BETA Technologies’ revenue came in at $14.7 million against a guidance range of $8 million to $11 million — about a third above the top of what the company told investors to expect, and roughly two and a half times the $6.0 million it booked in the same quarter last year. BETA raised its full-year revenue guidance to $42 million to $50 million, up from the $39 million to $43 million it had held to since March.

Subscribe now

The number that matters most to Vermont is further down. BETA spent $41.1 million on property and equipment in the quarter, up from $6.0 million a year earlier — nearly seven times as much. That is the South Burlington plant. The company expects to spend $150 million to $200 million on capital projects this year.

It wants a federal lender to pay for a large share of it.

What the billion dollars is for

On Aug. 4, BETA and the Export-Import Bank of the United States announced they intend to expand an existing financing relationship to as much as $1 billion, roughly $830 million of it new money on top of the $169 million EXIM approved in 2023 to build the South Burlington production plant.

EXIM is the federal government’s export credit agency. Its traditional job is financing foreign buyers of American goods, but the 2023 BETA loan came through a newer program called Make More in America, which opened EXIM’s long-term lending to domestic manufacturing projects whose output is destined for export. That is the door BETA went through then, and the one it would go through again.

The Aug. 4 announcement did not say what the money would be spent on. Wednesday’s earnings call did.

Chief Financial Officer Herman Cueto laid out a division of labor between BETA’s two pots of money: proceeds from last November’s stock offering fund research and certification work, while the EXIM financing would fund capital assets — buildings, equipment, tooling. Founder and CEO Kyle Clark returned to the point in his closing remarks, describing the arrangement as matching each kind of money to the kind of spending it suits.

For a reader in Vermont, that is the whole point. The federal financing under discussion is factory money, and the factory is here.

Cueto said BETA is still in talks with EXIM and has a meeting scheduled in the coming weeks to discuss increasing volume through the plant and expanding vertical integration. Nothing is signed.

Subscribe now

Building the factory before the plane is certified

BETA’s aircraft are not yet certified by the Federal Aviation Administration, which means the company cannot sell them to ordinary commercial operators. Its production rate has not moved since last quarter.

Clark said that is deliberate. The most valuable work on the production floor right now, he told analysts, is securing long-lead materials, expanding vertical integration, staging production lines, qualifying suppliers, and bringing already-hired workers up to standard. He said BETA bought its autoclaves — the pressurized ovens used to cure composite parts — along with trim tools and ultrasonic inspection equipment early, because working under FAA oversight does not leave much room to change strategy quickly.

That is the bet the EXIM money would underwrite: build the capacity now, so that when the certificate arrives there is no second scramble to tool up.

Certification itself moved this quarter. BETA and the FAA settled a disagreement over how an existing rule applies to electric motors — a question of regulatory interpretation, not engineering, that had been holding up the H500A propulsion program. On the CX300, the conventional-takeoff aircraft, the FAA accepted the company’s complete set of compliance requirements, which BETA says is a first for the industry.

The Vermont jobs question

Neither the release nor the call gave a headcount, and no analyst asked.

Compass reported on Aug. 8 that BETA employed 1,008 people at the end of 2025, up from 902 six months earlier, and that the jobs language in the Aug. 4 announcement is written nationally — “hundreds of technical, high-quality U.S. aerospace and advanced-manufacturing jobs” — where the 2023 loan announcement counted 400 Vermont jobs specifically. BETA’s manufacturing is centered in South Burlington, but the company also runs a flight-test base across the lake in Plattsburgh, New York.

So the question the second quarter raises is not whether BETA is hiring. It is what share of the next wave lands in Vermont.

Nothing in Wednesday’s results answers that. What they do show is a company spending like one that expects to need the people: capital spending up nearly sevenfold year over year, a full-year capital budget of $150 million to $200 million, and a chief executive describing the current job on the factory floor as training the workers already hired.

There is a Vermont-sized complication behind the hiring. VTDigger reported in June that BETA’s chief information officer put the company’s January-to-June hiring at 420 people, and that Green Mountain Avionics in Middlebury estimates its staff has shrunk by about half since the South Burlington plant opened in 2023, with much of it going to BETA. Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation president Frank Cioffi described the underlying condition as a tight labor market that takes time to retrain into. In a state this size, a large aerospace expansion is partly addition and partly redistribution within a technical workforce that already exists.

What is paying the bills now

Aircraft sales are not carrying the quarter. Of the $14.7 million in revenue, $3.3 million came from products and $11.4 million from services. Two things drove the beat:

• Charging infrastructure. BETA delivered against a 34-charger contract with the Florida Department of Transportation. Its network now runs to 138 sites.

• The Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration program. Hybrid-electric propulsion work with GE Aerospace, conducted under a NASA program that this quarter produced a flight above 30,000 feet.

BETA also sells components to other aircraft manufacturers — motors, batteries, inverters, flight control computers — at margins Cueto put at 40 to 60 percent, higher still on the computers. Shortly after the quarter closed, the company sold flight control computers and software licensing to Horizon Aircraft, the third outside aircraft program to fly on BETA’s flight control computers.

Subscribe now

The charging business also puts BETA on the same side of the table as a company that just got considerably larger. In July, BETA joined Archer Aviation and Macquarie Capital in a consortium to build up to 250 charging sites in California, Texas, Florida, and New York. On Aug. 10, Boeing sold three subsidiaries — including Wisk Aero, its own air taxi arm — to Archer in exchange for a stake in the company. Asked about the consortium Wednesday, Clark said airports are public-use facilities where the industry has to agree on a common charging standard, and that Archer brings knowledge of where to put chargers in major metropolitan areas that BETA does not have. Cueto said BETA has the only certified CCS charger suitable for electric aviation and expects the consortium to grow.

The costs

BETA lost $148.8 million in the quarter, about $1.6 million a day, and roughly $10 for every dollar of revenue. Research and development alone ran $122.4 million, more than eight times what the company took in.

It has the cash to absorb that for now: $1.48 billion on hand at the end of June. Against a full-year plan of $400 million to $445 million in adjusted losses plus $150 million to $200 million in capital spending, that is roughly two and a half years of runway before any EXIM money arrives.

Three figures point the other way.

• Third-quarter revenue is guided to $8 million to $12 million, below the quarter just reported. A federal research program and a state charger contract do not repeat every quarter.

• The loss forecast widened at the bottom. In May the company guided full-year adjusted losses of $355 million to $445 million. It now expects $400 million to $445 million, having cut off the better end of the range.

• The order book grew by about ten aircraft. BETA reported 991 aircraft worth $3.9 billion in May and 1,001 aircraft worth $3.9 billion on Wednesday. Crossing 1,000 is a milestone; the dollar figure behind it did not move, and the year-end target of $4 billion is the same distance away it was three months ago.

What to watch

The financing is an intention, not a loan, and the path from here is public. The EXIM board has to vote; domestic loans of this size cannot be approved by staff. Loans above $50 million go to Congress in advance. Anything above $100 million is published in the Federal Register with at least a 25-day comment window — the one point at which a Vermonter can put something on the record about a federal loan to a Vermont factory.

South Burlington police announced Aug. 10 that they have launched a bicycle patrol, putting a five-member unit — four officers and a parks patrol member — on Market Street and Garden Street, in city parks, and on the recreation paths. The department is supplying bikes and e-bikes, and says those assigned have trained in bike safety, regulations, and public engagement.

The department describes the program as an investment in safer streets and stronger relationships, and says officers out from behind a windshield are easier to approach.

Subscribe now

The paths on that list are the same ones the city spent last year arguing about.

Complaints about speed on the shared-use paths — most of them aimed at e-bikes — went to South Burlington’s Bicycle & Pedestrian Committee. What came back was education, signage, a code of conduct, and speed limits that were advisory rather than binding.

The recurring objection, raised by committee members and path users alike, was that a real limit would need someone to enforce it. The city has no e-bike ordinance. On the paths, riders answer to state law, which treats an e-bike as a bicycle.

The city’s answer, in short, was that path conduct wasn’t something it would enforce.

Now there are officers on the paths. That isn’t what the announcement is about, and the department hasn’t said the patrol has anything to do with the speed complaints. But the practical position has moved. A city that decided it wouldn’t police the paths now has people on them.

That leaves a question the council hasn’t taken up: whether the advisory limits stay advisory now that someone is out there. Stay tuned.

Sources: South Burlington Police Department media release, Aug. 10, 2026. Bicycle & Pedestrian Committee recommendations and city council packet materials.

Subscribe now

A charity in Bermuda is covering the entire cost of a February trip to Vermont for someone who has never stood in snow.

Subscribe now

The Bermuda Ski and Snowboard Association announced its Snow Angel bursary Tuesday, as reported by The Royal Gazette. The recipient joins the island’s snow-sports community at Jay Peak from Feb. 7 to 12. The award is means-tested, and it is built for someone who has never skied or snowboarded — first snowfall, first chairlift, first run.

The bursary covers:

• round-trip travel and airport transfers

• lodging

• lift passes

• ski or snowboard equipment

• group lessons

• winter clothing

• reasonable food and drink

The eligibility rules, in plain terms:

• You have to be Bermudian or hold a Bermuda permanent resident certificate.

• You have to be 21 by the date of the trip. Applicants 18 to 20 will be looked at individually.

• You need a valid passport and have to be able to enter the United States.

• You have to be free for the whole six days.

• You have to actually participate — lessons, group activities — and afterward talk about how it went, so the next applicant knows what they’d be signing up for.

The association grew out of the Bermuda Snow Society, formed in 2023 to connect people on the island around skiing and mountain life. It registered as a charity this past February.

Applications and details are at bermudasnow.com. Questions go to BermudaSnowSociety@gmail.com.

Jay Peak has spent the past two winters as the national case study in who stops coming to Vermont. Car crossings from Canada into the state fell 27% in 2025, according to state figures cited by CNN in February. Resort president Steve Wright, whose mountain sits nine miles from the Quebec line and normally draws more than half its business from across it, told Bloomberg in January that Canadian season-pass renewals had come in down 35%. The season finished as the best in the resort’s history anyway, Wright told WCAX in May, on eastern skiers who stayed east and went where the snow was. February brings one more visitor, from 1,300 miles the other direction.

Woodlawn Creamery’s Brimstone won Best in Show at the 2026 Northeast Gold Medal Cheese Competition, judged July 17 at the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield, Massachusetts. Woodlawn’s Pawlet took Third Best in Show. Brimstone also took Best of Vermont.

Subscribe now

Woodlawn sits in Pawlet, in Rutland County, on a dairy farm the Leach family has worked for seven generations. The creamery opened in 2024, when Seth and Kate Leach took over recipes from the closing Consider Bardwell operation — Pawlet and Rupert among them — and hired cheesemaker Leslie Goff Tyminski. Everything Woodlawn makes comes from its own herd.

Woodlawn entered six cheeses. All six medaled. Four took gold.

Vermont took half the medals

The Vermont Agency of Agriculture pointed to the results Friday. Counted out of the published scoresheet:

• 27 of the 49 gold medals awarded across all classes went to Vermont cheeses

• 61 of the 125 total class medals went to Vermont

• Thirteen Vermont creameries appear by name in the results

Add the three special awards Woodlawn took on top of its class medals and Vermont’s total is 64 medals, 30 of them gold — the figure the Vermont Cheese Council published. The Council counts twelve creameries rather than thirteen, which reflects recent consolidation among makers.

Half the medals in a six-state field. Vermont has more than 40 cheesemakers, and thirteen of them medaled.

One name accounts for a large share of that. Cabot Creamery Cooperative took 18 of Vermont’s 61 class medals, 10 of them gold — cheddar, butter, yogurt, sour cream. Cabot is a farmer-owned cooperative with members across the Northeast, not a small artisan creamery. Nearly a third of Vermont’s haul came from the biggest dairy business in the state.

The competition itself is not a fair-week novelty. The Eastern States Exposition has run it since 2010. Entry costs $25 per cheese. Head judge John Greeley of Swampscott, Massachusetts, spent 15 years chairing the American Cheese Society’s judging committee, and eight other judges sat on this year’s panel. Winners are recognized September 26 at Farm-A-Rama during The Big E, and winning product is sold at the Eastern States Farmers Market on the fairgrounds for the run of the Fair.

The third one in twelve months

• World Cheese Awards, Bern, Switzerland (November 2025) — 33 awards, including Super Golds for Jasper Hill’s Withersbrook Blue and Parish Hill’s West West Blue. Compass covered the results at the time.

• American Cheese Society, Louisville (July 2026) — 15 Vermont cheesemakers, 54 ribbons, first-place Best in Show for Jasper Hill’s Winnimere. Every Vermont maker who entered won something.

• Northeast Gold Medal Cheese Competition, West Springfield (July 2026) — 64 medals, 30 gold, Best in Show and Third Best in Show.

The middle one comes with an asterisk Compass reported in May: the Vermont Cheese Council reimburses its members’ entry fees for the American Cheese Society competition, up to a set amount, treating the cost as marketing rather than a producer expense. Cheesemakers in other states pay their own way. The reimbursement does not extend to the Big E, where Vermont makers entered on their own dime and still took half the medals.

Meanwhile

Vermont had 838 dairy farms in 2016. Vermont Farm Bureau put the count at 414 this spring — one farm in two, gone in a decade. Four Vermont dairy processing plants are scheduled to close this year. Three of them closed within two months this summer, which is what brought dozens of farmers to Grand Isle on July 2 for a meeting that was supposed to be about one plant and turned into a conversation about whether processors are leaving the state.

Those two facts are not in tension. Artisan cheese sells for what commodity milk never will, which is exactly why a seventh-generation dairy farm in Pawlet opened a creamery in 2024 rather than shipping more milk. It is a survival strategy, and for the Leach family it is working.

It is not, however, a fix for the sector. Thirteen creameries won medals. There are 414 farms.

What to watch

Vermont Cheese Week runs September 13 through 20, and the Vermont Cheesemakers Festival lands at Shelburne Farms on September 20. The Big E awards ceremony is September 26. Between now and then, the state’s dairy processing map will likely have changed again.

Watch whether those September events get framed as a celebration or as a case for policy. The Cheese Council has spent a year assembling the best argument anyone has made for Vermont dairy, and the Legislature reconvenes in January with a processing crisis on its desk.

Compass Vermont skipped a few Sundays to enjoy a little bit of summer. Here are some key stories since July 19, 2026.

Subscribe now

Under the Fingernails: A Day in the Life of Your Hands in Vermont

Vermont Told You to Compost. Its Own Bear Plan Named What Was Missing. Six Years Later It’s Still Not in the Statute

Eight Years of Chittenden County Court Data Show — and Don’t Show — About the State’s Attorney Race

A New Article in The Atlantic Features Burlington as a City That Said Yes to Drugs — and Wouldn’t Reconsider

A Packed Burlington City Hall, Six Hours of Argument, and One Word Everyone Agreed On

Vermont’s last second-home tax came in $6 million light. The new promises are seventy times bigger

You don’t like a story, you delete it. You really don’t like it, you unsubscribe. Two clicks, and the story is gone — not just out of your inbox, but out of the version of the news you carry around in your head.

Subscribe now

Nobody assigned you that job. It came with the technology, and there is no giving it back. Every day, mostly without thinking about it, you decide:

• which outlets get into the inbox and which get blocked

• which notifications come through and which get silenced

• what the algorithm learns about you when you scroll past something

• which stories you finish and which you abandon at the headline

• which relative’s link you open and which one you leave sitting there

That’s editing. It’s the same call a newspaper editor makes about what runs, made by somebody who never applied for the position.

The awkward part isn’t the choosing. Everyone chooses, and nobody can read everything. The awkward part is what you’re choosing between.

Nobody tells you the whole thing

Go to the farmer’s market. The tomatoes are labeled local, and they came up from Pennsylvania this morning, because Vermont’s aren’t quite ready. Nobody is breaking a rule. The FDA doesn’t define “local” for food labels at all, and the most-cited federal benchmark — written into the 2008 farm bill for a USDA loan program — counts a product as locally or regionally produced if it traveled under 400 miles from where it started, or never left its home state. Much of Pennsylvania clears that.

• Ask if the desserts are homemade and you get “they’re baked here.” True enough — the oven that thawed them is on the premises.

• Ask if the fish is fresh and you get “fresh.” Also true — frozen at sea within hours of the catch. Just not in the sense you were asking about.

Nobody lied to you. Every one of those answers survives the follow-up question, and the person giving it would be honestly surprised you had a problem with it. That’s the thing in miniature: the label is doing work you assumed somebody had already done.

News labels work the same way, and you pass a dozen of them before lunch:

• “Reports say” — which reports?

• “Critics argue” — which critics, and what is their stake?

• “A study found” — measuring what, over what period, funded by whom?

• “Sources familiar with” — familiar how, and what do they get out of talking?

Each one stands in for verification that may or may not have happened. From where you’re sitting, the two look identical.

Better story selection starts with better material

You are not going to independently verify the news. Nobody expects that, and anyone telling you to do your own research on every story is handing you a job that would take all week.

But most reporting reaches you already assembled. Someone picked the sources, picked which quotes made it in, and picked which one ran near the top. That isn’t a scandal — it’s the craft, and every outlet makes those calls, this one included. It does mean that a great deal of what arrives at your door is somebody’s opinion, quoted accurately.

Quotes are useful. They are also the place where the selection happens.

Sometimes what an editor needs is the other thing. The number. The statute. The filing. The line in the budget. The part that reads the same no matter who is doing the talking.

Here is what that looks like in practice. Last month we ran a piece on the composting mandate and bears. The state’s own wildlife plan had already named the problem in writing: the law had, in the plan’s words, “no requirement for bear-proof food scrap containers.” And this wasn’t a prediction. In the three years before that plan was drafted — while the rules still applied only to large generators, before the mandate reached a single household — Fish & Wildlife had already logged more than a hundred reports of bears damaging compost structures.

So we read the disposal ban itself, start to finish, including all three times the Legislature reopened that section after the ban took effect. A new banned material. A battery list updated. A deadline pushed back by one year. Nothing that touched food scraps, compost, containers or wildlife.

That isn’t an opinion about the Legislature. It’s what the law says, and both of those links were in the story, so you could go look and decide for yourself in about a minute whether we had read it correctly.

That’s the whole arrangement. We bring the data. You form the opinions.

You’re going to be the editor either way. The only real question is what you give yourself to work with.

Compass Vermont is free to read. What a paid subscription buys is the part you can’t see from the outside: the hours it takes to read the statute, the filing and the budget line all the way to the end, so the ingredients are on the label by the time the story reaches you.

If that’s the kind of material you want to edit with, become a paid subscriber.

Compass Vermont is independent and reader-supported.

Subscribe now

Ray’s Seafood Market & Restaurant posted a letter to customers this week announcing that it will close permanently on Sept. 12, 2026, at 7 p.m. The notice is signed “The Ray’s Seafood Market & Restaurant Family,” thanks customers for 74 years, and asks anyone holding gift certificates to bring them in and redeem them before the closing date. No reason is given.

Subscribe now

Most Vermonters know Ray’s as one place: the market and restaurant at 7 Pine Crest Drive in Essex Junction, where you order the fried perch.

There is a second place, and it is not a restaurant.

At 49 North Street in Burlington’s Old North End, Ray’s runs a bait, tackle, and fish-buying counter. Buying does not mean buying from a wholesaler. It means buying fish caught by individual Vermonters — people who go out on Lake Champlain, catch more perch or bullhead than they intend to eat, and sell the rest. On Ray’s own website, under a page titled “Lake Fish,” the company puts it in two sentences: at its Burlington site, it buys fresh local fish year-round, and it sells live bait and fishing tackle.

The closing letter names 7 Pine Crest Drive. It does not address 49 North Street.

That distinction matters, because the Burlington side of Ray’s sits at the center of something Vermont has and almost no other state does.

The trade almost nowhere else allows

In most of the country, selling fish you caught with a rod and reel is illegal, and MeatEater’s 2022 survey of the rules found most states enforce that ban strictly.

Vermont is the outlier. Anyone with a Vermont sportfishing license can sell panfish — the state defines those as bluegill, bullhead, pumpkinseed, rock bass, and yellow perch, along with crappie until this year — subject to whatever daily limits apply to the water they came from. On Lake Champlain, there is no daily limit at all on those species. White perch, which is not in the panfish definition, is also saleable.

Shawn Good, a Fish and Wildlife biologist based in Rutland, told the outdoor publication MeatEater in 2022 that when a mail-order listing advertises wild-caught black crappie, the fish are coming almost exclusively from Vermont, and that he knew of no other state that permitted the practice. New York is the partial exception: it lets anglers sell some sunfish species, and lets them sell crappie only if the fish were caught in a state that allows it — which in practice means Vermont.

The reason sits in the statute. Vermont’s law protects a short list of gamefish from sale — salmon, trout, lake trout, walleye, northern pike, muskellunge, black bass — and leaves effectively everything else saleable. Good has described those statutes as at least 50 years old and out of date, and said changing the list itself takes an act of the Legislature.

But the same statute hands the Fish and Wildlife Board a key: it lets the Board add “any other fish specified by rule.” That clause matters later.

Subscribe now

How the chain actually works

The structure of this trade is not what most people would guess:

• Anglers sell buckets of fish to small bait shops around the state, most of which double as the licensed buyers.

• Those shops resell to a large regional buyer — Ray’s.

• Ray’s trucks the fish to processors in Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Erie.

• The processors ship fillets to Boston, New York, Chicago, and to online retailers.

By the accounting in MeatEater’s 2022 report, a Vermont perch changes hands about four times between the hole in the ice and the plate.

Between 12 and 18 bait shops and fishmongers report purchases to the state in any given year, according to Fish and Wildlife data reported by VTDigger. So an angler with a bucket of perch is not out of options on Sept. 13.

The shops are the collection points. Ray’s is the place the collection points sell to.

What the trade is worth

Vermont’s own tally of buyer reports from 1998 through 2015 found that fish buyers statewide bought 7.11 million pounds of panfish over those 18 years — an average of about 394,772 pounds a year.

Anglers were paid a combined $13.18 million across that stretch, an annual average of roughly $732,471, or about $1.86 per pound.

Yellow perch carried the trade by weight, at 3.74 million pounds and $8.42 million in payments. Crappie moved the least weight of any tracked species but paid the most per pound, at $3.09 — roughly double what bluegill and pumpkinseed returned.

That last figure is the one to hold onto. The species the January rule banned outright was the most valuable pound-for-pound in the trade.

Spread across every angler who sold, that money was never a living. It was gas money, wiper blades, a way to make a February hobby pay for itself. But roughly $732,000 a year moving to Vermonters in cash, from a resource the state does not otherwise monetize, was not nothing either.

Two caveats on those numbers. They end in 2015, and Vermont has published nothing comparable since. And the state’s own view of them is skeptical: Good described the underlying annual reports as unaudited estimates, often written from memory, and probably minimums.

What changed in January

Buying fish in Vermont runs through a statute and a rule.

10 V.S.A. § 4611 makes it unlawful to buy or sell fish caught in Vermont without a permit issued by the Commissioner of Fish and Wildlife.

The Commercial Angling Rule, 10 App. V.S.A. § 123, builds out the machinery:

• An angler cannot sell fish without a Vermont fishing license and a Fish Seller’s Endorsement.

• A business cannot buy fish for resale without a Fish Buyer Permit, which runs January 1 through December 31 each year.

• A permit holder must file quarterly reports listing pounds purchased by species and size group, with the Lake Champlain share broken out separately.

• Those reports are due within 30 days of the close of each quarter.

The rule was amended effective January 1, 2026. The amended version banned the sale and purchase of black crappie and white crappie outright.

The department had wanted this for a long time. MeatEater reported in 2022 that Fish and Wildlife had opposed the panfish trade for years and went to lawmakers as recently as 2018 to try to end it, without success. Then-chief conservation warden Jason Batchelder put the obstacle plainly at the time: the department wanted the trade ended, and legislators kept telling them they had not shown a biological problem.

Batchelder became Commissioner of the Fish and Wildlife Department in 2025, after more than 22 years with the Agency of Natural Resources. Under 10 V.S.A. § 4611 and the Commercial Angling Rule, the Commissioner is the official who issues Fish Buyer Permits, sets the reporting the permits require, and can revoke a permit for noncompliance.

Subscribe now

None of that is an accusation. It is a description of where authority sits — and the authority is not borrowed. The Legislature itself wrote the delegation into § 4611, letting the Board name additional prohibited species by rule. The department did not go around the General Assembly on crappie; it used a door the General Assembly built. What it could not do by rule was touch the gamefish list in the statute, and it did not try.

The people in the trade saw it differently. Paul Dunkling of Ray’s told MeatEater that most of the anglers selling to him were retired men who liked to fish and wanted to cover their gas — people who, in his telling, would be out there anyway. Vermont’s own angler surveys have found limited public appetite for ending the practice: in 2020, fewer than a quarter of resident anglers called angler-caught fish sales a problem at any level, and fewer than 9 percent called it a serious one.

That is the quiet structural story underneath a fish market closing: a trade the regulator has long wanted to end, narrowed by rule in January through authority the Legislature granted, with its main distribution point announcing in August that it is closing at least one of its two doors.

Compass draws no causal line between the rule and the closing, and none should be read into the sequence. The family has given no reason, and a business that has run for 74 years can close for any of a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with a rulebook.

What the record does not settle

• Whether the Burlington fish-buying counter is closing. The family’s notice addresses 7 Pine Crest Drive. The two locations have separate phone numbers and, on Ray’s own website, separate descriptions. The notice does not mention Burlington either way.

• Whether another business would take on the distribution role. Aggregating that volume and moving it to Ontario is a different business from buying a bucket at a bait shop counter, and the public record does not show who else does it.

• What the quarterly reports show. The Q1 and Q2 2026 reports have come due under the amended rule — the first purchase figures the state has collected quarterly rather than once a year. The Q3 report is due within 30 days of Sept. 30.

One note for the record: the family’s letter dates the business to 1952, consistent with the 74 years it cites. Paul Dunkling has previously dated the family’s fish business to 1949, and Ray’s Burlington bait and fish-buying listing says 1951.

What to watch

Vermont spent years arguing about how tightly to regulate a fish trade that ran for decades with almost no reliable data attached to it. The rules took effect in January. The first full year of reporting under them is not finished.

Whatever happens on North Street, those quarterly reports will be the first time anyone can say with real numbers what this trade actually is — and whether the state started counting it on the way down.

Compass Vermont is independent and reader-supported.

Subscribe now

BETA Technologies and the Export-Import Bank of the United States said on Aug. 4 that they intend to expand their lending relationship to as much as $1 billion — roughly $830 million on top of the $169 million the bank approved in 2023 to build BETA’s aircraft production plant in South Burlington.

Subscribe now

If it closes, BETA says the money would go toward roughly doubling how much the company can build, bringing more of its aerospace manufacturing in house rather than buying it from suppliers, and scaling up production of the electric motors and propulsion systems it now ships in small numbers. The company puts the employment effect at hundreds of technical and advanced-manufacturing jobs.

BETA had 1,008 employees at the end of 2025, up from 902 six months earlier. Its 188,000-square-foot final assembly plant is built to turn out more than 300 aircraft a year at full rate, and the company holds permits to expand it to over 355,000 square feet. It also runs a battery test facility in St. Albans. The proposed loan is money to fill that capacity out, and it is debt rather than stock, which means BETA gets the capital without selling a larger piece of itself to investors.

Why an export bank is lending to a Vermont factory

EXIM exists to help foreign customers buy American goods. Financing the construction of a plant in Chittenden County is not that.

It happens through a program the bank’s board created in 2022 called Make More in America, which opened EXIM’s long-term lending to domestic factories. BETA’s 2023 loan was only the second deal the program ever approved.

The program’s terms are public, and they are the most useful thing in this story, because they turn a press release into a set of specific things BETA has to deliver:

• Some of what the factory makes has to be sold overseas. The required share is 15 percent of output for certain priority industries and 25 percent for everything else.

• The size of the loan is tied to jobs. EXIM lends up to about $230,000 for each job supported for one year. A thousand jobs held for five years counts as five thousand job-years.

• The bank has to believe it will be paid back. EXIM generally wants at least three years of revenue in the same line of work, a demonstrated ability to service debt, and a loan that isn’t oversized relative to the borrower — as a rule of thumb, no more than 40 percent of the company’s tangible net worth.

• The loan has to be money the private market wouldn’t provide. EXIM is meant to fill gaps, not compete with banks.

• Missing the targets has consequences. These agreements are supposed to include contractual recourse if a project falls short on exports or jobs.

The jobs formula sets a ceiling on how much EXIM can lend, not a floor under how many people BETA must hire, and it counts jobs supported during construction as well as over the life of the loan. Still, the arithmetic is worth doing: at roughly $230,000 per job-year, a $1 billion facility needs about 4,360 job-years behind it — 400 jobs held for eleven years, say, or a thousand held for four. The “hundreds of jobs” in the announcement is in the same neighborhood as what the formula would require.

Subscribe now

The 2023 loan is old enough to check, and it holds up

When EXIM’s board approved the first loan in November 2023, the bank estimated it would support 400 clean energy jobs in Vermont.

BETA reported 1,008 team members at the end of 2025 in its annual report, up from 902 at midyear. By June of this year, the Boston Globe reported the company’s headcount at roughly 1,370, with more than 420 people hired in the first half of 2026 alone — 85 percent of them Vermonters, BETA’s chief information officer told VTDigger. The company has said it expects about 2,000 workers by next summer, which would make it the largest for-profit employer in the state, ahead of the GlobalFoundries plant in Essex Junction.

Vermont has watched a lot of federal announcements arrive with job numbers attached and never checked the receipt. This is one where the receipt is better than the projection.

One difference between then and now: the 2023 announcement counted Vermont jobs specifically. The Aug. 4 announcement counts American ones. BETA’s manufacturing is centered in South Burlington, but the commitment as written is national, and the company also runs a flight-test base in Plattsburgh, New York.

Three things have to happen before the money moves

Nothing is signed yet. Both BETA and EXIM say so plainly in the announcement, and the path from here is short and public:

• The EXIM board has to vote. Domestic loans require board approval, and staff can only sign off on deals under $25 million. The board needs three members for a quorum and currently has exactly three — chairman John Jovanovic, acting vice chairman James Burrows and director Spencer Bachus — with two director seats vacant.

• Congress and the public get notice. Domestic loans above $50 million go to Congress in advance. Anything above $100 million is also published in the Federal Register with at least a 25-day window for public comment — the one moment when a Vermonter can put something on the record about this.

• The clock runs out on Dec. 31. EXIM’s charter expires at the end of this year, and without reauthorization the bank can’t approve new business. Financing meant to arrive in what the announcement calls “one or more tranches” over the next several years runs straight into that date. Sens. Kevin Cramer and Mark Warner introduced a ten-year reauthorization bill, S. 3772, in February; a House draft circulated in March would extend the charter five years instead.

The numbers that will decide it

A $1 billion loan to a company still building toward its first certified aircraft is a real bet, and the pieces EXIM’s underwriters weigh are all in BETA’s public filings.

Exports. This is the condition the whole arrangement rests on, and BETA’s first-quarter report puts a number on where it starts. Of the $10.1 million the company took in from January through March, $559,000 came from customers outside the United States — about five and a half cents of every revenue dollar. A year earlier it was zero. The rule asks for 15 or 25 cents. The standard counts output expected to be exported, not only what has already shipped, and BETA’s aircraft aren’t certified yet, so most of those sales are still ahead of it: the company holds a contract to supply up to $1 billion of pusher motors to EVE Air Mobility, the Embraer-backed manufacturer, and has aircraft customers in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. But international revenue appears in every quarterly report, which makes this the easiest promise in the deal for anyone to follow.

Subscribe now

Earnings. BETA expects $39 million to $43 million in revenue this year and a loss, before certain accounting items, of $355 million to $445 million. The proposed loan is about 25 times a full year of revenue. The company has $1.59 billion in the bank from its November IPO and earlier fundraising, and it went through roughly $121 million of it in the first quarter — about $1.3 million a day.

Size. EXIM’s rule of thumb puts a loan at no more than 40 percent of the borrower’s tangible net worth. BETA’s net worth was $1.725 billion at the end of March, down from $1.818 billion at the start of the year, with no goodwill or other intangibles propping it up. Forty percent of that is about $690 million. The proposal is $1 billion, and the gap grows with every quarter of losses. EXIM treats the 40 percent figure as a general standard rather than a hard cap, large project financings are judged differently, and companies can raise more equity — but this is the number to keep an eye on.

Orders. BETA’s aircraft backlog has grown from about $1 billion at the time of the first EXIM loan to $3.9 billion across 991 aircraft, and that is the strongest argument for the whole expansion. The backlog combines firm orders with options, which is standard in aviation: at the end of 2025, the last date the company broke it out, 891 aircraft were on the books, 289 of them firm orders and 602 of them options. The pattern held into this year — the Surf Air Mobility deal signed in March, the biggest single addition of the quarter, is 25 aircraft firm and up to 75 more optional. The narrower measure, the revenue BETA is contractually locked into and hasn’t yet delivered, was $25.1 million at the end of March. All of these numbers are accurate. They answer different questions.

What to watch

• A Federal Register notice on the transaction, which starts the public comment clock.

• An EXIM board vote, and whether the loan comes through all at once or in a smaller first piece.

• BETA’s second-quarter results on Aug. 12, which refresh the cash, net worth and export figures the underwriting rests on.

• Which export threshold applies, 15 percent or 25 percent, and how fast international sales climb toward it.

• EXIM reauthorization before the charter expires, and how Vermont’s delegation votes on it.

Compass has covered BETA’s federal pilot-program selections, the ACES charging consortium, the Loganair term sheet and the company’s first-quarter results. This is the largest figure attached to any of them.

Compass Vermont is independent and reader-supported.

Subscribe now

ANALYSIS

All five Democrats running for governor and lieutenant governor have said they would raise taxes on second homes. Between them, they have attached that money to universal primary care, community health clinics, housing construction, and lower property tax bills for year-round Vermonters.

Subscribe now

The Vermont Department of Taxes has already told the Legislature, in writing, that it cannot yet say how many houses would pay.

The state says it can’t count them

In December, the Department of Taxes delivered a report to the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees on how the new second-home tax class would actually work. It runs 44 pages, and it is unusually candid.

On the size of the tax base, the Department writes that the data to quantify it does not currently exist. Its working estimate — that second homes make up somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the existing nonhomestead grand list — is a triangulation, not a count. The analysis in the report splits the difference and assumes 35 percent.

The reasons are practical, and they are all in the report:

• Owners of second homes and short-term rentals are not required to file any attestation with the state today. Nothing in the system asks them to identify themselves.

• Dwelling units not suitable for year-round living are not consistently monitored or recorded anywhere.

• Individual dwelling units have no unique identifier and no separate taxable value. Towns would have to go find them, measure them, and name them.

• The Department asked Vermont’s listers and assessors whether they could reliably tell a year-round house from a seasonal camp. Of 96 who answered, 60 said yes and 36 said no.

There is also a gap the report flags on the other side of the ledger. Vermont receives roughly 173,000 homestead declarations a year, but the Census counts closer to 200,000 owner-occupied homes. Under current law, a homeowner who doesn’t file gets taxed as nonhomestead. Under the new system, some of those Vermonters — often people whose income is low enough that they don’t file a tax return at all — would be taxed as second-home owners on their own primary residence.

The state also modeled the rate

The same report does what no campaign has done. It puts numbers on what a second-home rate would actually be.

The Legislature asked the Department for two sets of rate scenarios. Both were built on fiscal 2025 data, when the average homestead rate was about $1.30 per $100 of value and the nonhomestead rate was about $1.39. Across every scenario the Department modeled, the second-home rate lands between $1.60 and $2.00.

The Department spells out what its own top scenario means for a house. A full dollar of separation between the primary-residence rate and the second-home rate works out to about $5,000 more a year on a house worth $500,000.

That is a real tax increase, and it is roughly the size of the change Vermont is actually contemplating.

Now set it against the promises. Amanda Janoo, one of two Democratic candidates for governor, said in a social media video that taxing second homes and vacation rentals could bring in $1 billion a year. Asked about the figure, she described it as a rough estimate tied to a broad restructuring of property taxation rather than a completed analysis. The Department’s highest modeled second-home rate — the $2.00 scenario — generates about $138.6 million. Reaching $1 billion means roughly seven times the revenue of the most aggressive rate the state’s own tax analysts have put on paper.

The Department also flags why the gap can’t simply be closed by pushing the rate higher. The wider the spread between the primary-residence rate and the second-home rate, the greater the incentive for owners to file a homestead declaration they aren’t entitled to, or to claim a unit is a long-term rental when it isn’t. A larger differential increases the tax-avoidance incentive, and the compliance burden that follows.

The category can erase itself

Act 73 of 2025, the education overhaul Gov. Phil Scott signed, created the second-home tax class. It did not set a rate for it, and it did not guarantee the class survives.

Two contingencies are written into the law. The work of classifying properties does not proceed at all unless the General Assembly first enacts new school district boundaries. And the classifications are repealed outright unless three things happen by the statutory deadline: the Legislature acts on tax rate multipliers, the new school districts are operating and educating all resident students, and the foundation formula cost report reaches the General Assembly. Act 170 of 2026 extended that timeline further, shifting to district-led mergers with town votes in March 2028 and pushing the foundation formula and the statewide tax rate to July 2029.

Setting a rate also means passing a bill. In Vermont, education property tax rates are set in the annual yield bill, and the yield bill goes to the governor. In June 2024, Scott vetoed it. Lawmakers overrode him, 103–42 in the House and 22–7 in the Senate. The last fight over education property tax rates required an override to settle, and a second-home rate is a larger fight than the one that produced it.

Subscribe now

So what happens between now and then?

This is the part the campaign conversation skips, and it is the part that lands on Vermonters first.

Nothing about second-home taxation changes in the meantime. Until the new class takes effect, a lakeside second home pays the same statewide nonhomestead rate as a dairy farm, a hardware store, and an apartment building — $1.643 per $100 of value this year. Every argument the candidates are making about fairness describes a system that stays exactly as it is through the entire term they are running for.

Meanwhile, the money already spent has to be replaced.

Vermont held this year’s average education property tax increase to about 3.5 percent by deploying $104.9 million in one-time General Fund money in a single year, plus roughly $22 million in Education Fund surplus. Without them, lawmakers’ own analysis put the increase near 10 percent. Without any of the relief layered in, closer to 12 percent — in the range of the 11.9 percent the Tax Commissioner had projected in December.

None of that money comes back next year. The next governor writes the fiscal 2028 and 2029 budgets in exactly the window where the one-time relief is gone and the second-home revenue has not arrived. Over the same stretch, the cap on school spending tightens on a schedule already in statute, from 118 percent of average per-pupil spending this year to 115.5 percent next year and downward each year after.

The question for every candidate isn’t what the second-home money would buy. It’s what happens in the three budgets before it exists.

The incumbents are leaning on the same forecast problem

Scott and Lt. Gov. John Rodgers both say they are wary of new taxes, pointing instead to controlling education spending and growing the tax base.

That position depends on the same kind of projection. The one-time transfer that held this year’s increase to 3.5 percent was the governor’s own recommendation, deployed in full in a single year rather than split across two. A tax base that grows enough to replace it is a forecast in exactly the way second-home revenue is a forecast. Both sides of this race are spending money that has to be predicted before it can be collected.

Vermont has already tested a forecast like this

The second-home tax isn’t hypothetical. Vermont enacted one two years ago.

Act 181 of 2024 raised the property transfer tax on second homes fit for year-round living from 1.45 percent to 3.62 percent, effective that August. The Joint Fiscal Office projected $15.7 million in the first year and $18.6 million in the second — $34.3 million across two years.

Preliminary Department of Taxes figures put the actual take at about $28 million across roughly 7,300 purchases, around $6 million under forecast. The first year captured eleven months rather than twelve and the numbers are preliminary, which explains part of the gap but not all of it.

That tax is a one-time charge on a sale, not an annual property tax, so it is not the same instrument being proposed now. But it is the only real Vermont data on what second-home tax forecasts do when they meet the market. It runs about $14 million a year. The largest number being campaigned on is $1 billion a year.

What we know, what we don’t, and what to watch

Known: Act 73 created the second-home tax class and set no rate for it. The Department of Taxes has modeled second-home rates between $1.60 and $2.00, worth roughly $5,000 a year on a $500,000 house at the top of that range. Setting any rate requires a bill and a governor’s signature. The 2024 second-home transfer tax came in under forecast.

Not known: How many properties are in the class — the state says the data to count them does not yet exist. What rate a future Legislature would set. Whether the class survives its own repeal provisions.

Worth watching: The dwelling-identification work that towns and listers would have to complete before any of this is billable, and the yield bills of the 2027 and 2028 sessions, where a second-home rate would have to appear.

Vermont’s primary is August 11.

Compass Vermont is independent and reader-supported.

Subscribe now

They came because of a new plan called Burlington Forward.

Subscribe now

On July 24, the Democratic caucus of the Burlington City Council held a press conference to introduce it — twenty-one pages proposing a harder line on public drug use, encampments, and what the document calls unpermitted social services in city parks. On July 30, Compass Vermont published an overview of an Atlantic cover story on harm reduction that used Burlington as its cautionary example, a city that had said yes to drugs and gotten the predictable bill. In between, the mayor sent a series of citywide emails opposing the resolution and asked the council to table it. The council president declined.

By the time the gavel came down on August 3, the meeting had become the place where all of it would land at once.

It landed for six hours. More than a hundred people signed up to speak. Public forum ran past three hours against a rule that allots ninety minutes. The council suspended its own rules twice to get through the rest of its business and adjourned at 12:08 a.m.

Compass pulled the full transcript and counted it.

One word stuck out, and it was said seventy-one times — roughly once every five minutes, for six straight hours. The word was compassion.

It is not the word that was spoken most. It is the word that meant the most different things.

What beat it

Plenty of words beat it. People was said 403 times. Council, 306. City, 300. The words for housing and homelessness together, 220. Safe, safety and unsafe, 166. The vocabulary of drugs and addiction, 161. Community, 160. Police and cops, 143.

Those are the furniture of the meeting. They are what the meeting was about. Nobody walked to the microphone to contest what city means.

The comparison that matters is narrower. Set compassion beside the other words people use when they are making a claim about what is right, and it is not merely first. It is most of the field.

Compassion was spoken more often than evidence and data put together. Over six hours, the room reached for virtue more than twice as often as it reached for proof.

One speaker named that while it was happening. Selena Colburn, a former city councilor and state representative, told the council she had changed her remarks and decided to talk about what she found in shortest supply in the resolution itself — evidence and science.

Subscribe now

Half the uses were an argument over who gets to claim it

Compass read all seventy-one uses in context. Roughly half of them are not a person claiming compassion. They are a person denying that someone else’s version qualifies.

The denials came from every direction:

• From a resolution supporter, on open drug use: it is not compassionate to leave people suffering from addiction on our sidewalks.

• From an opponent, on the city’s record: compassion hasn’t even gotten started here.

• From a supporter who read the city’s economic data aloud: anyone who looks out that window and sees success, compassion, or any sort of accountability is lying to themselves.

• From an economist and doctoral candidate opposing the resolution: the same old ideas had surfaced cloaked in a veneer of compassion and accountability.

• From a downtown property owner, turning it back on the administration: the mayor speaks of compassion, but she has compassion for everyone except the law-abiding residents and businesses of Burlington.

• From a volunteer inviting councilors to a downtown cleanup crew: maybe that’s too compassionate for some of you.

And one speaker refused the word altogether, telling the council she did not want compassion from the people at the table. She wanted liberation.

Subscribe now

Two councilors, from opposite caucuses, went further than contesting a definition. Each accused the other side’s compassion of being cover.

Gene Bergman, opposing the resolution, said the framework is heavy on enforcement, couched in the technocratic word accountability, and covered in the calming word compassion — an iron fist in a velvet glove.

Buddy Singh, supporting it, described people left in the park to be preyed upon by dealers and taken advantage of, and said it was all happening in the name of compassion.

More than half the times the word compassion was spoken on Monday night, someone was wrestling it out of someone else’s hands.

That is not a shared value. It is contested ground that everyone had agreed to fight on.

Five definitions, one word

Sorted by what the speaker actually meant, the seventy-one uses of compassion fall into about five camps. Nineteen sit within a few words of safety. Nineteen sit within a few words of accountability or enforcement. Eleven attach to something material — food, syringes, naloxone, a bed. Eight extend the word outward, past the people usually meant by it.

Compassion as the thing you hand someone. The harm reduction and mutual aid position, and the most concrete: compassion is a meal in City Hall Park, a clean syringe, a dose of naloxone, a place indoors when it is cold. A nurse practitioner told the council that Burlington already has organizations showing what compassion and safety look like together, and named the daily free lunch that has run for six years on no city budget. Here, the act is the compassion. There is no further test.

Compassion as the thing you refuse to allow. The mirror image, argued just as earnestly. A speaker who has lived across from City Hall Park since 1998 said compassion cannot mean looking away. Another said boundaries are what make compassion last, and that the city had come to treat boundaries as though they were the opposite of care. Councilor Buddy Singh built his floor remarks around intervening with someone he loved, and the therapist’s line about putting on your own oxygen mask first. In this definition, letting a person remain untreated in public is the cruelty, and the intervention is the kindness.

Compassion as structural repair. A third group rejected the premise that any of this is about individual conduct. Housing, health care, and a tax on wealth are the compassionate policies; anything else manages symptoms. One speaker walked the council through a proposed transfer tax on million-dollar home sales and asked why the council could summon concern for the financial circumstances of twenty sellers a year and not for people sleeping outside.

Compassion widened. The least-noticed definition, and it did real work in that room. A downtown developer said compassion for neighbors in need matters deeply — and so does compassion for families who no longer feel safe, for employees, for businesses hanging on. The board chair of a local nonprofit asked the council to make children the north star. This is not a rejection of the word. It is an argument about the size of the circle it covers.

Subscribe now

Compassion refused. And then the speakers who declined the frame entirely. Not only the speaker who wanted liberation, but the several who separated safety from comfort and told the council it was conflating them — that watching a person suffer is uncomfortable and should be, and that discomfort is not danger. If the word has been captured, this position holds, then arguing about it is a trap.

Both documents claim it

The clearest sign the word had stopped doing any sorting work is that both sides of the table used it to describe their own paper.

Burlington Forward is built on the pairing. Its supporters returned to it all night: the city does not have to choose between compassion and enforcement, it needs both; compassion and accountability are not opposing values; the resolution rejects a false choice.

And the mayor, opposing that resolution, said this: This has never been a choice between safety and compassion. We need both. She described her own administration’s framework as grounded in both compassion and accountability.

Two documents, opposite conclusions, identical claim. Every person in that chamber could have signed the sentence Burlington should be compassionate, and it would have settled nothing about zoning for an overdose prevention center, about license plate readers, about permits for serving lunch in a public park, or about what happens to a person who does not show up to a restorative justice appointment.

Why this matters going forward

The resolution passed, 7–5.

What passed, though, was not the twenty-one pages. It was a motion to send them to four council committees — Public Safety, Racial Equity Inclusion and Belonging, Community Development and Neighborhood Revitalization, and Parks Arts and Culture — with recommended amendments due back to the full council by September 14. The mayor’s office was asked to work with council leadership on the sections dealing with the state.

So the vote settled where the argument goes, not how it ends. Nothing in the resolution takes effect. Nobody is bound by it. It is not over. It moved.

That leaves roughly six weeks of drafting, in public, by people who spent Monday night demonstrating at length that they do not share a definition of the document’s central term.

Amendments are written in words. If compassion survives into the amended text doing the same work it did on Monday — signaling agreement while concealing its absence — then September’s version will read as warmly as this one and settle as little.

The useful questions in committee are the ones the word lets people skip. Not whether Burlington is compassionate. Whether a syringe services program may operate downtown. Whether a group may serve food in a public park without a permit. What happens when someone referred to City Circle does not appear.

Those have answers. Compassion does not, or rather it has seventy-one of them.

Compass Vermont is an independent Vermont news outlet. This piece is labeled ANALYSIS: it draws conclusions from primary source material rather than reporting news alone.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Every newsroom in America, ours included, relies on some information and articles that land in the inbox, and somebody has to decide what they mean.

Most of the time that’s an honest job. But there’s a version of it that goes sideways, and it usually isn’t a lie — it’s a thread.

Somebody reads a document, finds the one loose end that’s more interesting than the rest of it, and pulls. Pull hard enough and you’ve got a story.

Pull a little too hard and you’ve got a story the document doesn’t actually support: less a finding than a hunch that got dressed up for the occasion, and one that happens to be very, very clickable.

That’s what happened here. Parade ran a piece under the framing that America’s leaf-peepers have moved on from Vermont, and that Stowe — the state’s marquee foliage destination — didn’t even crack the top five. The mechanics are simple enough that it’s worth walking through slowly, because once you see them, you’ll see them everywhere.

Put yourself in the reporter’s chair.

You want to know whether Vermont is drawing fewer fall visitors. What did you actually have to work with?

You had numbers from Priceline — the online travel agency, the one that sells hotel rooms — showing how often people searched its site for hotels in places known for fall color. So you started typing.

You typed Stowe. You got a number.

You typed Adirondacks. You got a much bigger number.

Now, what have you learned? That more people searched hotels in the Adirondacks than searched hotels in Stowe. Fine. Does that mean more people are heading to the Adirondacks than to Stowe? Maybe — though a search isn’t a booking, and a booking isn’t a car on Route 108.

But does it mean more people are going to the Adirondacks than to Vermont?

Not unless you searched Vermont. And nobody did.

Stowe is a village of about five thousand people. The Adirondacks is six million acres holding Lake Placid, Lake George, Saranac Lake and many more towns. The rest of the list runs the same way — the entire Berkshires, a whole Pennsylvania county, the Columbia River Gorge. Vermont was the only place on the board entered as a single town. Type in the Green Mountains instead, or Route 100, or just Vermont, and the whole thing rearranges itself.

So the thread got pulled, and out came a verdict on a Vermont October.

This is the whole job. It’s why Compass Vermont exists.

Ask where the number came from and how it got made, before deciding whether to believe what it’s being used to say. That is the first move at Compass, every single time — whether it’s a magazine, a company, a state agency, or a legislator with a chart.

Usually the answer checks out and the story stands, and you’ll never hear about the checking. Sometimes the answer is that a search box became a trend, and a trend became a headline about your state’s economy ten weeks before the buses arrive.

Compass Vermont was built on the idea that a Vermonter shouldn’t have to take anybody’s word for it — including ours. So when we tell you something, we show you where it came from. Not because national outlets are the enemy, but because a state this small doesn’t get many people doing that work on its behalf, and the claims still keep coming.

Skip that step and you’re not reading news. You’re being told what to think by whoever wrote it that morning, at whatever speed they were writing it.

And for what it’s worth: hotel searches in July tell you nothing about what this season will look like. The rooms and meals receipts do, and those come in after the leaves are down. If anything moves Vermont’s number this fall, the likelier candidate is what’s happening at the Canadian border — not a ranking on a booking site. We’ll see what the numbers say.

Compass is independent and reader-supported.

If this is the kind of reading you want more of, subscribe — it’s free. And if you’d like it to still be here next fall, a paid subscription is the thing that does it.

Subscribe now

A new article in The Atlantic, published this morning, argues that a radical form of harm reduction has failed the American cities that adopted it. It’s called “The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs,” it’s by Michael Powell, and it runs as the magazine’s September cover story. It uses two cities to make its case. One is Seattle. The other is Burlington.

Subscribe now

Burlington is the one the article presents as unmoved.

Compass checked the Vermont figures in the piece against the state’s own records. The ones that can be checked hold up. Vermont recorded 170 overdose deaths in 2025, a 37 percent decline from the 2022 peak of 269 — exact, per the Health Department’s 2025 Fatal Overdose Report, and the same figure Governor Phil Scott’s office used in its own May press release.

Twenty-eight people died of overdoses in Burlington in 2024, out of 64 in Chittenden County — also exact, from the Health Department’s January 2026 report to the Legislature on the overdose prevention center pilot. One number we could not reproduce from public records: the article’s count of 585 overdoses in Burlington that year, which may derive from a police incident category that the same report defines as any encounter with an officer, including a logged foot patrol.

None of that changes the picture. Burlington’s overdose rate is high. The conditions Powell describes — the needles, the tents, the park — are not in dispute here.

But the numbers aren’t what the article is actually arguing.

The argument is about direction

The piece opens on the street in Seattle: an open-air drug market at 12th and Jackson, a fenced playground in Little Saigon, a park pavilion on Beacon Hill taken over by people smoking fentanyl. It traces the philosophy back to the addict unions of 1970s Rotterdam, forward through Vancouver’s 2003 supervised injection site, and out into British Columbia’s “safer supply” program, which Powell argues fed a black market and widened the circle of addiction.

Then it turns to the retreat, and the retreat is the point.

British Columbia now requires supervised consumption of prescribed narcotics, and its decriminalization program has expired. San Francisco’s mayor has ordered crackdowns on dealers and tent cities. Philadelphia has stood up a treatment court. Boston’s mayor, once an enthusiast, has dropped all mention of injection centers from her plans, the article reports. Seattle’s new mayor — a democratic socialist with no prior elected experience — is authorizing encampment sweeps.

One city after another, in Powell’s telling, has looked at what it built and started taking it apart.

And then there is Burlington, where the article finds officials still insisting that harm reduction is the most effective and moral answer available. The mayor calls it humane and essential. The state’s attorney says the people using drugs downtown are rarely dangerous and that City Hall Park is still a very safe place to be. The city is planning an overdose prevention center — authorized by the Legislature in 2024 over the governor’s veto — and citing Vancouver, the model everyone else is walking away from, as its evidence.

That’s the architecture. Burlington isn’t in the piece because its numbers are the worst. It’s in the piece because it’s the one that wouldn’t reconsider.

July 24

On Friday, July 24 — six days before the article published — most of the Burlington City Council’s Democratic caucus held a press conference on Bank Street to announce a draft resolution called Burlington Forward: A Comprehensive Framework for Safe Public Spaces and a Stronger Community.

The Democrats hold a majority on the council. The draft calls for a stronger public safety presence downtown, moving homeless people out of public spaces, more police staffing, security cameras, encampment and graffiti removal, and demands that neighboring towns and the state carry more of the load. It takes direct aim at the needle exchange recently relocated to Bank Street, in the heart of downtown, arguing that facilities like it should go through formal zoning and public review and should not sit in the downtown core. The caucus said it plans to introduce the resolution at the council’s August meeting. (WCAX; Seven Days)

The councilor who called that press conference was Ben Traverse, the council president. “We are here now because, from our perspective, enough is enough,” he said. Neither the needle exchange nor a future overdose prevention center, in his view, belongs downtown.

Traverse is quoted in The Atlantic. Powell describes him as “a liberal Democrat who has grown uncomfortable with Burlington’s direction,” and notes near the end of the Burlington section that “Traverse and other Democrats on the city council have begun to challenge the mayor on harm reduction.”

Subscribe now

That sentence is accurate, and this piece isn’t built on the claim that Powell missed something. It’s built on the size of what those six words now contain: the council’s majority caucus, a named framework, a public rollout, a planned August introduction, and the council president saying enough is enough out loud.

What hasn’t happened matters too. The resolution has not been adopted, referred to committee, or scheduled for a vote. It does not reject harm reduction wholesale — it goes after enforcement, encampments, and where these facilities sit, not the philosophy entire. Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak responded the same day, saying the draft does little to set a tone of collaboration and contains ideas that move Burlington away from its values by suggesting the city remove people and legislate restrictions that contradict what public health data shows works. Progressive Councilor Gene Bergman asked that it go through committee rather than get rammed through.

So Burlington is having a version of the argument the article says the other cities already had. It hasn’t finished having it. But it is no longer the city that isn’t having it.

It didn’t start last week either

Pressure has been building for the better part of a year, much of it applied from outside the city.

In October 2025, Governor Scott announced a 14-point action plan for Burlington: a special prosecutor for defendants carrying five or more open cases, state law enforcement on foot patrols, Health Department help with syringe disposal. The mayor didn’t fight it. She said the plan would help ensure cases are resolved and victims supported.

State troopers deployed downtown that November. They came back this week and will stay through mid-August.

In May, an effort to partially defund the overdose prevention center reached the Senate floor. It failed, and the Senate approved more than $1 million to continue the work — but the vote happened at all, and some of the project’s original supporters were publicly undecided going in.

And the center itself still has no site two years on. A location fell through in February and the city declined to say where. A May assessment narrowed the search to three areas of the city rather than to addresses.

None of that is a reversal of city policy, and Compass isn’t calling it one. It’s a record of a policy under sustained outside pressure and growing internal disagreement — in a place where the governing majority on the council has now put a name and a date on its objection.

What none of this settles

The article argues that harm reduction made things worse in Burlington. Burlington Forward assumes the same thing. Neither claim is settled by any Vermont data we can find.

Overdose deaths fell across Vermont and across much of the country in 2024 and 2025. Burlington’s own fell 20 percent while its police-recorded drug incidents rose. Chittenden County didn’t decline at all — 63 deaths became 64 — even as the state’s total fell 12 percent. Nothing in the public record separates the effect of a needle exchange from a changed drug supply, a naloxone campaign, or an enforcement surge. Broad declines across many places don’t tell you which local policy caused them.

But the argument in Burlington was never going to be decided by data, and it isn’t being decided by data now.

What changed on July 24 is that a group of elected officials stopped waiting for the evidence to resolve. The people who live and work downtown had already stopped. So had the merchants who wrote to the mayor last year, and the parents Powell interviewed, and — on the evidence of two trooper deployments and a 14-point plan — the governor.

That’s the thing The Atlantic documented and the thing the article couldn’t quite show, because it went to press six days too early: not a city that said yes to drugs and meant it, but a city that has run out of patience with its own answer and hasn’t yet agreed on a new one.

What to watch

August. Burlington Forward goes to the council for introduction. Whether it moves to committee or toward a floor vote will tell you how hard the Democratic majority intends to push, and whether the mayor and the Progressive minority can slow it.

August 11. State’s Attorney Sarah George, quoted in the article saying people who use drugs are “rarely dangerous,” faces a contested Democratic primary. Compass published its analysis of eight years of Chittenden County court data this week.

Mid-August. The state police deployment ends. Public Safety Commissioner Jennifer Morrison has said the state was already staffing up for a New England governors and eastern Canadian premiers meeting in early August and extended the deployment on both ends. Compass has asked the Vermont State Police to confirm that rationale, along with hours, cost, and end date — and for the same figures from the November 2025 deployment, which was announced with a start date and no public record of how it finished.

A note on timing: Powell reported this piece over roughly a year, and the Burlington section references visits last September and this April. Magazine production schedules are long, and nothing here is a claim about what any reporter could have caught. The observation is narrower: a story about whether a city would change course reached print the same week that city’s council majority made its case for changing it.

Compass Vermont is independent and reader-supported. Sources are linked throughout.

Subscribe now

You vote August 11. This race is a referendum on a philosophy of prosecution: Sarah George built her career on it, and Bram Kranichfeld rejects it. Compass pulled the county court’s own books to ask a plain question — is it working? Here’s what the numbers say, and the more honest answer about what they can’t.

Subscribe now

If you live in Chittenden County, you have a choice to make on August 11, and under all the campaign noise it comes down to one real disagreement: what is a prosecutor for?

Sarah George

Sarah George, the county’s top prosecutor since 2017, has a clear answer and doesn’t hide it. She belongs to a national network of reform-minded prosecutors called Fair and Just Prosecution, and she runs on its ideas: stop asking for cash bail, steer people toward treatment and diversion instead of jail, charge fewer low-level cases. Her campaign puts it plainly — a prosecutor’s job is “to seek justice, not convictions at any cost.”

She believes the old tough-on-crime approach failed the people it processed, and that a smarter, more supportive system is a safer one. She also treats it as a long project, telling supporters when she launched this campaign that there was still work to do.

Bram Kranichfeld

Her challenger, Bram Kranichfeld, doesn’t accept that a prosecutor should remake the system from the bench. His view of where bail policy belongs is blunt: if Vermont is going to replace cash bail with something else, he’s said, that’s a job for the Legislature, not for a state’s attorney deciding it office by office.

He wants tougher, escalating consequences for people who keep reoffending. He’d know the work: he runs the prosecutor’s office one county north, in Franklin, after taking over there in 2024 — and he’s a former colleague of George’s from that same Chittenden office, the candidate the county Democratic committee actually favored for the 2017 appointment that George ultimately received.

A Vote on Philosophical Differences

So the ballot question isn’t really about two personalities. It’s whether George’s philosophy of prosecution is working — well enough to earn more time, or not. Compass went looking in the one place that keeps score without taking a side: the county court’s own books.

One caution before any number. These are court records — a measure of the workload, not a prosecutor’s grade. How fast cases move depends on judges, public defenders, and court staffing as much as on the prosecutor. The numbers can frame the question. They can’t, on their own, answer it. Hold onto that, because it matters most at the end.

Subscribe now

What the numbers say

The one idea you need. Picture the court as a sink. Cases pour in the top; the court drains them out the bottom as they’re resolved. Drain at least as fast as they pour in, and the level holds. Fall behind, and the water rises — a backlog. Officials track this with a “clearance rate”: cases finished for every 100 that come in. Over 100, the sink is draining. Under 100, it’s filling. That’s the whole trick.

Chittenden built up a property-crime backlog — and worked most of it back down.

George told Vermont Public that for a time her office deprioritized low-level cases like retail thefts, to focus on a spike in gun-violence and homicide cases in 2022 — and that it took until this year to resolve all of those cases.

The books line up with the shape of that account. In the 2022 fiscal year the sink was filling: for every 100 property felonies coming in, the court finished only 82, and hundreds of cases sat waiting at year’s end. By the 2025 fiscal year it had flipped — the court was finishing more property cases than were arriving, and the waiting pile of property felonies had shrunk by about a quarter.

One thing the numbers can’t tell you, though it’s fair to ask: whether some of that came from reducing charges rather than resolving cases as filed. The data counts cases the court finished, not what they were ultimately charged as. Given George’s stated preference for charging fewer low-level cases and dismissing where she can, a reader can reasonably wonder — the books just can’t answer it either way.

A backlog is a choice, not weather

A backlog doesn’t fall on a county like a storm. It’s the sum of choices — including a prosecutor’s — and there’s a reading of these numbers that isn’t kind to George. If you don’t ask for bail, and low-level cases get pushed to the back of the line, then some of the same people move through the system again and again, stacking up new cases while the old ones wait. Under that reading, “the backlog got worked down” and “her approach helped build it” are the same story told from opposite ends.

We can’t prove that from the court books. But we don’t have to guess whether the problem is real, because George herself has named it — and what she did about it is the whole race in miniature.

By her own account, a small, hard core of people drives a large share of the churn. When Governor Phil Scott announced a new Community Accountability Court for Chittenden County in October 2025 — a dedicated docket and special prosecutor for people with five or more open cases — George didn’t resist it. She co-signed it, in her own words: “We have 50 to 70 people in Chittenden County repeatedly causing harm to multiple victims,” she said, people “not succeeding in existing diversion and deflection programs.” (This new court came after the court data above, so it isn’t what turned those 2025 numbers around; it’s the next chapter, aimed at the hardest cases still in the pile.)

George — the reform prosecutor — is conceding that her signature approach doesn’t reach everyone. And that matters, because reaching those people with treatment instead of jail is the core of her philosophy. Two years earlier, in 2023, her office had built a program for exactly this population: Incentives for Success, launched with the nonprofit Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform, offering repeat low-level offenders case management and small rewards for showing up, with charges dropped if they stay clean for 12 weeks.

Subscribe now

A neutral evaluation by the national policy group Results for America describes the machine your gut was already turning over: “a relatively small number of individuals were responsible for a disproportionate share of property crimes,” and, “released without any additional support services, these individuals often picked up additional charges while awaiting sentencing.”

So here is the real fault line between the two candidates. George’s bet is that you break that cycle by fixing what drives the offending — and when the softest tools don’t reach the hardest core, you add a faster court, not a harsher philosophy. Kranichfeld’s bet is that for people cycling through with case after case, the consequences themselves have to come faster and mean more, or nothing changes.

Does the treatment approach work?

The most neutral scorekeeper on that question is the U.S. Department of Justice’s CrimeSolutions clearinghouse, which rates individual justice programs on the same evidence scale regardless of politics. Its picture is genuinely mixed: some restorative and diversion programs are rated “Promising” or “Effective,” others “No Effects,” and one long-running Chittenden County diversion program — the Rapid Intervention Community Court, which predates George — is rated “Ineffective” at reducing reoffending.

Across the research, the reductions in reoffending tend to be real but small — and they shrink further in the most rigorous studies, likely because these programs are voluntary, so the people who enroll and finish are already the most motivated to change. That is the built-in catch for a program like Incentives for Success: it does the most for the people most ready to change, and the least for the service-resistant core — the same 50 to 70 George pointed to.

A 2025 WCAX investigation of Vermont restorative-justice programs put a sharp point on it, reporting low reoffending among first-time participants but, among those who keep cycling back through, recidivism running as high as roughly 90 percent.

One number, two counties

Kranichfeld runs Franklin County now, so the same ledger grades his shop too — with the caveat that the 2025 fiscal year is his only full year in the job, a snapshot, not a trend. (He isn’t seeking reelection there; he’s running for George’s seat.) That year, for every 100 cases coming in, Chittenden’s court cleared about 104 and Franklin’s about 91. George’s county kept its head above water; Kranichfeld’s fell a little behind. It doesn’t crown either prosecutor — courts move cases, not just prosecutors — and it complicates any tidy “he’s the tougher, more effective one” story.

One more Franklin number, because it cuts both ways just like everything else here. Low-level property cases coming into Franklin’s court jumped from 160 in 2022 to 728 in 2025 — more than four times as many. It might mean property crime there surged. It might mean Kranichfeld is charging cases another prosecutor would drop — which is close to the tougher approach he’s running on. The books count how many cases showed up; they don’t say why.

The gap that matters most: the number that would answer the question isn’t published anymore

Here’s the honest heart of it.

Everything above measures how fast courts clear cases. None of it measures the thing you actually want to know: do the same people keep coming back? That’s the real test of whether a lenient approach works or quietly feeds itself — and it’s the one number nobody publishes.

Subscribe now

The state used to publish part of it. Through 2020, the Judiciary reported, county by county, how cases ended — plea, trial, or dismissed. For George’s early years it’s on the record, and it shows her office dismissing a rising share of felony cases (with a spike in 2020, the COVID year, when dismissals jumped in courts statewide). Then Vermont changed its court computer system, and that breakdown stopped appearing in the Judiciary’s annual reports. We did not find it published anywhere after that. Which means Kranichfeld’s entire record in Franklin — how he actually resolves his cases — isn’t in those reports either, and there is no public county figure for how often the same defendants reoffend.

So the single most useful measure for judging these two — as prosecutors, not as caseload managers — dropped out of public view in 2020, right when a countywide race is being fought over it. That’s not a knock on either candidate. It’s a hole in what the state lets voters see.

What these numbers can’t tell you

Court speed isn’t a prosecutor’s grade — judges, defense lawyers, and staffing all move cases. Anything resolved before it reaches court — a case sent to diversion, like Incentives for Success — never appears in these books at all, so the true workload is bigger than the ledger on both ends. The older and newer numbers come from two different court computer systems and can’t be stacked directly, so we compared trends within each era, not raw totals across them. And none of this reaches what the campaign actually fights about: which cases a prosecutor declines before charging, the cash-bail policy, the traffic-stop policy. Anyone who tells you these books settle the race is reading them for more than they hold.

What it comes down to

Strip it all away and the choice is simple, even if it isn’t easy. Sarah George has run a clear, deliberate experiment in what prosecution can be — no cash bail, treatment over jail, programs that try to fix people instead of just processing them — and when the hardest core didn’t respond, she backed a faster court to reach them. She says the larger project takes time, and that it’s working. You’ve now seen most of a decade of it, along with the backlog that built up on the way and the extra court it took to help work it down.

So on Tuesday the question is really this: is that an approach that has earned more time to prove itself — or one the county has now seen enough of? Bram Kranichfeld is betting a lot of voters will say enough. George is betting they’ll say keep going. The court data can sharpen that question. It can’t answer it for you. That part is yours.

The primary is Tuesday, August 11.

A note on the numbers: The caseload figures come from the Vermont Judiciary’s annual statistical reports — the FY2020, FY2022, and FY2025 editions. Vermont’s court years run July through June, so “2022” and “2025” here mean those fiscal years, not calendar years. “Clearance rate” is simply cases finished divided by cases that came in. Two honest limits: the reports don’t say whether each figure counts cases or individual charges, so we describe them as cases and don’t treat them as head counts of distinct people; and the Judiciary changed case-management systems between 2019 and 2021, so we compare trends only within each era, never raw totals across the break. Sources for everything else — George’s record and positions, Kranichfeld’s, the accountability court, the diversion programs, and the effectiveness ratings — are linked inline above.

Six years ago this month, Vermont told you to stop throwing food in the trash.

If you didn’t want to pay a hauler or drive to a drop-off every week, the state’s answer was a compost pile or bin in your backyard. Maybe that backyard is a hillside with room to put the bin far from the house. Maybe it’s a half-acre village lot where “far from the house” means fifty feet from the kitchen door — and the tree line.

Vermont’s wildlife agency knew what that meant. It said so, in writing, in the ten-year management plan it was finalizing while the mandate took hold. The Legislature has never gone back.

That’s the whole story. Here’s the record.

Subscribe now

What the law actually says

The composting mandate comes from Act 148 of 2012, the Universal Recycling Law. It phased in over eight years, and on July 1, 2020, it reached everyone: 10 V.S.A. § 6621a bans food residuals from the landfill, and the companion section, § 6605k, requires every generator — including every household — to separate food scraps and either compost them, manage them on site, or send them to a hauler or drop-off.

Two things about the law that are easy to miss:

First, the chicken bones. The question everyone asked in 2020 — what am I supposed to do with meat scraps? — has an answer, and it’s hiding in the definitions. Under § 6602(31), “food residual” does not include meat and meat-related products when a resident composts at home. Translation: if you compost in your backyard, your meat scraps and bones can legally go in the trash. State composting guidance discourages putting meat in a backyard pile — for odor, for pathogens, and for exactly the reason this piece exists. Households using a curbside hauler or a drop-off never needed the exemption; those services take all food waste, meat included. But for the backyard composter, the exemption is conditioned on composting at home, it appears nowhere on the trash can, and the state’s guidance for the days between pickups is to keep meat in the freezer until trash day.

Second, enforcement. There are no garbage police. Nobody is inspecting your trash, and the mandate works, to the extent it works, because Vermonters comply.

So the practical effect of the law came down to a choice. A household could pay a hauler, drive scraps to a drop-off every week, or take the free option: a compost pile or bin on the property. The state’s own bear plan predicted which way many Vermonters would go — more backyard composting, specifically to avoid the fees. For those households, food waste that used to leave the property in a sealed can every week now stays on it, and unless the pile or bin is managed to keep wildlife out, it stays reachable.

The warning, in the state’s own plan

The Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department’s 2020–2030 Big Game Management Plan — the ten-year document that guides the department’s bear management — was posted in draft in March 2020, took public comment through August 13, 2020, six weeks after the residential ban took effect, and was finalized in 2021. Its black bear chapter addresses the composting mandate directly.

The plan states that the mandated composting law could, “at least temporarily, increase problems statewide” without proactive measures aimed at reducing bear-human conflict. And it identifies the specific gap: the law has “no requirement for bear-proof food scrap containers.”

The plan also documents that this was not a prediction waiting to come true. It had already started. In the three years before the plan was drafted — while the mandate still applied only to large generators, before it reached a single household — the department had logged more than one hundred reports of bears damaging compost structures. The plan expected that number to rise as more Vermonters started backyard composting to avoid hauler fees.

Set that against the trajectory the same chapter records. In 1990, the department received 24 bear complaints statewide and counted 8 incidental mortalities. By 2016 it was 866 complaints and 203 incidental mortalities, 158 of them road deaths. The plan’s own characterization is that the rise was out of proportion to bear numbers: while the population roughly doubled since 1990, reports of bears causing damage and bears killed by means other than hunting increased twenty- to thirty-fold. The department wrote that the volume of bear-human interactions was already taxing it beyond its capacity to respond.

Into that trend, in that year, the state made food-scrap diversion universal — and its own wildlife plan flagged the missing safeguard by name.

Subscribe now

What the Legislature did next

Here is what the Vermont General Assembly has done to these statutes since the ban took effect. This comes from the amendment history printed at the bottom of each section and the enacted text of each act — the public record of what passed, not of what was discussed.

§ 6605k, the food residuals mandate: untouched. Its last amendment is Act 208 of 2018, effective July 1, 2020 — the section has not been changed since before the residential ban took effect.

§ 6621a, the landfill disposal ban itself: reopened three times.

• Act 58 of 2023 (H.67) added household hazardous products to the banned-materials list.

• Act 152 of 2024 (S.254) updated the battery entries to match an expanded battery stewardship program.

• Act 59 of 2025 (H.484) — a miscellaneous agriculture omnibus — moved the household-hazardous-products deadline from 2025 to 2026. One line.

Three reopenings of the exact statute. A new banned material, a list update, a date fix. List maintenance and deadline management. Nothing that touches food scraps, compost, containers, or wildlife.

The disposal ban’s one express exception for food residuals — for scraps collected at litter-cleanup events, subsection (d) — predates the residential requirement entirely: the amendment history shows it was in place by 2016 at the latest. The Legislature wrote that exception years before the ban reached households, and has added nothing to the section since.

The picture is the same from the other direction, with a caveat about method. The Legislature’s bill search is keyword-based and imperfect — it does not reliably surface every bill that touches a given statute section, and this review found bills it missed. What a Compass review of bear-related legislation across the 2021–22, 2023–24, and 2025–26 bienniums did surface was trapping and furbearer regulation, and bills concerning bears damaging agricultural crops. None imposed safeguards for residential food-scrap management. The one bill found proposing to amend the disposal ban outside the three enacted acts, H.292 of 2025, concerned PFAS in biosolids; as of this writing it has not moved since its first reading in February 2025. What committees discussed along the way isn’t captured in session law. What passed is — and none of it reached the gap the bear plan named.

Meanwhile the fix migrated to you. Fish & Wildlife’s guidance for composting in bear country: use three times as many browns as greens, keep the pile in a sturdy bin, take down your bird feeders — and if a bear does come, stop composting at home until it leaves the area or surround the bin with an electric fence. The statute mandates the diversion; the agency documents the risk; the resident buys the fence.

What can’t be measured — and what can

Honesty requires saying what this record does not prove. Nobody can isolate the composting law’s share of Vermont’s bear-conflict numbers, and this piece does not claim to. The bear population has grown and pushed into lower-elevation towns where more people live. Bears now occupy nearly twice as many Vermont towns as a few decades ago. Habitat has shifted, and the plan points to natural food supply as a driver of year-to-year swings — a bad berry or acorn year sends bears looking elsewhere, and the department expects drought and temperature extremes to make those years more frequent. 2020 also kept more people home, plausibly generating more household food waste. Changes in how conflicts get reported may account for part of the rise. And the plan notes that most Vermonters already composted before the mandate — the hundred-plus damage reports predate the ban precisely because voluntary compost was already drawing bears. That last point cuts both ways: it shrinks the mandate’s marginal contribution, and it means the state universalized a known attractant with the damage already in its own records. The plan’s own hedge — “at least temporarily” — is a hedge, and its account of rising conflicts is multi-causal. All of that is real.

Subscribe now

But the argument here was never that composting caused Vermont’s bear problem. It is narrower, and every piece of it is documented: the Legislature made a known attractant universal and mandatory; the state’s own wildlife agency identified the missing safeguard in writing, in the ten-year plan it was finalizing as the mandate reached every household, with the damage already showing up in its records; and three legislatures since have opened the relevant statute three times without ever reaching it. State guidance on avoiding bear conflicts leads with trash cans and bird feeders — choices individual residents make. The record shows a third attractant the law extended to every remaining household, and a safeguard that one arm of state government named while another never wrote it into the statute.

What to watch

Three markers, going forward. The next Legislature convenes in January 2027; any bill addressing compost containers, wildlife-conflict funding, or small-lot accommodations would appear there first. The Fish & Wildlife Department’s current big game plan expires in 2030, and the drafting of its successor will show whether the department repeats the warning — or records that it was answered. And the household-hazardous-products deadline the Legislature pushed back by a year took effect on July 1 of this year — a reminder of how routinely this statute gets adjusted when someone asks.

The question this piece began with — did the composting mandate make the bear problem worse? — may never get a measured answer. The question the record does answer is narrower: the state’s own wildlife experts put the missing safeguard in writing, in a public plan, as the mandate reached every household. Six years of session law shows no one wrote it into the law.

Sources: Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department, Big Game Management Plan 2020–2030 (finalized 2021; bear chapter, pp. 29–35, composting discussion and quotes at pp. 30–31); Vermont Fish & Wildlife, Composting in Bear Country; 10 V.S.A. §§ 6602, 6605k, and 6621a with amendment histories (Vermont Statutes Online is an unofficial convenience copy); Acts 58 (2023), 152 (2024), and 59 (2025) as enacted; H.292 of 2025 bill status; DEC Universal Recycling.

Compass Vermont is independent and reader-supported.

Subscribe now

ANALYSIS

When you wash your hands before dinner, do you ever look down and wonder what got under your fingernails all day?

Subscribe now

Not the obvious days — the garden days, the days under the truck. The ordinary ones. The rim under each nail that you didn’t notice arriving, that you scrape at without thinking, that says something about the eight or ten hours you just spent. Most of us do one kind of work, all day, most days. And most of us go home with the residue of exactly that one thing under our nails, whether we look or not.

So here’s a question worth a few minutes: what is under the fingernails of a Vermonter at the end of an ordinary day? Not the Vermonter on the postcard. The one who actually clocked in this morning.

To answer it honestly, you have to start with who works here, and at what.

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and its May 2025 count of Vermont jobs, the ten largest occupations in the state are these:

• Retail salespersons — 8,250

• General and operations managers — 8,000

• Home health and personal care aides — 7,700

• Registered nurses — 7,410

• Cashiers — 7,030

• Fast food and counter workers — 6,830

• Stockers and order fillers — 5,360

• Janitors and cleaners — 5,130

• Office clerks — 5,100

• Teaching assistants — 4,960

That’s 65,770 jobs — more than one in five of every job the survey counts in Vermont.

The Vermonters You Don’t Find on the Postcards

Read the list again, because it isn’t the Vermont we advertise. There’s no logger on it. No dairy farmer, no sugarmaker, no stonecutter, no ski instructor. The actual working day in Vermont happens on a sales floor, at a register, in a hospital corridor, behind a kitchen counter, in the aisles of a store after close, and in other people’s houses. That’s where the hands are.

So let’s look at them. What follows is what the work can leave behind — not a claim about every person who does it, but the residue these jobs are known to carry home.

Stock the shelves, run the floor.

The largest share of Vermont’s workday is retail — selling, stocking, ringing up. It looks clean. It isn’t; it’s just quiet. You break down boxes all shift, ride a box cutter against the same knuckle, move merchandise from truck to shelf to bag a thousand times over.

Under the nails:

• Fine gray cardboard dust, worked deep into the edge

• A box-cutter callus at the first knuckle

• Shrink-wrap static and the filmy gray of handled goods

Clean the building.

Vermont has more than 5,000 jobs classified as janitors and cleaners, and their hands tell on the chemistry more than the dirt. The building ends the day spotless. The hands that got it there don’t.

Under the nails:

• Bleach, degreaser, the ammonia bite of glass cleaner

• Yellowed nail plate and cuticles worn back

• The dry split in the skin where a stripping agent sat too long

Feed people.

Fast food and counter work — nearly 7,000 jobs, and that’s before you count the line cooks tallied separately. Grease is the honest one here: it gets under the nail and it does not come out with one wash, or two.

Under the nails:

• Fryer grease that survives the dish soap

• Salt, and the sheen you can smell at midnight

• The small shiny burn scars a kitchen collects on the backs of the fingers

Hold other people up.

Home health and personal care aides — 7,700 jobs, the third-largest occupation in the state. This is work you do with your hands kept short and bare, because you can’t do it with anything that could scratch or harbor. So the story under the nails isn’t dirt. It’s what the work costs the hands themselves — and, in home health, it’s that the workplace is someone else’s living room, for a median wage of about $20 an hour.

Under the nails:

• Not much — and that’s the point

• Cuticles cracked raw from washing and sanitizer, shift after shift

• Woodstove ash, a cold bathroom, the underside of a transfer belt — someone else’s house

And then the register.

Here’s where it gets strange.

If you run a cash register all day, you’d expect your hands to read like the retail list up top — cardboard, grime, the film of handling things. But there’s something on a cashier’s hands you can’t see at all.

Receipts.

Thermal receipt paper — the slick kind that fades in a year — makes its image through a heat-reactive chemical coating rather than ink. These days that coating is usually bisphenol S, or BPS, the substitute that replaced BPA after years of concern about it. Handle the paper and a little of the coating transfers to your skin. And a 2014 study found the transfer isn’t fixed: when people held thermal paper with hand sanitizer still wet on their hands, far more of the chemical came off onto the skin than when their hands were dry. The sanitizer’s solvents opened the door. The researchers happened to note that at the store they looked at, a bottle of sanitizer sat at every register.

Under the nails:

• Nothing you can see — and that’s the whole story

That’s the strange part. The bottle at the register — the thing we all reached for and never stopped reaching for — may be the reason more of the coating ends up on a cashier’s hands, not less. There’s nothing to scrape out at the sink. Whatever’s there went somewhere a nail brush can’t reach.

Vermont law regulates bisphenols in food packaging. It says nothing about the coating on the paper you’re handed at the register.

That’s the piece nobody sees. Now the piece nobody counts.

Look back at that top-ten list and notice who isn’t on it — the logger, the farmer, the sugarmaker, the quarry hand. It’s tempting to read their absence as proof they’ve vanished from Vermont. They haven’t. The federal survey is built from employers’ payrolls, and much of Vermont’s iconic work is done by people who work for themselves — so the count can’t see them. It puts the entire category of farming, fishing, and forestry in Vermont at about 530 workers, a number that only makes sense once you know how much it leaves out. Those hands are real.

Under the nails:

• Sap, bar oil, chainsaw pitch

• Manure and teat dip

• Granite dust, of the kind Barre learned long ago to fear

It’s all still under Vermont’s fingernails. It just doesn’t fit in the ledger — which is its own quiet story about how we measure a state’s work, and whose work we measure.

So: what’s under yours?

Maybe it’s cardboard. Maybe it’s fryer grease, or floor stripper, or nothing at all because the day’s residue went somewhere you can’t see. Maybe it’s sap and chainsaw grit and you’re not in anyone’s official count. Whatever it is, it’s the truest record of your day you’re carrying — a small dark line that says here is what I actually did with my hands in a way a job title never quite manages.

Scrape it out. Wash up. Dinner’s ready.

Tell us what you found under there.

The Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules voted 5-3 Thursday against the Scott administration’s revised wetlands rule, declining the Agency of Natural Resources’ request to withdraw the objection the committee lodged in May. It is the second time this year the committee has come down against the wetlands and housing provisions of Executive Order 06-25.

Subscribe now

The committee’s posted agenda listed rule 25-P040 for that day; minutes and a roll call had not been published as of Friday.

Governor Phil Scott’s office announced the vote the same day, saying the administration had narrowed its original proposal after months of negotiation and that the narrower version earned “the support of both environmental and housing advocacy organizations.” The statement did not name them.

The agency’s own filing names them, and describes the arrangement in different terms.

In a July 14 letter to committee chair Rep. Trevor Squirrell, DEC Commissioner Misty Sinsigalli wrote that the deadline extension allowed the agency to negotiate changes to Section 6.26 with Let’s Build Homes and the Vermont Natural Resources Council, which in turn worked with partners in the Water Caucus. On the changes that resulted, the letter says Let’s Build Homes and ANR support them and that VNRC “does not oppose” them.

It adds that the agency does not speak for either organization and that the agreement should not be treated as precedential. The Conservation Law Foundation, the Lake Champlain Committee and the Connecticut River Conservancy, which joined VNRC in welcoming the May objection, are not described as parties to it.

The letter is also candid about why the agency negotiated at all: without an agreement, it says, litigation was virtually certain, and would delay the housing work either way.

Subscribe now

What the administration gave up is substantial. The revised rule eliminates the allowed use for housing in unmapped Class II wetlands — the provision conservation groups objected to most loudly, and the one the committee called arbitrary because it leaned on state inventory maps. Projects in the outer 25 feet of a buffer would now need a wetland delineation approved by the Secretary within the past ten years.

The geographic reach narrows to within a half mile of designated areas served by public sewer or water, or with soils adequate for wastewater disposal. And builders would have to notify the wetlands program 30 days before construction rather than after.

Two allowed uses survive: housing and associated infrastructure within 25 to 50 feet of the buffers of mapped and delineated Class II wetlands, and linear utilities inside Class II wetlands under a set of best management practices carrying compensation for permanent impacts above 5,000 square feet. The 2030 sunset is unchanged, with registered projects permitted to finish construction into 2031.

The committee had objected on May 21, also 5-3, on three grounds — chief among them that the agency cannot weigh housing benefits against wetland protection through rulemaking when the Legislature has already written that balance into statute. LCAR’s eight members are five Democrats and three Republicans, and both votes fell along that line. None of the five is leaving the Legislature. Candidate filing closed May 28, and all five are on the November ballot; two of them, Sen. Seth Bongartz and Sen. Robert Plunkett, face a contested Democratic primary on August 11, with three candidates running for Bennington’s two Senate seats.

For a Vermonter with a housing project near a Class II wetland in a designated growth area, none of this is in force. Vermont statute sets the Class II buffer at 50 feet unless the Secretary determines otherwise for a particular wetland, and activity inside a significant wetland or its buffer generally has to qualify as an allowed use or be authorized by permit or conditional-use determination. DEC’s site states that the 2023 rules remain in effect and that the housing amendments have not been adopted.

Two votes. Two different rule texts. The same 5-3 alignment.

The thing to notice is what the negotiation could and could not change. It changed the substance considerably — enough that the state’s largest conservation group stepped back from opposition. It did not change the committee’s stated objection, which was never about how much wetland the rule would affect. LCAR’s May memo argued that the agency cannot set aside the Legislature’s wetland-protection policy in order to weigh it against the economic benefits of housing, and that adjusting a Class II buffer calls for an individualized determination rather than a blanket reduction for a class of projects. That is an argument about who holds the authority. A private agreement among an agency, a builders’ coalition and an environmental group cannot confer it.

Which is a fair answer to the Governor’s framing, and an uncomfortable one for the committee too. If the objection is purely about authority, then the narrowing was beside the point and the second vote was decided before the negotiation began. If it was about substance, the narrowing should have moved somebody. Nobody moved.

That distinction also describes a narrower power than a veto. Under the Administrative Procedure Act an agency that receives an objection may respond and adopt the rule anyway; what a certified objection changes is who carries the burden afterward, requiring the agency to show in any later challenge that the provisions are authorized, consistent with legislative intent and not arbitrary. LCAR cannot stop a rule. It can make adopting one expensive.

Twice now, the committee has declined to make it cheaper.

There is an obvious objection to reading this as lawmakers choosing land over housing: Act 181. The 2024 law reworked Vermont’s land-use framework in an explicitly pro-housing direction, and the designated areas at issue here exist because of it — ANR’s filing cites Act 181 alongside 24 V.S.A. chapter 76A and 10 V.S.A. §§ 6033–6034 as the basis for the roughly three percent of the state where the rule would apply. Bongartz, the committee’s vice chair and one of Act 181’s architects, told VTDigger and Vermont Public in May that framing housing and wetlands as an inherent conflict is “preposterous.”

But Act 181 answered where. It did not repeal the statutory Class II buffer, and it did not authorize a categorical reduction of that buffer for housing inside the areas it designated. That gap — land marked for concentrated growth, still governed by the wetlands statute — is what Executive Order 06-25 set out to close by rule.

It is still open. The Legislature could close it by statute. The administration could adopt the rule and defend it in court. Ten months after Executive Order 06-25, the buffer is where it was in September.

You’re at the counter with a coffee and a sandwich. The total is $8.62. You hand over a ten. The clerk gives you back $1.40 instead of $1.38, or maybe $1.38 exactly, or maybe there’s a handwritten sign taped to the register saying the store is out of pennies and you’re not sure what that means for you.

Subscribe now

Any of those could be what’s happening at your register. All of them trace back to the same law.

Since June 8, a Vermont business has been allowed to round your cash total to the nearest five cents. The rule arrived inside Act 128, the Legislature’s economic development bill, and it runs about three paragraphs. It now sits in the chapter of Vermont law that defines the dollar, the cent and the mill as the state’s units of account.

Here’s the part that matters at the counter: it’s optional. Every store decides for itself. There is no statewide practice to learn. There is only whatever the register in front of you happens to do, and there’s a decent chance nobody has told you which one it is.

What your store might be doing

Five possibilities, and you can’t tell them apart by looking.

Rounding by the state’s table, with the notice posted. This is the version the law is built for. Totals ending in 1, 2, 6 or 7 cents come down. Totals ending in 3, 4, 8 or 9 go up. The store posts the state’s model notice at the register or the door, and you can read the whole rule while you wait.

Rounding by the table, no notice. The rounding is lawful. The missing notice is its own problem — the law requires businesses that round to post it — but that’s between the store and the state, and it doesn’t make your $8.60 wrong.

Rounding down every time. Some shops just eat the difference rather than think about it. You come out ahead or even, every single time. Technically this isn’t the statute’s method. Practically, nobody is going to complain.

Rounding up every time. This is the one to notice. It isn’t the statute’s method either, and that matters more here, because the whole point of Act 128 was to give businesses legal cover. The law says rounding by its table isn’t an unlawful price increase, a surcharge, an unfair or deceptive practice, or discrimination. A store that only ever rounds up doesn’t have that cover. It gave up the protection the law was written to provide.

Not rounding at all. Asking for exact change, steering you to a card, digging out the penny jar.

If you want to know which one you’re dealing with, the receipt tells you. Compare the subtotal, the tax, and what you actually handed over. It reconciles or it doesn’t.

The sign says something the law doesn’t

The state produced a model notice for stores to post — the one with the Vermont logo and the number line with the little arrows. If you’ve seen it, you’ve seen this line at the top:

Pursuant to Vermont State Law, when pennies are unavailable, cash purchase totals may be rounded to the nearest nickel…

When pennies are unavailable. Reasonable enough. It sounds like a contingency — like rounding kicks in on a bad supply day.

The law doesn’t say that. Its operative sentence reads that a person in a cash transaction “may round the final amount due to the nearest $0.05,” and then gives the table. No shortage required. No standard for what “unavailable” would even mean. A store can round every cash sale, all day, with a drawer full of pennies, and be squarely within the law.

The “when pennies are unavailable” language does appear in the act — in its purpose section, which explains why lawmakers wrote it. Purpose sections tell you the intent. They aren’t the permission. The permission is unconditional.

The notice adds one more limit that isn’t in the statute either: that rounding applies only to purchases over five cents. Nothing in the law says so.

That the notice is narrower than the law isn’t a technicality, and Arizona shows why. When Arizona wrote its own rounding law in March, it put the penny-availability condition in the operative text, not the preamble: rounding applies where one-cent coins “are not available or are not used by a seller.” Arizona also made rounding mandatory rather than optional, and — the part with real teeth — expressly forbade sellers from using any rounding method other than the standard one. In Arizona, a store that rounds up every time is breaking the law. In Vermont, it has merely forfeited a legal shield it may never need.

Subscribe now

Three things nobody put on the poster

If you return it, you get back what you paid. The law says that if a transaction was rounded, a cash refund goes to you “in the exact amount initially paid.” Rounded up two cents on the way in, you get those two cents on the way out. A real protection, and it isn’t mentioned anywhere on the notice.

Paying part cash still counts. The law defines a cash transaction as one where payment is made “entirely or partially in cash.” Twenty in bills and the rest on a card is a cash transaction, and it can be rounded. The notice and the Department of Taxes guidance both describe this as a cash-purchase rule, which is true but leaves that out.

The state gets the same either way. Tax is calculated on the real total before any rounding, so nothing here changes what Montpelier collects. The pennies come out of the space between you and the store, not out of the treasury.

And if something seems off?

This is where it gets strange.

The notice was written by the Department of Liquor and Lottery. Complaints go to the Attorney General’s Consumer Assistance Program, the address printed at the bottom of the poster. But the power to actually penalize a business for not posting belongs to the Secretary of Agriculture, Food and Markets — the agency that inspects gas pumps and grocery scales — under a penalty section borrowed from an entirely different title of Vermont law, capped at $500. That agency also runs its own consumer complaint form, which the poster doesn’t mention.

Three agencies, two complaint windows, one poster, five hundred dollars. Vermont is not alone in the last part: Arizona also handed enforcement to its agriculture department’s weights and measures division. Rounding, it seems, is being treated everywhere as a cousin of the gas pump.

What that enforcement looks like in practice is a matter of public record, and it’s worth knowing before you assume anyone is being fined. The Agency’s weights and measures program starts with an official notice on a first violation and a written corrective action report from the store; penalties escalate only if inspectors find the same problem again, with referral to the Attorney General as the far end. The Agency publishes its violation records back to 2011, sorted into four categories — price scanners, short weight, missing meter seals, and short measure. A missing rounding notice is not among them. Whether Act 128 checks have been folded into that inspection routine at all doesn’t appear anywhere in the public record.

There’s also a gap at the start. The law took effect June 8. The state wasn’t required to have the model notice ready until July 1. For about three weeks, a business could round under the law’s protection while the notice it was supposed to display didn’t yet exist.

So is it costing you money?

Almost certainly not much. But how it works is more interesting than the amount.

Start with the rule itself, which is even. Four endings go down, four go up, and the amounts match exactly — over a full run of possible totals you gain six cents and give back six. If the last digit of your total were random, this law would cost nobody anything, ever.

First: most cash purchases aren’t affected at all. The best data on this is a Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond study by economists Zhu Wang and Russell Wong, which is where the widely quoted “$6 million” figure comes from. Rather than simulate, they used the Fed’s Diary of Consumer Payment Choice — 24,728 real transactions logged by 4,671 adults over three days in 2023. Of those, 3,559 were cash. And 2,436 of the cash transactions — more than two-thirds — ended in whole dollars, so rounding wouldn’t touch them. Of the rest, about 35 percent ended in a zero or a five, also untouched.

Work that through and roughly one cash transaction in five is actually subject to rounding at all. Across every payment method, it’s about three in a hundred.

Second: the totals that are affected lean the wrong way, slightly. Wang and Wong found real cash totals cluster on 3, 4, 8 and 9 cents — the round-up digits — rather than spreading evenly. Applying the standard rule to each transaction and scaling to the adult U.S. population, they put the national cost at $6.06 million a year. That works out to about 2.35 cents per adult per year. Scaled to Vermont’s roughly 532,000 adults, on the order of $12,500 statewide — our arithmetic, not theirs, and rough. Per affected transaction, the average drift is about an eighth of a cent.

Third — and this is the Vermont part — our tax rates decide whether the drift is random or locked in.

We checked every price from $1.00 to $99.99 against each Vermont rate. At 6 percent sales tax, 7 percent in local-option towns, 9 percent meals, and 11 percent alcohol in local-option towns, multiplying by the tax scatters the final digit across all ten values and the net effect lands within a hundredth of a cent of zero. Those rates are, in effect, randomizers.

Two rates aren’t. And they are the two that matter most in Vermont.

Zero percent. Vermont doesn’t tax groceries, clothing, footwear or medicine. On those, the shelf price is the total. So a single item priced at $4.99, or $2.49, or $6.19 — any price ending in 9 — produces a total ending in 9. Nine rounds up. Not usually. Every time. That is arithmetic, not a forecast, and it holds for every 9-ending price we tested.

Subscribe now

Ten percent. Vermont’s alcoholic beverage tax is 10 percent statewide on drinks served for immediate consumption — bars, restaurants, taverns, clubs. It’s also the meals rate in the 44 municipalities that have adopted the 1 percent local option meals tax. And 10 percent is too clean a multiplier to scramble anything: whatever your price ends in, the total’s last digit is fixed. A $7.99 drink lands on 9 and rounds up, every time. A $7.89 drink lands on 8 and rounds up two cents, every time. A $7.79 drink lands on 7 and rounds down two cents, every time.

That last one is worth sitting with, because it cuts against the easy version of this story. At 10 percent the outcome isn’t stacked against customers — it’s stacked, full stop. Which way depends on how the menu is priced. A bar that ends its prices in .99 will round up on every cash drink it sells for as long as those prices hold. A bar down the street that ends its prices in .79 will round down on every one. Neither is doing anything wrong. Neither is choosing. The menu decided it.

The one place the tilt does run consistently against customers is the untaxed aisle, and even there it vanishes as soon as you buy more than one thing:

A full grocery run comes out level. The exposure is the small stuff — one or two untaxed items, paid in cash, at a store that rounds. The gas station run.

Which means it lands on people who pay cash. In the Fed’s diary data, Vermonters’ age group is the tell: adults 55 and older used cash for about 22 percent of their payments, roughly double the 12 percent rate among people under 55. Vermont is one of the oldest states in the country, with about 22.8 percent of residents over 65 against 18 percent nationally. If anything, the $12,500 estimate is a floor.

Questions the record doesn’t answer

Some of this is simply not knowable from the documents, and it’s worth being plain about which parts.

Whether a store that rounds without posting keeps its legal protection. The law grants the protection in one subsection and requires the notice in another, and the text does not connect them. Arizona’s statute leaves less room for the question by forbidding alternative methods outright. Vermont’s doesn’t address it.

Why the notice describes a narrower rule than the statute. Nothing in the act, the Department of Taxes guidance, or the notice itself explains the gap. The purpose section is the likeliest origin, but that’s an inference, not a finding.

Whether anyone is enforcing the notice requirement. No rounding-notice category appears in the Agency of Agriculture’s published violation records, which is consistent with either no enforcement or no violations found — the record can’t distinguish between them.

How many Vermont businesses are rounding. The law is optional, there is no registry, and no one has counted. Any figure you see is a guess.

What share of Vermont transactions are cash. The national diary data is the best available proxy. No state-level measurement appears to exist.

What to watch

Whether lawmakers come back and do what Arizona did — make rounding mandatory and bar every other method — which would end the store-by-store guessing Vermont has chosen instead. Whether the notice gets rewritten to match the law. And whether anyone in Montpelier notices that the 10 percent alcohol rate turns every cash bar tab in the state into a coin flip that was decided months ago, by the menu.

In the meantime: check your receipt. It’s two cents. It’s also the only way to know.

How we got the numbers: rounding outcomes come straight off the statutory table in Act 128. The claims about which tax rates scatter the final digit and which lock it were computed deterministically over every price from $1.00 to $99.99 at 0, 6, 7, 9, 10 and 11 percent, with tax rounded to the cent before the statutory rounding is applied; the basket table is arithmetic. National transaction figures are from Wang and Wong, “Rounding Up: The Impact of Phasing Out the Penny,” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Economic Brief No. 25-27 (July 2025), which uses the 2023 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice. The finding that roughly one cash transaction in five is subject to rounding is our arithmetic from the transaction counts they report, not a figure they publish. The Vermont dollar figure scales their national estimate by adult population and is ours, not theirs. Local option tax counts are from the Department of Taxes list as published, counting only municipalities whose tax is in effect as of publication.

Compass Points is our curation file. No reporting of our own — just the Vermont stories we read this week that we think are worth your time, a short note on why, and a link straight to the people who did the work.

We picked this one for a subhead, not a headline: the Nulhegan plan a cultural hub at the former Covenant Hills camp, echoing a promise made to Chief Philip in 1796.

That stopped us. A promise made in 1796 — by whom, to whom, and how does a Methodist summer camp end up sitting on top of it 230 years later? Most coverage of this transfer ran the ceremony and moved on. North Star went back and traced the deed, the families who signed it, and what happened to the land in between. It’s the rare local story where the history isn’t decoration.

Worth the read for sure. → Click below.

270 Acres in Cabot and Peacham returned to Nulhegan Abenaki

ANALYSIS

They’re bumblebee yellow, about the size of a ride-on mower, and since May they’ve been humming up and down crop rows on farms in northern Vermont with nobody driving them.

Subscribe now

More than 45 people came out to Henry Bros. Wolfridge Dairy in Alburgh on June 30 to watch three of them work at once. UVM Extension is running them again today at its annual Crops and Soils Field Day at Borderview Research Farm.

If you’ve seen them, you probably have a decent idea of what they do. What none of the demonstrations or the public write-ups have said is what one costs.

So we asked. Nathan Dyrud at Greenfield Robotics, the Kansas company that builds the BOTONY robots, wrote back with a number: $36,500 apiece.

Here’s what that means if you farm here.

How many you’d need

Start with the part that decides the bill.

Dyrud’s rule of thumb is one robot for every 80 to 100 acres of row crops. So under 80 acres of corn or beans, you’re looking at one machine — $36,500. Two hundred acres puts you at two or three. Three hundred, three or four. Where you land in that range depends on your fields, and it’s the difference between a $73,000 decision and a $146,000 one.

You’ll see a couple of different speed numbers floating around, and they’re measuring different things. UVM’s team clocked the robots at about seven acres in a day during the pilot, running on batteries good for three to three and a half hours before they need about that long to charge back up. Greenfield says the machines are now running 0.85 acres an hour. Neither is wrong; the acres-per-robot rule is the one to plan against.

What you get for the money is a machine that mows weeds between 30-inch rows and carries a 30-gallon foliar tank. Before it can run anywhere, the field has to be mapped — Adam Reck, Greenfield’s northeast territory leader, flies a fixed-wing drone at 350 feet when the crop is four to six inches tall, taking something like 1,200 pictures of a 70-acre field, which get stitched together into the path the robot follows. Speaking to WCAX in June, Heather Darby compared it to a robot vacuum: map it once, train the robots, and they go do their job.

Worth knowing what it doesn’t do. Mowing between the rows doesn’t touch the weeds coming up inside the row, right against your plants. This is a tool that replaces some passes, not your whole weed program.

Subscribe now

Two catches

The first one: you can’t rent your way in anymore.

Greenfield used to sell weeding as a service — you’d hire them the way you’d hire a custom sprayer, try it on a few acres, and never buy anything. Dyrud told us they’ve moved away from that. It’s outright purchase now. A lease option is supposed to come along later this year.

The second: you can’t get one this year anyway. They’re sold out for 2026 and taking orders for 2027. Anybody who watched those robots at Alburgh in June, liked what they saw, and had the money sitting there still couldn’t have put one in a field this season.

Where the pilot’s money came from

One caution before you measure your own situation against the pilot’s: what UVM paid per robot isn’t public, and the numbers below don’t establish it.

The Northwest Crops and Soils program — Darby, agronomy specialist Jeff Sanders, and precision ag specialist Daniel Bliss — got the six robots with $137,000 from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, Stonyfield Organic, and donations. That money also covered the drone mapping, a custom trailer with chargers mounted on the wall, and a season of support from the company.

Six robots at $36,500 would run $219,000. That doesn’t mean UVM got $82,000 knocked off. We don’t know the price at the time they bought, whether anything was donated or thrown in, or what the whole arrangement looked like. We asked UVM Extension how the $137,000 broke out across the three funders and how the purchase was put together. We hadn’t heard back by publication, and the question’s still open.

The short version: the pilot’s math isn’t your math. Six machines got onto Vermont farms on state, corporate, and donor money put together by a land-grant university, which is what a pilot is for. It just means watching them run at a field day was never going to tell you what they’d cost you.

What to keep an eye on

That lease option. Dyrud said the company plans to have one later this year. No terms, no firm date yet. For any farm that isn’t writing a $36,500 check up front, that’s the number to wait for.

The 2027 queue. Dyrud said Greenfield is sold out for 2026 and taking 2027 orders. He didn’t say what’s behind the wait, and we don’t know whether it reflects demand, production, or how the company is pacing sales. If you’re thinking about it, the practical point is that the line starts now.

Organic first. Sylvia Jensen, a water quality specialist at the Agency of Agriculture, said at the June demo that she hopes the cost comes down, and that for an organic operation this could be a game changer. That’s the sharpest thing anyone’s said about it. Organic standards limit which herbicides you can use, so mechanical weeding is worth more on those acres than on ground where spraying is an option — which makes organic and no-till the likeliest places for the numbers to work first. Nobody has run those numbers for a Vermont farm yet.

How they hold up. UVM says black beans and sweet corn are still to be tested. Rocky ground and Vermont’s mixed soils were among the reasons for trying this here, and a season’s worth of data off working farms — not a good day at a demo — is what’ll tell you whether these earn their price in this state.

Cell service. You need cell service to start a robot — the command goes through Greenfield’s app. Jeff Sanders said at the June demo that UVM’s crew uses Starlink to get service in rural fields, and that it’s worked OK but has been spotty enough to cause delays. Around here, that’s not a footnote. That’s a condition of use.

Compass Vermont is independent and reader-supported.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

If you fish Lake Memphremagog, you have probably seen one. A brown bullhead — a catfish, what a lot of people around here still call a pout — with a raised black patch on its side, its head, its fins, sometimes in and around its mouth.

Anglers and biologists started reporting them in 2012. Depending on where in the lake you drop a line, somewhere between roughly a fifth and 40% of the adult bullhead have them.

A study published today in the journal Nature explains what they are. The answer is stranger than anyone expected, and it comes with a second finding that has gone almost unmentioned: this cancer did not start here.

First, the question you actually have

Can you eat the fish?

The researchers say the disease poses no known risk to people. In UVM’s announcement of the study, the team states that the cancer cells cannot infect or survive in another species and that the fish are safe to handle. The lake also supplies drinking water to more than 175,000 people, most of them across the border in Quebec, and the researchers say nothing about this affects that supply. The Nature paper itself is a genetics paper and does not take up human health at all.

So the scientific answer is no, you are not going to catch cancer from a catfish.

Here is the part that is harder to summarize. Vermont has no fish consumption advisory specific to Lake Memphremagog or to brown bullhead. The state’s waterbody-specific advisories cover lake trout in Lake Champlain, all fish in the Hoosic River, and several reservoirs on the Deerfield and Connecticut. Memphremagog bullhead have never been on that list. Statewide mercury guidance applies here as it does everywhere else in Vermont, but nothing addresses these fish or these tumors.

What anglers have instead is one scientist’s personal answer. In UVM’s announcement today, fish biologist Mark Henderson, one of the study’s authors, says of the affected fish: <cite index=”1-1”>”personally, I wouldn’t eat the ones with tumors.”</cite>

That is a biologist speaking for himself. No Vermont agency has told the public anything about eating these fish.

There is one concrete reason that gap matters, and it has nothing to do with the cancer being contagious to people. A separate study published in May in the Journal of Fish Diseases found that the diseased skin on these fish carries higher concentrations of seven metals than skin from healthy fish — including arsenic, a known human carcinogen, and zinc. That is a finding about lesioned skin, not about fillets. Nobody has published an assessment of what it means for a person eating the fish. That assessment is the thing that does not exist.

What is actually wrong with the fish

The black patches are melanoma — skin cancer.

That was the first surprise. Melanoma is the cancer we associate with too much sun, and the brown bullhead is a bottom-dwelling fish that spends its life away from sunlight.

The second surprise was much bigger. When the team sequenced the DNA, they expected to find each fish developing its own cancer from its own damaged cells. Instead, tumors from different fish turned out to be more closely related to each other than to the fish carrying them — in the mitochondrial DNA, in single-letter changes across the nuclear genome, and in large-scale structural rearrangements. All three lines of evidence pointed the same way.

That means the cancer is not starting over in each animal. It is one cancer, descended from a single original fish, spreading from animal to animal, with the tumor cells themselves acting as the infection. It behaves less like a tumor and more like a parasite.

The team also screened every sample for viruses and other microbes and found nothing associated with the tumors. That matters, because the obvious alternative explanation — a virus causing cancer in fish after fish — is the one they were able to rule out.

Only three others like it are known anywhere in the animal kingdom: a facial tumor in Tasmanian devils, a venereal tumor in dogs, and a leukemia-like disease in clams, mussels, and other bivalves. This is the first ever found in a fish, and the first in fresh water.

There is a historical footnote worth the space. In the early 1900s, a researcher studying black tumors on brown bullhead in a Massachusetts pond managed to produce small tumors in healthy fish by exposing them to tumor cells. He concluded something contagious was at work but could not identify what. More than a century later, this study identifies it: the cells were the contagion.

The work was led by Emily Curd and Julie Dragon of the University of Vermont, with Mark Henderson of UVM’s Rubenstein School, Matthew Bodnar, Tom Jones, and Peter Emerson of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department among the authors. Collections were made under the auspices of Fish and Wildlife.

It did not start here

This is the finding most likely to get lost, and it is the one with the most consequence for the Northeast Kingdom.

When the researchers compared the tumor DNA against healthy bullhead from around the region, the tumor lineage did not match Memphremagog fish. It sat closer to reference fish sampled in New Hampshire and Maine. The study’s conclusion is direct: the cancer lineage originated outside Lake Memphremagog.

It also predates 2015. Tissue collected that year, reanalyzed for this study, already carries the same clonal signature.

That reorders the local debate. For a decade, the working assumption was that something in the lake was causing the cancer. A leading hypothesis in the scientific literature was that flooding from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 degraded water quality enough to trigger it. The genetics do not support that. The cancer was not created here by local conditions. It arrived, and then it spread fast — from not being present at any notable level before 2012 to roughly 30% of the lake’s bullhead by 2015.

Subscribe now

The landfill question

Which brings up the question most people around Newport will ask second.

The Coventry landfill — Vermont’s only operating landfill, run by the Casella subsidiary NEWSVT — sits above South Bay, next to the Black River, which feeds the lake. It has drawn organized opposition for years from Don’t Undermine Memphremagog’s Purity on the Vermont side and Memphremagog Conservation Inc. in Quebec.

Be precise about what today’s paper does and does not say. The Nature study never mentions the landfill. It is a genetics paper, and it does not test water, sediment, or contaminants.

What it establishes is that this cancer is an inherited lineage from a founder fish somewhere outside the lake, not damage caused to Memphremagog fish by something in Memphremagog. That is a strong reason to look elsewhere for the cause, and it is stronger evidence than anything offered before.

Separately, in UVM’s announcement, the researchers say directly that they see no evidence pointing to the landfill, and give their reasons: the diseased fish are spread across the full 32 miles of the lake rather than clustering near the landfill; they appear in bullhead populations within the lake that do not breed with one another; the team’s water testing found pollutant levels comparable to other lakes in the region, including Lake Champlain, where this cancer has not been found; and as sampling expanded, the disease turned up in ponds and lakes in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and New Brunswick, some of them clean water nowhere near a dump.

The distinction that is going to get lost this week

None of this concludes that the landfill is not affecting the lake. It concludes the landfill did not cause this cancer. Those are two different questions with two different bodies of evidence, and this research only answers the first.

The second question is still very much open. The landfill collects roughly a million gallons of leachate — the liquid that drains through buried garbage — every month. Since 2019, treating or disposing of that liquid anywhere in the Memphremagog watershed has been restricted under a condition attached to the Act 250 permit that approved the landfill’s 51-acre expansion, Land Use Permit series 7R0841. The leachate goes to treatment plants in Montpelier and Plattsburgh, New York, instead.

How long that restriction lasts is not clear from the public record. Memphremagog Conservation Inc. has described it as running to January 1, 2024, after which treated leachate could return to the watershed. In January, the Newport Daily Express reported that the Agency of Natural Resources had extended it indefinitely. In March, VTDigger quoted Rep. Larry Labor, R-Morgan, describing a five-year moratorium that would soon expire. The permit condition itself would settle it, and it has not been published.

The rest is firmer. Casella has run a system at the site since September 2023 to strip PFAS out of the leachate, with its formal pilot phase set for the second quarter of this year. In January, the Environmental Court ruled that making that system permanent requires an amended Act 250 permit, sending it before the District 7 Environmental Commission. A bill that would have banned landfill waste discharge into Lake Memphremagog outright, H.652, was introduced January 13 by Rep. Woodman Page, R-Newport City, referred to the House Committee on Environment, and never voted out.

Fourteen years of sampling

Most of this was built in public, a piece at a time.

YearWhat was found2012Anglers and biologists report black growths; not seen at notable levels before this2014–1723–37% of sampled bullhead affected2015Liver tumors in 8% of fish sampled; none at a comparison pond. Tissue from this year, reanalyzed later, already carries the clonal signature2020Lab work confirms malignant melanoma spreading into muscle and boneMar 2020State holds a public meeting on the lesions; cause unknownMay 2025State committee minutes record the contagious-tumor idea as under investigationMay 2026Lakewide survey finds 18–42%; the disease also turns up in Maine and New HampshireJul 2026DNA sequencing confirms one cancer spreading between fish, originating outside the lake

Worth noting: the contagious-tumor idea appears in the minutes of a Vermont Department of Health committee more than a year before it was published, raised by Matthew Bodnar, who is among the authors of today’s paper.

Subscribe now

What nobody knows yet

How it spreads. The study lays out the candidates without settling on one. The disease has not been documented in fish younger than breeding age, which points at spawning — bullhead crowd together in shallow water to breed, and that contact could pass cells along. Bullhead are also scaleless bottom-dwellers in constant contact with sediment, which could carry cancer cells between fish the way seawater is thought to carry the bivalve version. Weakened immune systems, from pollutants or from the hormonal swings of spawning season, could make fish easier to infect. None of this is established.

Where it came from, and what else it is in. The lineage traces outside the lake, but the study cannot yet say where or when it began. Other transmissible cancers range from decades old in Tasmanian devils to thousands of years old in dogs. Black tumors on brown bullhead have been reported for over a century, and whether those were this same lineage is unknown.

What arsenic has to do with it. This is not part of today’s paper. Separately, the researchers have said the map of where this cancer appears roughly tracks the map of naturally occurring arsenic in New England soils, which runs high through the Northeast Kingdom and into Maine. Whether arsenic weakens fish enough for the cancer to take hold, or is simply along for the ride, is unresolved. It is a finding about fish. It is not a statement about arsenic in Vermont wells, which is a separate and long-documented issue.

What it does to the fish population. The other transmissible cancers run the whole range. The Tasmanian devil version has driven a 90% decline and threatens extinction. The dog version usually regresses on its own. Bivalve populations persist despite it, with some localized die-offs. Heavily diseased Memphremagog bullhead live for years. The study is explicit that the effect on bullhead numbers here is currently unclear, and calls this the time-sensitive question.

What to watch

• Whether the Department of Health takes up guidance for Memphremagog bullhead now that the cause is known, and whether it treats a fish tumor with no human transmission route as an advisory trigger at all. There is no announced timeline for that decision.

• Whether containment becomes a management question. The study raises the possibility that spread to new waters — naturally or with human help — may eventually need to be limited. Nothing has been proposed, but this is the finding with the most direct implications for how people move boats, bait, and fish between Vermont waterbodies.

• What the 7R0841 permit condition actually says about the leachate restriction, and whether it is a fixed date, a permanent bar, or conditional on treatment. Compass will report the term once the permit language is confirmed.

• The District 7 proceeding on the leachate treatment system, and whether either side puts this study into that record.

• Whether a successor to H.652 is introduced next biennium.

• Where else this turns up. The authors’ own read is that transmissible cancers may be considerably more common than assumed, in fish and elsewhere — we have not been looking for them.

Sources for this piece are linked in the text. Additional documents: Act 250 Land Use Permit series 7R0841; the H.652 legislative record.