those conversations with the understanding that it will take staff resources to undertake this work.”

She framed the tool as additive rather than corrective. “Stress testing is one tool that could be added to the assortment of tools already used to manage and plan for the future,” she said.

Pew: Vermont Isn’t Starting From Scratch

Goodman pushed back on the resource-constraint rationale. “Many smaller states with staffing constraints have proven that they can regularly produce high-quality analyses,” he said, naming Alaska, Maine, Montana, New Mexico, and Rhode Island as examples. He also noted that Vermont would not be starting from scratch: the state’s consensus revenue estimates already include five-year revenue projections that “could serve as a starting point for long-term budget assessments if combined with spending projections.”

That combination — adding an expenditure forecast to match Vermont’s existing revenue forecast — is precisely what the December 2024 working group report itself identified as the missing piece, without recommending a standing statutory requirement to build one.

The Maine Model — And Connecticut’s

Maine offers a nearby New England comparison with a similarly small economy and revenue base. Maine’s Legislature mandated biennial stress tests in 2017 via Public Law 2017, Chapter 284. The tests are prepared jointly by the state’s Consensus Economic Forecasting Commission — composed of independent economists — and its Revenue Forecasting Committee. The results go to the Governor, legislative leadership, and the joint standing committee of the Legislature having jurisdiction over appropriations and financial affairs every two years by October 1, by law — not contingent on appropriation or available staff bandwidth.

Maine’s most recent stress test, published October 1, 2024, ran two recession scenarios against five years of General Fund revenue projections. Under a moderate recession beginning in early 2025, Maine’s model estimates a General Fund revenue decline of 6.1 percent in FY2026, with revenues still 2.9 percent below baseline in FY2029. Under a severe recession, the peak decline reaches 14.8 percent in FY2027, with Maine’s rainy day fund — currently holding $908 million, or 17 percent of prior-year General Fund revenue — exhausted by early FY2027. The report gives the Governor and Legislature a concrete timeline: approximately 15 to 18 months to respond before reserves run out.

That kind of specific, scenario-based planning information is what Vermont currently lacks the institutional machinery to produce.

Goodman noted that Maine’s model built directly on existing staff capacity. “Maine’s approach has been to task the state’s revenue forecasters with conducting stress tests,” he said. “This work builds directly off their regular forecasts — both involve estimating how economic conditions would translate to revenue collections.”

Connecticut offers a newer model still. According to Goodman, Connecticut passed a law in 2025 requiring budget stress tests, using historical recessions as a guide for estimating revenue declines — an approach he described as producing “reasonable estimates without the need for more complicated models that require more staff time and specialized training.”

Vermont’s working group cited both Maine and Connecticut approvingly in the December 2024 report. What it did not do was recommend Vermont follow their example by statute.

The Defensible Case — And Its Limits

There is a defensible version of Vermont’s current position. Vermont’s credit ratings — AA+ from S&P, Aa1 from Moody’s, AA+ from Fitch — reflect genuine fiscal strength. Vermont’s rainy day fund balances have ranked above the mean and median of peer states in each of the last three fiscal years. Research has not demonstrated a clear correlation between having a formal stress test and having a strong credit rating — a point the working group itself noted in recommending against requiring the exercise.

But Vermont’s credit ratings carry a specific caveat worth noting. Vermont lost its triple-A rating from Moody’s in October 2018 and from Fitch in July 2019 — downgrades the working group attributes explicitly to Vermont’s longer-term economic and demographic outlook, not to any failure of fiscal management. That is precisely the kind of structural, multi-year trend that a long-term budget assessment is designed to surface and quantify before it becomes a crisis. Vermont did not have one then. It does not have one now.

Goodman framed the broader national stakes plainly. “States across the country face tightening budget conditions, with both short-term shortfalls and long-term structural deficits common,” he said. The pressures driving those gaps, he said, include aging populations, increasingly frequent natural disasters, federal decisions shifting costs for programs including Medicaid and SNAP to states, and states’ own decisions to cut taxes and increase spending. “These challenges make high-quality long-term analysis even more important.”

The Bottom Line

Vermont knows the tools exist. It knows it doesn’t have them. The December 2024 report left the question of whether to build them contingent on resources that, seventeen months later, have not materialized — even as the officials who wrote that report have quietly begun conversations with Pew about changing that.

Maine built its stress test with a statute. That cost nothing.

Compass Vermont contacted the Vermont State Treasurer’s Office, the Vermont Department of Finance and Management, the Legislative Joint Fiscal Office, and The Pew Charitable Trusts for this story. The Treasurer’s Office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Responses from all other parties have been incorporated.

If you found this story valuable, please consider supporting Compass Vermont with a paid subscription. Independent accountability journalism in Vermont depends on readers like you.

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The Vergennes resort, Basin Harbor, was hit by a ransomware attack on October 20, 2025. Hackers accessed the resort’s computer systems and walked away with some of the most sensitive personal data a company can hold: Social Security numbers, government identification numbers, financial account information, and credit and debit card data.

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According to the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, 1,757 Vermont residents were affected. The total number of people notified nationwide is 3,150.

Notifications to affected individuals went out April 20, 2026.

The attack was carried out by a criminal group known as Akira, which publicly claimed responsibility in November 2025. Akira typically steals data before threatening to publish it — a tactic designed to pressure victims into paying. It is not publicly known whether Basin Harbor paid a ransom or whether the stolen data has been released.

If you think you may be affected, here’s what to do right now:

Place a credit freeze with all three major bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. It’s free, it takes about ten minutes per bureau, and it prevents anyone from opening new accounts in your name without your knowledge. A freeze does not affect your existing accounts or your credit score. You can lift it temporarily any time you need to apply for credit.

You can also request a free credit report at AnnualCreditReport.com to check for any accounts or activity you don’t recognize.

If you received a written notice from Basin Harbor in the past two weeks, a California law firm — Cole & Van Note — has already opened an investigation and is pursuing legal action on behalf of affected individuals.

Basin Harbor Resort is listed in the Vermont Attorney General’s public data breach registry, which tracks every company required to report a breach affecting Vermont residents. The registry is available at ago.vermont.gov. Compass Vermont will continue following this story.

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Saturday was Green Up Day, the annual statewide ritual in which thousands of Vermonters pull on gloves, grab green bags, and walk the state’s roadsides clearing out whatever winter and human carelessness left behind. The total tonnage is staggering — but the strange specifics are what make the day, and one thread on r/vermont has become the unofficial annual ledger of the weirdest finds.

This year’s haul, as documented on r/vermont, did not disappoint.

The crown likely goes to user WhatTheCluck802, who came across a giant femur — possibly moose, possibly cow — and added it to what they describe as a personal bone collection housed in a stainless steel produce basket on their back deck. “I trotted up the road with a green bag in one hand and this massive bone in the other, skipping with glee,” they wrote. They are now considering acquiring a second basket.

In the genuinely useful category: user matt_vt found a “minty” Burton ICS snowboard, undamaged. User Bandit_mochi reported that someone they were with picked up a $100 bill. User SheaF91 fished a cheetah-print Stanley thermos out of the bushes near a Price Chopper.

The booze and party supplies category was, predictably, well represented — a handle of Fireball, a full can of whipped cream (minus the gas), and a sealed box of fruit-flavored nitrous canisters all turned up in different parts of the state.

The bones category was, less predictably, also well represented. Beyond WhatTheCluck802’s femur, user Jeb_802 posted a photo of their own osteological haul, and user teamlazerhawk picked up a raccoon skull. User AntelopeParticular70 found an entire plastic bag of bones, which they are choosing to attribute to hunters rather than the opening credits of Law & Order.

Other notable items: hologram baseball cards scattered across one stretch of road, a car axle, a bright red button, and a single dime.

The thread, now an annual fixture, captures something the official tonnage totals cannot: that Green Up Day is also a kind of slow-motion archaeological dig of Vermont life. The whipped-cream cans and Fireball handles tell one story. The undamaged snowboard, the $100 bill, and the femur destined for someone’s deck collection tell another.

Green Up Day was launched in 1970 by Gov. Deane C. Davis, after Burlington Free Press reporter Robert S. Babcock Jr. walked into the governor’s office the previous spring and pitched the idea. Vermont remains the only state in the country without an Adopt-A-Highway program — Green Up Day is the grassroots alternative, and has been since the first one drew roughly 70,000 volunteers onto the roads. The full r/vermont discussion is here.

When you buy a ticket marked “Obstructed View,” at least you know.

A pillar blocks the left side of the stage. A beam cuts across the field. You can see most of it — but not all of it. And crucially, you knew that going in.

The best seats in Vermont news don’t come with that label. But a lot of them should.

Politically filtered. Institutionally cautious. Dependent on the sources they’re supposed to scrutinize. Asking the questions their audiences want to hear rather than the ones their audiences need answered.

Nobody is putting “Partially Obstructed View” on the ticket. But the obstruction is there.

Compass Vermont is not a perfect front-row seat. No publication is.

But we will always tell you exactly what we can and can’t see from where we’re sitting. We’ll show you the numbers instead of telling you what they mean. We’ll ask the question your neighbor asked at the general store that nobody in Montpelier ever answers.

And we’ll never mistake our own view of the stage for the whole performance.

Compass Vermont turns one on May 15. Ten days left to lock in $50 a year before the price goes up.

If you’ve been reading Compass and trusting what you see — this is how you say so. Until May 15, you can get a paid subscription for $5.00 a month or $50.00 annually. After, the monthly sub will go to $7.00 or $75.00.

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Tom Davis — Compass Vermont