In News, Independent Does Not Equal Impartial

Is Vermont’s Sharp Cheddar Going Soft? We Asked a Cheese Chemist

A Norwich University Historian Is Now Streaming on Netflix

Vermont’s New Wake Boat Rule Polices the Boat, Not the Wake

Seventy Year Old Hiker Wisely Calls for Help on Mansfield Summit Before Running Out of Light, and Energy

After Lawmakers Rejected His Wetland Rule, Scott Says He’s Still Pushing — and Expects a Lawsuit if He Proceeds

The State Just Dropped a 263-Page Water Plan on Southern Vermont. Here’s the Part That’s About Your Town

Compass Points: “Very Limited Opportunities” Mean High School Seniors Are Leaving Vermont

Scott Signed the Forensic Facility Bill. Now Vermont Has to Build It

Vermont Built a Way to Count the Homes It Builds. The First Count Shows It Falling Further Behind

The word “independent” has become the most powerful credibility signal in American journalism. It appears in the branding of nearly every nonprofit newsroom, digital-first outlet, and newsletter-based publication in the country — including this one. Readers encounter it and instinctively assign trust, because the word implies: this outlet answers to no one, so you can believe what it tells you.

That instinct isn’t wrong — it’s just incomplete.

What “Independent” Actually Means

Independence in journalism describes a structural condition. It means an outlet is free from corporate ownership, political party control, or advertiser influence over editorial decisions. No parent company dictates which stories get covered. No donor calls the newsroom to spike an unflattering investigation.

That is genuinely valuable. The decline of independent ownership across American media has been well documented by Northwestern University’s Medill School. When hedge funds absorb local papers, coverage shrinks, newsrooms hollow out, and editorial priorities shift toward the balance sheet.

But here’s what independence does not tell you: how the outlet uses that freedom.

The Conflation

Independence describes who you answer to. Impartiality describes how you report. They are entirely different qualities, and conflating them has become so routine that most readers — and many journalists — no longer notice the substitution.

An independent outlet is free to be as opinionated, advocacy-driven, or editorially slanted as it chooses. That is not a flaw in the model — it is the whole point. Independence means the freedom to take positions and pursue coverage that aligns with an editorial worldview without corporate interference.

Readers benefit enormously from outlets that bring a specific point of view, particularly when that perspective surfaces stories and angles that mainstream media overlook. A progressive outlet investigating corporate malfeasance is performing a public service. A conservative outlet scrutinizing government overreach is performing a public service. A hyper-local outlet covering the school board meeting nobody else attended is performing a public service.

The value of independent journalism is real and substantial. The problem arises only when the word “independent” is used — intentionally or not — to imply something it doesn’t deliver: impartiality.

Why the Distinction Matters

When readers believe “independent” means “fair,” they lower their critical defenses. They consume reporting as if it were a comprehensive account, when it may be a carefully constructed argument for a particular interpretation. They mistake editorial choices — which sources to quote, which context to include, which counterarguments to address — for the natural, obvious way to tell the story.

This is how well-intentioned, well-sourced, structurally independent journalism can still leave readers with an incomplete picture. Not because anyone lied. Not because the facts were wrong. But because the framing did the work that an editorial page used to do — and the “independent” label obscured it.

The irony is that legacy media’s credibility collapse has made this dynamic worse. As trust in traditional outlets has declined steadily, readers have migrated toward independent sources precisely because they perceive them as more trustworthy. That migration has created an environment where the word “independent” does more persuasive work than any headline.

What Impartiality Actually Requires

If independence is a structural condition, impartiality is a discipline — and a far more demanding one.

Impartiality means presenting competing perspectives on a contested issue, even when you find one of them unconvincing. It means including the counterargument that complicates your narrative. It means letting word choice serve clarity rather than persuasion. It means trusting the reader to evaluate the evidence and reach their own conclusions.

Impartiality does not mean false equivalence. It does not mean treating every claim as equally valid regardless of evidence. It means presenting the data, presenting the claims, presenting the context, and respecting the reader enough to let them do the thinking.

This is harder than independence. Independence just requires not having a corporate parent. Impartiality requires discipline on every single story — resisting the pull to editorialize through framing, to stack sources, to omit the inconvenient detail that doesn’t fit the thesis.

Where Compass Vermont Stands

Compass Vermont is independent. But we have never believed that independence alone is sufficient to earn a reader’s trust.

Every story published here is built on a methodology designed to serve impartiality, not just independence. Every factual claim is hyperlinked to its primary source, so readers can verify the reporting themselves. Competing perspectives are presented when they exist. Editorial framing is identified as analysis when it appears. And the reader — not the publication — decides what the facts mean.

We don’t claim to be perfect at this. Impartiality is aspirational by nature — every editorial decision involves judgment. But the aspiration matters. The methodology matters. The commitment to letting readers think for themselves matters.

If you appreciate research-driven news that gives you the full picture and lets you draw your own conclusions, please consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription.

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There’s a piece making the rounds in The Wall Street Journal about the improbable rise of gas-station food — brisket smoked for fourteen hours at a Texas mega-stop, paella at a Miami filling station, Japanese-style egg-salad sandwiches imported to 7-Eleven coolers.

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The trade numbers back the trend: food now accounts for nearly 30 percent of what Americans buy inside convenience stores — up from about 12 percent two decades ago, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores — as chains scramble to replace the dollars cigarettes and beer used to bring in.

It’s a good story. It is also, from where we sit, a little funny — because the thing the rest of the country is calling a renaissance, Vermont has been calling Tuesday for about two hundred years.

We never had to rediscover good food at the pump, because we never stopped making it. The owner-operated deli counter, the scratch baking, the creemee window humming a few feet from the diesel nozzle — that isn’t a trend here. It’s infrastructure. The general store got there first, and in a lot of these places the food came first and the gas pumps are almost an afterthought.

And our version looks nothing like the one the Journal describes. There’s no Vermont Buc-ee’s, no billboard luring you off the interstate to a fluorescent food court — partly by law, partly by temperament. Ours are smaller, family-run, and usually you have to know they’re there. The brisket isn’t a marketing strategy bolted onto a fuel business. It’s somebody’s recipe.

A few of ours, just to start the brainstorming:

• Hero’s Welcome, North Hero. Gas, groceries, a deli, and a creemee window, all of it holding down the middle of the Champlain Islands. As much a town square as a store.

• The Cupboard Deli & Bakery, Jeffersonville. A genuinely good bakery — donuts, muffins, full loaves of bread — that happens to share a building with a filling station out on Route 15.

• Marty’s 1st Stop, Danville. Fill the tank, then watch them cut your sandwich meat to order. The deli case is the reason people pull off Route 2, and the gas is the afterthought — the Beatties opened the place as a food store in 1990 and didn’t put in the pumps until a year later.

• Cambridge Village Market. Pumps out front, a butcher counter and made-to-order sandwiches on fresh-baked bread in back.

That’s four. There are dozens — hundreds, really. Every Vermonter has one: the place you’ll add fifteen minutes to a drive for, the order you don’t have to think about, the counter person who starts making it when your truck pulls in.

So here’s what we want from you.

Tell us your spot. The town, the order, and why you keep coming back — the creemee flavor, the breakfast sandwich, the soup that’s only good on cold days, the pie. Drop it in the comments or email us at news@compassvermont.com. We’d love to share more great spots across the Green Mountain State.

The country thinks it just figured this out. Let’s show them how long the list really is.

For 24 years, Brian Canfield was a missing man.

On April 9, 2001, the 38-year-old Weathersfield resident was fishing at Sumner Falls in Hartland when his boat overturned in the Connecticut River. He and his companion, 44-year-old Terry Brinegar of Mount Holly, were both presumed drowned, according to Vermont State Police. Brinegar’s body surfaced about two weeks later at the Bellows Falls Dam. Canfield’s never did.

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What surfaced instead, more than five years later, was a human skull. According to the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which responded to the scene, hunters found it in October 2006 near the Salmon River Boat Launch in East Haddam, Connecticut — more than 150 miles down the Connecticut River from where Canfield disappeared. At the time, investigators had no way to connect it to the Vermont fisherman, and the remains were stored, unidentified, for nearly two decades.

It was a comparatively new forensic method — forensic genetic genealogy — that finally closed the gap this spring. Working from a DNA profile built by a Texas laboratory and a comparison sample from Canfield’s brother, whom investigators located in Delaware, authorities confirmed in May that the skull was his. The case, open since 2001, was closed.

That same technology is now at the center of a bill moving through Congress. The Carla Walker Act, co-sponsored by Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, cleared the full Senate this month and is headed to the House. It would create a federal program to put forensic genetic genealogy — the method that named Brian Canfield — within reach of more crime labs and investigative agencies.

Welch has framed the bill as a crime-fighting tool, and for its Texas namesake it was exactly that. But the Vermont case he points to is a different kind of story. Canfield was not a homicide victim; he was presumed drowned in a boating accident the state police describe as not suspicious. His identification was not a prosecution but an answer — a name returned to a family after nearly a quarter-century. The distinction matters, because it points to what the technology does beyond catching offenders: it identifies the dead.

What the technology actually does

The method that identified Canfield goes by a few names — forensic genetic genealogy, or FGG — but its power comes from how much more of the genome it reads than conventional forensic DNA testing.

The system most people picture, the FBI’s CODIS database, works by reading roughly 13 to 20 short tandem repeat markers, or STRs, from a sample and checking them against profiles already on file from known offenders. It’s fast and reliable, but it has a hard limit: if the person isn’t already in the database, there’s no match. The trail ends.

FGG reads a different and far larger slice of DNA — hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms, the SNP markers that consumer genealogy services use to tell you a stranger three states away is your second cousin. By comparing those shared blocks of DNA against the genealogical databases that permit law-enforcement searches — opt-in services such as GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, not the consumer giants Ancestry and 23andMe, which bar police use — investigators can identify not the person directly but their relatives, then build a family tree inward until a name emerges.

That’s the step that broke the Canfield case open. The skull found in East Haddam couldn’t be matched to anyone through conventional means. Othram, the Texas lab, rebuilt a usable DNA profile from the decades-old remains and ran a genealogical search that pointed investigators toward a specific family. From there it was traditional police work — locating Canfield’s brother in Delaware, obtaining a direct comparison sample, and confirming the match this May. The technology generated the lead; a relative’s sample closed it.

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What the bill would do

The Carla Walker Act doesn’t create a national DNA database or new surveillance authority. It’s narrower than that. The bill — S.1890 in the Senate — sets up a pair of competitive grant programs that let publicly funded, accredited crime labs apply for federal money to do this work: one stream to purchase the sequencing equipment, another to fund the analysis itself. Under the bill text, each is authorized at up to $5 million a year through fiscal 2029, and the work must follow the Justice Department’s 2019 interim policy governing how forensic genealogy searches are conducted.

The practical pitch is access. The labs that can already afford whole-genome sequencing and in-house genealogy teams tend to be large or well-funded; the cold cases sit everywhere, including in small states with thin forensic budgets. The bill’s logic is that a modest, dedicated funding stream lets a wider range of agencies reach for the same tool that named a Vermont fisherman.

The case behind the name

The bill is named for Carla Walker, and her case became an early test of forensic genealogy in court. Walker was 17 when she was abducted from a Fort Worth bowling alley parking lot in February 1974; her body was found three days later, south of the city. She had been beaten, raped, and strangled. Police collected evidence but had no way, with the science of the era, to identify her killer.

Decades later, Othram rebuilt a genetic profile from the last usable DNA on her clothing and traced it through a genealogical database to a single family — the McCurleys. In 2020, that work identified Glen McCurley Jr., a man who had been questioned and cleared early in the original investigation. By Othram’s account, it was one of the first cases in which FGG evidence was admitted in court after a challenge; a judge allowed it following a pretrial hearing, before McCurley changed his plea to guilty during his 2021 trial. He was sentenced to life and died in prison in 2023. The case also drew Cornyn to Othram’s lab in 2023 for a roundtable on the technology, which the company describes as the start of the process that led to this bill.

The open question

What the bill’s supporters celebrate is real: a tool that can close cases the old science couldn’t touch. But the civic question Vermonters might ask isn’t whether the technology works — Canfield’s name is proof enough — it’s whether a federal program authorized at $5 million a year for each of its two grant streams meaningfully reaches a state like this one.

Vermont doesn’t run the kind of high-volume forensic operation that competitive federal grants tend to favor. And the Canfield identification itself leaned on out-of-state agencies and a private Texas lab — whose work, according to Othram, was paid for not by any government budget but by private donations raised through its DNASolves crowdfunding platform.

Whether the Carla Walker Act becomes a resource Vermont can actually draw on, or mostly a tool for bigger jurisdictions, is the part worth watching as the bill moves to the House.

Ask a room full of Vermonters about sharp cheddar and you’ll start an argument. The complaint surfaces every few months — most recently in a long thread on the r/vermont subreddit that drew more than 150 comments — and it’s remarkably consistent: the sharpest cheddars don’t cut the way they once did.

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The bite has softened. The hard little crystals that used to crunch between your teeth show up less often. People trade the names of store brands and small Vermont makers they’ve switched to, and somebody always insists it’s all in everyone’s head.

So which is it? We took the question to the Vermonter best equipped to answer it, and pulled the numbers a beloved co-op publishes about its own cheese. The honest answer turns out to be more layered than either side of the argument assumes — and the most interesting part is that some of what’s changed may not be the cheese at all.

First problem: “sharp” isn’t one thing

Before you can ask whether cheddar got less sharp, you have to define sharp — and that’s where the trouble starts.

Paul Kindstedt would know. A professor emeritus of food science at the University of Vermont, he spent a career on the chemistry of cheese, wrote widely on it, and helped found the Vermont Cheese Council. “Sharp,” he told Compass, “is a nebulous term,” one that captures the overall intensity of taste, flavor, and feel that hits you when you eat a piece of cheese.

Those are three separate channels. Taste covers the five basics — sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami. Flavor is a different and much larger universe of aromatic compounds. And the crunch of those crystals is neither taste nor flavor but a tactile response, a thing you feel. “Sharpness” is all of it at once, which is why it varies so widely.

Then Kindstedt added the part that reframes the whole debate. Whether a cheese reads as sharp depends not only on its chemistry but on the eater’s expectations — what they consider desirable and normal for cheddar, built up over a lifetime of eating it. “What is considered medium or sharp or extra sharp in one market may differ,” he wrote, “depending on consumer experience and expectations.” He points to studies comparing cheddars from different regions of the country, which have found measurably different flavor profiles — meaning a Vermonter and a Wisconsinite may be calibrating the word “sharp” against different baselines entirely.

In other words: sharpness lives partly in the cheese and partly in your head. Hold onto that.

The popular theory — “they age it less now” — and what the numbers can’t settle

The single most common explanation you’ll hear is that the big makers have quietly cut aging time. Sharpness is largely a function of time; less time on the shelf means a milder cheese. It’s a tidy theory.

The labels neither confirm it nor put it to rest — and that ambiguity is itself the tell.

Cabot — Vermont’s flagship cheddar maker and a farmer-owned cooperative — has published aging figures for Seriously Sharp that shift with the year and the page. In 2017, a company representative told HuffPost it ran a minimum of 14 months and could reach 18. Today the company’s own site lists the same cheese at 12 to 14 months. Read literally, the floor has slipped a couple of months and the “up to 18” has gone quiet — the opposite of a longer age, but a long way from proof of a deliberate cut. And these aren’t audited specs; they’re loose descriptions of a cheese the company itself goes out of its way to call unpredictable. The numbers can’t carry the accusation either way.

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What Cabot is unambiguous about is the variability itself. The company calls Seriously Sharp its “wild” cheddar — unpredictable, and meant to differ from one batch to the next. Its 2017 representative said the same thing in plainer words: from bar to bar you get a different experience, sometimes landing at the crumbly, 18-month end, sometimes not. In this telling the inconsistency isn’t a malfunction. It’s the design.

Cabot has even taken the exact complaint head-on. Asked by a customer on its own website whether the formula had changed — the cheese tasting flat, the texture gone plastic instead of crumbly — the company answered that the recipe was unchanged, that temperature, milk, and aging all shape any given bar, and that despite its graders’ work, some low-flavor bars still slip through.

So the labels won’t convict anyone of shortening the clock — but they don’t clear the shelves of every Vermonter’s hunch either, because aging time is only one of the dials, and the others are where this gets interesting.

Moisture cuts both ways — and so does the cost

Here’s where a lot of folk wisdom goes wrong. People assume drier cheese is sharper, full stop. But plenty of Vermonters can tell you they’ve had wet, moist cheddar that tasted intensely sharp, and they’re not imagining it.

Kindstedt explained why. More moisture, he wrote, “accelerates and expands the range” of the microbial and chemical changes that happen as cheese ripens — the very reactions that produce sharpness. A higher-moisture cheddar, if everything is balanced just right, can ripen quickly into something genuinely intense.

The catch is risk. That same moisture makes it more likely the ripening goes sideways into off-flavors and defects. So cheesemakers follow a rule of thumb: the longer you intend to age a cheese, the lower you set its moisture, to keep the long ripening from turning on you. A cheese built for the “extra sharp” market is typically made significantly drier than one built for “medium.”

And then Kindstedt named the lever that quietly governs everything: money. “Lower moisture and longer aging also drive up the cost of production,” he wrote, so there’s standing industry interest in finding ways to make high-quality sharp cheese with more moisture and less aging time. Nobody has to be cutting corners for that pressure to exist. It’s simply the economics of the category, pushing in one direction, all the time. That push does hit a legal wall: federal standards of identity cap anything sold as “cheddar” at 39 percent moisture, so there’s only so far the wetter-and-cheaper strategy can travel before the cheese stops, by law, being cheddar at all.

Readers chasing a culprit often land on packaging, and here there’s a real, datable change to address. In June 2024, Cabot announced it would move its eight-ounce bars to a film made with 30 percent post-consumer recycled plastic, replacing the old virgin-plastic wrap; the new packaging rolled out across the line through late 2024 and into 2025. If you’re hunting for a recent change, that’s a concrete one. But the switch wasn’t made blind. According to the team behind it, the new film went through shelf-life and sensory trials checking for differences in flavor, texture, and color, and was chosen to preserve the same moisture and oxygen barriers that protect the cheese; Cabot’s own line to customers is that nothing about the eating experience changes. Those are the company’s and its supplier’s findings, not independent lab results — so weigh them as you like. What you can’t honestly do is treat the new wrapper as a smoking gun: the one recent change anyone can point to is also one its makers say they tested for sensory impact before it ever reached a shelf.

The crunch you miss is mostly one specific crystal

About those crystals. They’re the thing people mourn most — the little crunchy bits that signal a serious cheese — and here the science is genuinely clarifying.

There are two different crystals, and they don’t behave the same way. The crunch most people are chasing comes from tyrosine, an amino acid released as the cheese’s protein breaks down over time. The longer a cheddar ripens, the more tyrosine accumulates and the more likely it is to crystallize into something hard enough to feel. Cheese aged long enough to develop that crunch is usually made deliberately drier too — but it’s the slow breakdown of protein over those long months, not the dryness itself, that grows the crystals. So tyrosine crunch is a fair signal of a genuinely long-aged cheese. If that’s what you’re missing, you’re missing real age.

The other crystal, calcium lactate, is messier. Kindstedt was explicit that it depends on a “perfect storm” of factors — lactate concentration, specific chemical forms of it, free calcium — and that while longer ripening does raise the odds, aging time isn’t necessarily the most important factor, and these crystals are not a reliable proxy for how dry a cheese is. So the rule of thumb has limits: crunch tells you something, but don’t read every crystal as a stopwatch.

Why it can shift even when nothing “changed”

Now back to that 2017 admission, because Kindstedt’s science lands right on top of it.

Sharpness genuinely moves on its own. For traditional, smaller-scale makers, he wrote, perceived sharpness “will almost inevitably shift” across the seasons, because the milk itself changes — its chemistry and its native microbes swing with the time of year — and a skilled cheesemaker rides those changes, adjusting as they go. The result is a cheddar that’s perceptibly different across the calendar, “sometimes subtly, at other times more pronounced,” but compelling precisely because it moves.

Large makers who need a consistent product year-round do the opposite: they work to hold the milk and the process steady, engineering that natural variation out so a bar in January tastes like a bar in July.

Sit that next to the memory effect Kindstedt described at the very start, and a fairer picture emerges than either “they ruined it” or “it’s all in your head.” A longtime eater isn’t simply misremembering. The old, more variable product may have hit higher seasonal peaks — and engineered consistency, whatever it gains in reliability, can shave those peaks off. You remember the best bar you ever had. You may genuinely not be getting it as often. And your own palate, recalibrated over decades of eating, has moved too. All of it is true at once.

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A taste of place, and of the person making it

Ask a cheese scientist where Vermont’s distinctiveness actually comes from and you might expect a shrug about marketing. Kindstedt didn’t shrug. Terroir — “a taste of place” — is real, he said, a sensory imprint the environment leaves on the cheese; sometimes subtle, sometimes not, but “scientifically it is simply a fact of life.”

And on top of it sits something he calls “a taste of the cheesemaker”: the skill to take everything nature throws at a batch — the shifting milk, the changing seasons, the feed, the weather — and turn it into “this magnificent product of the human imagination that we call Cheddar cheese.”

Which is the part no spec sheet captures, and maybe the real answer to why a remembered cheese is so hard to find again. Some of what you’re chasing was never a fixed number. It was a moment — a particular wheel, a particular season, a particular hand on the make — that the cheese was always going to move on from.

If it’s the bite you’re after

The good news is that the aged, crunchy register hasn’t gone anywhere; it just isn’t the default in a mass-market bar, and never really was. If tyrosine crunch is what you want, you want genuinely old cheese — and Vermont makes plenty of it. The longer-aged reserve and clothbound cheddars from the big houses still deliver it, as do the state’s smaller makers; the Vermont Cheese Council’s cheese trail maps a long list of them. The thing to read on the label isn’t the word “sharp.” It’s the number of months.

Compass Vermont put specific questions about aging targets, moisture content, and the recent packaging change to Cabot/Agri-Mark; the cooperative did not respond by the time of publication. In statements on its own website, Cabot has maintained that its Seriously Sharp recipe has not changed and that normal variation in milk, temperature, and aging accounts for differences from bar to bar. We’ll update this piece if the co-op responds.

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For five years, Vermont has been described — by its own Department of Mental Health, among others — as possibly the only state in the country without a secure forensic facility for defendants too ill to stand trial. On June 16, Governor Phil Scott signed S.193 into law as Act 147. After five years, four bills, and a list of the dead, the law resolves the dispute that stalled the project for all of them: who runs the facility, and under what model.

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It does not resolve whether the permanent facility will be funded, sited, built, staffed, and opened by the law’s own July 1, 2029 deadline.

That gap — between the law and the building — is now the question.

What Vermont settled

The five-year argument was never mainly about whether Vermont needed a secure setting for the narrow group of defendants charged with life-sentence offenses — murder, aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping — who are found not competent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity, and who do not meet the threshold for psychiatric hospitalization. The argument was about whether that setting would be run by the Department of Corrections or by a health agency.

Act 147 answers that. The permanent facility will not be operated by Corrections. The Agency of Human Services Medical Director oversees all clinical, forensic, and competency-restoration services. The building will be licensed as a therapeutic community residence. DOC’s role is limited to perimeter and admitting-area security, and only if the facility is located on the same grounds as a correctional facility.

The law also puts three things in statute:

• An interim program is scheduled to launch inside an existing Department of Corrections facility on July 1, 2027. It does not require another vote of the Legislature to begin.

• Wellpath — DOC’s for-profit health care contractor, which declared bankruptcy in 2024 — is barred from providing restoration services in the interim program. The law requires that the entity providing those services “shall not be under contract with the Department of Corrections.”

• The procedural safeguards are preserved: six-month competency reviews, dangerousness hearings where the state must prove its case by clear and convincing evidence, court-approved involuntary medication under strict standards, and victim notice throughout the hearing process.

What Vermont did not settle

The money to build the permanent facility.

FY2027 funding covers planning only. The law expressly bars spending on construction or fit-up “absent further legislative enactment.” The facility’s size is unsettled. Its location is unsettled. Both are left to a feasibility plan due January 15, 2027, with interim updates to lawmakers in August and November.

So the permanent facility is a statutory mandate without a construction appropriation. It is not yet funded, sized, or sited.

The part of Act 147 with a near-term mechanism is the interim program — the smaller one, inside correctional facilities, operating under emergency rules due by the end of this year. The permanent facility has a deadline. It does not yet have the money to become a building.

ANALYSIS: Why Vermont keeps landing here

Start with the size of what passed, because it is real. For five years the executive and legislative branches were deadlocked over whether this would be a prison wing or a hospital, and the final law settles it decisively toward care — boxing Corrections out of clinical operations entirely. That is a historic shift in how Vermont treats this population, and it is now statute, not aspiration.

With that on the table, it is fair to ask why a state that agreed it needed this spent five years not building it.

The strongest defense is that the governance fight was not a detail. A corrections custody unit and a therapeutic residence are different buildings — different design, different license, different law. You cannot pour a foundation until you know whether you are building a jail wing or a hospital. The disagreement over who runs it was, in effect, a disagreement over what the thing is. The same logic defends the budget: committing tens of millions to construction before the state has a site, a size, or a design would be reckless, and the feasibility plan due in January is how a state avoids that.

But that defense explains 2027. It does not explain 2021. The law that finally passed proves a both/and was available the whole time — an interim corrections-based bridge and a permanent health-run facility, start now and finish later. That is roughly the structure the governor was publicly asking for this year, and what victims’ families had been asking for far longer. Kelly Carroll, who founded Voices for Vermont Victims after her daughter Emily Hamann was killed in Bennington in 2021 by a man who had been found incompetent to stand trial in an earlier case, has been making that case for years, as Compass has reported. The compromise that broke the logjam did not require five years to invent. It required five years to accept.

And this is not the first time Vermont has let the fight over the model delay the facility itself.

After Tropical Storm Irene destroyed the Waterbury state hospital in August 2011, Vermont had already been trying to site a new psychiatric hospital since 2005. The replacement — the Vermont Psychiatric Care Hospital in Berlin — did not open until July 2014. A flood forced the issue, and it still took three years. Anne Donahue, a Republican state representative from Northfield and a longtime mental health advocate, described the dynamic plainly: the storm, she said, “forced our hand when we were really caught up in this maze of differing ideas of what to do and inadequate urgency.”

That is the floor, not a clean parallel. Irene gave Vermont an urgency this debate never had, and the state still argued over the model the whole way down. The forensic facility had no flood. So it waited five years with no building at all, and now starts a clock that does not run out until 2029.

The people this was written for cannot necessarily wait that long. The interim program is the part that protects them in the meantime — if it launches on schedule, if it is staffed, if the resources arrive. The permanent facility is a promise the next Legislature has to keep. Whether it does, and whether the building exists before another name is added to the list that got Vermont here, is the part of this story that is not finished.

Act 147 is the law. The facility is still the question.

Every five years the state runs one of Vermont's 15 river basins through a plan like this one. This summer it's southern Vermont's turn — 263 pages on the West, Williams, and Saxtons rivers, more than 25 towns, one month to respond. Here's the handle: what it proposes for your town, and how to weigh in before July 15.

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Every so often, the state sets a thick stack of paper on the public’s desk and asks what it thinks.

This summer’s stack is 263 pages — the draft Tactical Basin Plan for Basin 11, the state’s five-year roadmap for the rivers, lakes, and wetlands of southern Vermont’s West, Williams, and Saxtons watershed. It’s one of 15 basins the state maps and manages on a rolling schedule. Vermont runs a lot of water through this process: some 800 lakes, 23,000 miles of rivers, and 300,000 acres of wetland statewide, all of it eventually written up in a document like this one. Right now it’s the turn of the more than 25 towns that drain toward the Connecticut between Mount Holly and Brattleboro. Public comment closes July 15.

Here’s the thing about a stack like that. None of it is secret — it’s all public, all online, all technically yours. But “technically public” and “actually usable” are not the same thing. The information lands as a brick, the clock runs about a month, and the handful of decisions that touch your particular town are scattered across hundreds of pages written for engineers and regulators. Most people take one look and set it aside.

So here’s the handle — what’s actually in it, and what’s in it for where you live.

Inside are decisions that touch real ground. The plan recommends removing two dams on the West River system. It flags more than 20 clean streams for stronger legal protection. It names special stretches of water — a gorge, a falls, a cove — for the state’s highest safeguards. And it steers where a limited pot of state and federal money goes over the next five years, to fix eroding roads, build stormwater systems, and shore up failing septic. For all that, this isn’t a basin in trouble: most of its waters already test good to excellent. The plan is mostly about keeping them that way — and fixing the spots that aren’t.

What a “tactical basin plan” actually is

The name is dry, but the document isn’t just an environmental report that sits on a shelf. A basin plan does three things. It takes stock of how healthy the basin’s waters are. It lays out a list of priority actions — around 80 of them this round — for the next five years. And it points landowners, towns, and conservation groups toward the funding and technical help to carry those actions out. Much of the work depends on willing landowners, because so many of the streambanks and shorelines in question are private. That’s a big part of why the state wants public eyes on the draft now.

“It is critical that we hear from community members,” DEC Commissioner Misty Sinsigalli said in announcing the draft. The agency says it will use the feedback to make the plan fit local realities. Cory Ross, district manager of the Windham County Natural Resources Conservation District, called the plan a key tool for deciding which projects his district designs and builds — and for steering federal dollars toward local needs.

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That’s the case for caring. Here’s the catch.

The part that’s hard to use

[Analysis]

The plan is 263 pages because it’s doing two jobs at once. It’s a federal compliance document, built to satisfy the Clean Water Act and the state rules that govern how Vermont protects water. And it’s a public document, meant for the people who live here. The first job wins. Roughly half the file is appendices — a report card, a dam inventory, a fisheries assessment, agency coordination agreements. The decisions a resident would actually want to weigh in on sit in a four-page summary and a single table, surrounded by hundreds of pages of material written for engineers and regulators.

So a homeowner in Londonderry who’d want to know the state is recommending a dam removal a few miles upstream, or a landowner near a stream that’s about to get a protection upgrade, has to know the document exists, find it, and then find themselves inside it. The comment window — 30 days, over a Vermont summer — assumes they’ll do all three.

There is a shorter way in — sort of. The state built a clickable Story Map to go with the plan, and as orientation it’s fine: it explains what a basin plan is, lays out the five-year cycle, and even names the two dams up for removal. What it won’t do is place any of it. It names the Williams and Weston Mill dams but not the towns they sit in. It shows the streams proposed for stronger protection as numbers keyed to a map, not names you’d recognize. It tells you what’s in the plan without telling you where you stand in it — and for that, you’re back in the 263-page PDF or clicking through a separate projects map.

This isn’t a knock on the people who wrote the plan; the science in it is serious and the work is real. It’s a knock on the format. A plan that depends on public participation shouldn’t make participation this much work.

So, in plainer terms, here’s what’s in it — and what’s in it for your town.

What’s actually being decided

The two most concrete proposals are dam removals. The plan recommends taking out the Williams Dam on the West River in Londonderry, with floodplain restoration above and below it, and the Weston Mill Dam in Weston, paired with replacing the Lawrence Hill Road bridge. Dam removals carry direct consequences for nearby property and roads, which makes them exactly the kind of thing residents tend to want a say in.

Beyond the dams, the plan flags more than 20 clean streams — among them Stickney Brook, Sacketts Brook, the Winhall River, and stretches of the Williams and West — for reclassification, a legal upgrade that locks in their current quality and makes future pollution harder to permit. It recommends naming several special places as Outstanding Resource Waters, including Brockways Mills Gorge and Herricks Cove in Rockingham, Twin Falls on the Saxtons in Westminster, and the Retreat Meadows in Brattleboro. And it puts three wetland complexes — at the Athens Dome, the Winhall River headwaters, and Eddy Brook — under study for Class I status, the strongest wetland protection the state offers.

The rest of the roughly 80 strategies cover the workaday business of clean water: streamside buffers, farm runoff, road and culvert fixes, ski-area stormwater, septic relocation, invasive-species patrols at boat launches.

Sidebar — The surprising source

Some of the nitrogen that washes off this basin travels all the way to Long Island Sound, where an overload of it feeds algae blooms that pull oxygen from the water and suffocate marine life. The state models where Basin 11’s share comes from, and the breakdown holds a quiet surprise.

By far the biggest source is the air itself: about 71 percent arrives as atmospheric fallout, much of it carried in on out-of-state air pollution and slowly declining under the federal Clean Air Act — not something any one Vermont town can fix. Among the local sources, runoff from developed land and roads leads at roughly 12 percent. But the next-largest is one most people would never guess: residential septic systems, at about 9 percent — ahead of agriculture’s 7 percent. Municipal sewage plants trail at just 1 percent.

The lesson for a rural watershed runs against the grain: the nitrogen that matters isn’t always the farm down the road. Sometimes it’s the tank in the backyard. It’s part of why the plan leans on homeowner septic workshops and on moving the most vulnerable systems out of the floodplain.

How to weigh in before July 15

• Start with the short version. The state’s Story Map is the friendliest orientation, and the four-page summary at the front of the plan is the fastest read. The full draft and an interactive project map are on the Basin 11 webpage.

• Send a comment by July 15 to watershed planner Marie Caduto: Marie.Caduto@vermont.gov or 802-490-6142.

• Or show up. Both meetings start at 6:00 PM with a remote option (register ahead via this form):

  • Tuesday, June 23 — Newfane Town Office, 555 VT Route 30.

  • Thursday, June 25 — Londonderry Town Office, 100 Old School Street, South Londonderry.

• You can also petition. Any resident can formally ask the state to reclassify a stream or lake, or to designate an Outstanding Resource Water — independent of this plan.

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What’s proposed for your town

Every town in the basin is covered by the plan’s general strategies. These towns also have something specific on the table:

• Andover — Asked to strengthen flood-hazard and river-corridor rules.

• Athens — Athens Dome wetland complex (with Grafton) under study for top protection. Flood-rule ask.

• Brattleboro — Connecticut River and Retreat Meadows recommended as Outstanding Resource Waters; stormwater focus; flood-rule ask.

• Chester — Priority for fixing erosion-prone roads and culverts.

• Dummerston — Jelly Mill Falls on Stickney Brook and the Rock River (with Newfane) recommended as Outstanding Resource Waters.

• Grafton — Shares the Athens Dome wetland study. Flood-rule ask.

• Jamaica — Forester Pond recommended as an Outstanding Resource Water; road-erosion priority; flood-rule ask.

• Londonderry — Williams Dam removal on the West River; Lily Pond recommended as an Outstanding Resource Water. Hosts the June 25 meeting.

• Marlboro — Road-erosion and culvert priority.

• Mount Tabor — Flood-rule ask.

• Newfane — Town stormwater plan to be completed; road-erosion priority; Adams Brook, Bemis Brook, and the Rock River recommended as Outstanding Resource Waters. Hosts the June 23 meeting.

• Peru — Eddy Brook wetlands (with Winhall) under study for top protection. Flood-rule ask.

• Putney — Road-erosion priority; new river-management plans for Sacketts Brook and East Putney Brook (shared with Westminster), both in line for stronger protection. Flood-rule ask.

• Rockingham — The most on the table: Outstanding Resource Water recommendations at Brockways Mills Gorge, Herricks Cove, the Great Falls area, and the Williams River’s scenic reach — three already being pursued — plus stormwater cleanup in the industrial parks.

• Stratton — Ski-area runoff a priority, including a cleanup plan for Ball Mountain Brook and the Winhall River. Flood-rule ask.

• Townshend — Flood-rule ask.

• Wardsboro — Town stormwater plan to be completed. Flood-rule ask.

• Westminster — Twin Falls on the Saxtons River recommended as an Outstanding Resource Water; new river-management plans for Sacketts and East Putney Brooks (shared with Putney).

• Weston — Weston Mill Dam removal and Lawrence Hill Road bridge replacement.

• Winhall — Winhall River headwaters and Eddy Brook wetlands under study for top protection; ski-area runoff a priority; the plan flags Bromley Resort’s snowmaking withdrawals from Mill Brook. Flood-rule ask.

Other towns — including Brookline, Dover, Landgrove, and Windham — sit in the basin and are covered by the general strategies without a town-specific item in the draft.

Compass Vermont will keep following Basin 11 through the comment period and beyond. If you live in one of these towns and you have a stake in what the plan proposes — a stream behind your house, a dam down the road, a wetland you’ve watched for years — we want to hear from you. Reach out at news@compassvermont.com and tell us what the state’s plan looks like from where you stand.

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If you want a single, slightly uncomfortable number to sit with this week, try this one: nationally, about 22% of high school seniors — roughly one in five — scored proficient or advanced in math on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal test better known as the Nation’s Report Card.

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It doesn’t get much more reassuring further up the grades. USAFacts, drawing on that same 2024 NAEP data, puts proficiency at about 39% in 4th grade and 28% in 8th grade before the slide to 22% by senior year. Math proficiency, in other words, thins out the longer kids stay in school.

So where does Vermont fit? Just about where you’d expect — and maybe not where you’d assume.

In 4th-grade math, 36% of Vermont students scored at or above proficient in 2024, a few points under the national 39%. But by 8th grade the picture flips: Vermont’s eighth-graders outperformed the national average, posting an average scale score of 276 against the nation’s 272. No blowout in either direction. Vermont sits right on the national line — a touch below early, a touch above later.

That’s the part worth pondering. It’s easy to assume Vermont — small classes, high spending per pupil, a state that takes real pride in its schools — clears the national bar comfortably. On math proficiency, it mostly just meets it. And the national bar isn’t a high one. Vermont is standing right next to it.

Now the fun part: how would you do?

Below is a real one — the question handed to 12th graders on the 2024 test. Give it a shot before you scroll down to see the correct answer.

Got your answer locked in? It’s sneakier than it looks — the trap isn’t the choice most people grab first. The answer’s in the fine print at the very bottom of this story.

Sources: USAFacts · The Nation’s Report Card (NAEP), 2024 · Vermont Agency of Education · Vermont Business Magazine · NAEP Vermont Grade 8 State Snapshot

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Answer: D. Unequal increments on the vertical axis distort the bar heights — that’s what makes the chart misleading. The tempting wrong pick is C, but beginning the scale at $0 is the honest move, not the deceptive one.

Stay or Go? A Burlington High School senior surveys her graduating class on whether to stay in Vermont or leave — and finds most are leaving.
Siena DeMink · BHS Register

Compass Points is where we point you toward Vermont journalism worth your time — reporting from across the state press that informs, holds power to account, or simply tells Vermonters something true about the place they live. We didn’t write these. We just think they’re worth your time.

In “Stay or Go?”, graduating senior Siena DeMink does what good reporters do: she starts with a number and lets it breathe.

Of 106 BHS seniors who answered the Register’s survey, 73 said they’re leaving Vermont for college. Around that figure she gathers her classmates’ own reasoning — one headed to Providence College who sees “very limited opportunities” here, another who didn’t apply to UVM because her major lives out of state, and DeMink herself, who weighed it and chose to stay.

It’s a small, honest portrait of a question Vermont keeps asking from the top down — the state retains a smaller share of its college-bound students than any other, about 45 percent, per a study reported by Vermont Business Magazine — answered here from the bottom up, by the students actually making the call.

→ Read “Stay or Go?” at the BHS Register

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It’s a Saturday this summer. You’re on the beach at one of the Vermont lakes where wake surfing is no longer allowed. The water’s been calm for long stretches — no surfer carving a chest-high trough behind a ballast-heavy inboard. Then a set of waves rolls in and slaps the shoreline hard enough to rock the dock and skid your kid’s float up the sand.

You look out. It wasn’t a wake boat.

That moment is the gap at the center of Vermont’s revised wakesports rule, which took effect June 11, 2026. The rule does real things, and it does them to a narrowly defined kind of boat. What it does not do is set a general limit on the size, height, or energy of a boat wake itself — which means many of the waves washing up on Vermont shorelines this summer will come from boats the wakesports rule never touches.

What the rule actually does

The new rule tightens where wakesports can happen. It restricts wake surfing and riding an enhanced wake to designated wakesports zones on a shrinking list of inland lakes — the state removed wakesports from a dozen lakes this spring, leaving the activity on 18 inland waters, plus the big cross-boundary lakes like Champlain and Memphremagog. The list shrank because the state tightened the geometry of a legal wakesports zone: a zone now has to hold at least 100 contiguous acres with a straight run of 3,000 feet, up from 50 acres — a bar a dozen smaller lakes can no longer clear.

Alongside that, the rule adds a 500-foot safety offset from other users when a wake boat is throwing an enhanced wake; a wake boat running with empty ballast and making no enhanced wake reverts to the standard 200-foot offset. It also adds a 500-foot buffer from signed loon nesting sites during nesting season and a hot-water decontamination requirement for ballasted vessels moving between water bodies — replacing the previous “home lake” rule that had tied each wake boat to a single lake.

The hinge of the whole thing is one definition. Under the rule, a “wakeboat” is a motorboat with one or more ballast tanks, ballast bags, or other devices or design features used to increase the size of its wake. “Wakesports” means operating that boat with the ballast engaged, or riding the enhanced wake behind it. And the state draws the boundary explicitly: ordinary motorboats, speedboats, ski boats, even pontoons all throw wakes, but none of them count as “wakeboats” under the rule.

So the line isn’t the wave. It’s the boat. A conventional boat with no ballast is never a “wakeboat,” no matter how big a wake it throws — and if it isn’t being used for wakesports, it sits outside this rule entirely, though still subject to Vermont’s general boating laws.

What restricts a regular boat’s wake? No limit on the wake itself.

If you own a conventional powerboat — a ski boat, a runabout, a cabin cruiser, a heavy pontoon — the wakesports rule doesn’t reach you unless your boat fits the wakeboat definition and you’re using it for wakesports. The rules that still touch your wake are the general boating rules that apply to everyone, plus any lake-specific restrictions. None of them set a number for how big your wake can be.

Under the Use of Public Waters Rules and Title 23, the limits are:

• No more than 5 mph within 200 feet of shore on lakes larger than 75 acres, and 5 mph everywhere on lakes smaller than 75 acres.

• No-wake speed within 200 feet of swim areas, anyone in the water, other boats, canoes and kayaks, moored boats, and docks.

• A catch-all barring careless or negligent operation, or operating in any manner that endangers the safety, life, or property of another person.

That’s the general statewide toolkit. There’s no wake-height limit, no wake-energy standard, no equivalent of a noise cap for waves. Once a conventional boat is clear of the 200-foot shoreline zone on a lake that allows speeds above 5 mph, no rule caps the size of the wake it throws — though a reckless or negligent operator can still be cited, and a given lake may carry its own restrictions.

You don’t need ballast to throw a big wake

Here’s why that matters. The biggest drivers of how large a wake a boat throws are speed, hull behavior, and weight — not whether the weight happens to come from a factory ballast tank.

Reviews of the boat-wake research consistently find that a boat’s wake grows with its speed — and that for a planing hull the biggest wake comes not at full throttle but near the transition from displacement, or plowing, mode to planing mode. In that condition the bow rides high, the stern digs in, and the boat hasn’t yet climbed fully onto plane; a boat moving in that range throws a large wake. Weight compounds it: heavier boats displace more water and make bigger waves, and a boat towing a skier produces more wave energy than the same boat running empty.

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A regular boat, in other words, can do much of what the rule is worried about — without a drop of ballast.

What surf mode does that a regular boat usually doesn’t

That’s the case for why a conventional boat’s wake goes largely unaddressed by the new rule. It is not the case for treating a wake boat in surf mode as the same thing — because it isn’t.

A wake boat running in surf mode produces a wave you generally don’t see off a normal boat: a steep, sustained, oversized wave thrown by a hull deliberately plowed deep and weighted down with water, often circling the same stretch over and over to keep a surfer up. Researchers at the University of Minnesota’s St. Anthony Falls Laboratory put numbers to that difference in a 2022 field study. Measuring the height, energy, and power of waves from four boats — two wakesurf boats and two ordinary recreational boats — they found the wakesurf boats produced the largest waves by every measure.

In plain terms: a wake-surf wave can hit the shore harder than the wake off a typical runabout, and it stays large much farther out. The study found that, in typical operation, a wakesurf boat had to be more than 500 feet from shore before its waves calmed to levels similar to a normal boat’s. That’s the condition the rule most directly targets — the sustained, oversized wave that drove the citizen petitions and the erosion, wildlife, and safety complaints in the first place. Targeting it is a defensible call.

The line the state drew, and the line it didn’t

But notice what that leaves. The rule’s line is the boat — its equipment and how it’s used. The wave’s line is physics — speed, hull behavior, weight. Those aren’t the same line.

This is the interpretive heart of the piece, so it’s worth stating plainly: by regulating wakeboats and wakesports rather than the wake itself, Vermont has reined in the most extreme case while leaving a much larger group of boats outside the new rule — the heavy cruiser plowing at displacement speed, the loaded boat towing a skier, the runabout running just below plane. The reach is narrow by design: greeters at Vermont’s boat launches tallied 114 wake boats among 12,793 motorboats launched statewide in 2025 — under 1 percent of the motorboats in that data set — while the far larger number of conventional boats capable of a big wake stays outside the rule entirely. Whether that’s sensible triage or a meaningful gap depends on what you think the rule is for. If it exists to stop one specific recreational activity, it does that cleanly. If it exists to protect shorelines and small craft from large boat wakes generally, it reaches only a slice of the problem.

That tension wasn’t imported from outside the process. It surfaced inside the rulemaking, among the more than 1,500 public comments the agency reviewed before the rule’s May 2026 approval. Wake-boat owners and industry representatives argued that it is arbitrary to single out wake boats when other watercraft also make wakes and can carry invasive species between lakes. You can disagree with where those commenters want the rule to land and still grant that, on the wake-physics merits, they have a point about what it covers and what it doesn’t.

Which brings us back to the beach. You’ll still feel the wake roll in this summer. It just won’t always be the boat the rule had in mind.

This is a follow-up to our earlier reporting, “The Wake Boat Controversy Is Still Making Waves Across Vermont.”

Compass Vermont is independent and reader-supported. We bring the data. You form the opinions.

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At his June 18 press conference, the governor framed the contested 50-to-25-foot wetland buffer rule as roughly 2,000 homes the state won’t get and pointed to flood-displaced families in Barre. The committee’s objection ran along party lines; the Vermont Natural Resources Council says it will sue if he proceeds. Compass lays out what the rule actually does — and what is still genuinely in dispute.

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Gov. Phil Scott used his June 18 press conference to signal that a wetland rule a legislative committee objected to last month may not be finished. Asked whether he might act by executive order to push it through, the governor said his administration is “working behind the scenes” to find a resolution “to get what we want,” and acknowledged it could “move the rule forward even though it’s rejected” — a path he conceded would likely draw a legal challenge.

The rule would loosen wetland restrictions to make room for housing, and Scott framed its rejection in stark terms: roughly 2,000 homes statewide that, he said, the rule would have made room for. He pointed to Prospect Heights, a proposed development on high ground in flood-scarred Barre, where Barre Area Development’s Josh Jerome and the administration both estimate the looser rules would raise the buildable count from 90 homes to 120, cutting about $25,000 from the cost of each. Scott tied the project to the 30 to 40 families he said were displaced from Barre’s flood-prone North End, who he said could be rehoused “high and dry” if the rule cleared the way. “These are the kind of policy changes we need to move the needle on the housing crisis,” he said — ones that allow more homes “with little sacrifice.”

Proceeding would carry a cost the governor did not dwell on. The Vermont Natural Resources Council has said it will go to court if the administration adopts the rule over LCAR’s objection. “If they move forward with it, I don’t see a scenario where we wouldn’t challenge the rule in court,” the group’s policy and water program director, Jon Groveman, told Vermont Public. Attorney General Charity Clark had warned in November that the administration could not shrink the buffer this way by executive order alone, and that relying on the change “carries legal risk” for the builders and homeowners who would depend on it. Under Vermont’s rulemaking law, the administration may respond to the committee and then adopt the rule over its objection; as of the June 18 press conference it had not done so, and the rule had not taken effect.

What the rule actually does

The rule, 25-P040, is the housing piece of Executive Order 06-25, which Scott issued in September 2025. In designated growth areas — downtowns, village centers, and zones served by municipal water and sewer — it would let housing proceed without a wetland permit in unmapped Class II wetlands, and halve the protected buffer around mapped Class II wetlands from 50 feet to 25 — keeping the 25 feet nearest the wetland off-limits while opening the outer half. The changes were written as temporary, set to expire around 2030. Those growth areas cover about 3 percent of Vermont; the mapped wetlands inside them, about 0.18 percent of the state. Compass walked through the rule and the three legal objections to it when the committee acted in May.

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A party-line vote, and a fight over what it was

The Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules objected on May 21 — and how it objected is now part of the fight. The objection ran along party lines, the committee’s Democrats objecting and its Republicans opposed. After housing advocates cast the decision as a policy choice dressed up as a legal one, the committee and conservation groups pushed back that the objection was “grounded precisely in law.” A party-line split is hard to cast as purely either: the objection rests on detailed statutory arguments, and it broke cleanly along party affiliation.

Sen. Scott Beck, the Caledonia Republican who serves as Senate minority leader, sits on LCAR, whose Republicans — Beck among them — opposed the objection. He appeared beside Scott at the June 18 press conference, where — speaking about Act 181 — he said Vermont does not “need special interest groups and enviro groups to tell us how to manage land.” His committee vote and his presser remarks point the same way.

Alex Farrell, the housing commissioner, put the choice on the committee: “What do we value more: protecting every inch of unmapped wetlands in the two to three percent of Vermont designated for housing development... or putting more Vermonters into desperately needed homes...? LCAR chose the status quo. But the status quo is crushing Vermont families.”

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Moore: a misunderstanding at the center of it

At the press conference, Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore pushed back on what she called a misunderstanding driving much of the opposition. Critics, she said, were folding together two separate things: a proposal to let development rely on the state’s wetland maps, and the reduction of the buffer width. The fear that the change would put homes “on top of wetlands” mistakes the buffer for the wetland itself, she said — “I don’t think that anybody was arguing that building in that outer 25 foot ring of the buffer would be actually building in a wetland.”

Her larger point was that the maps are improving. Vermont’s wetland maps were built on data from the late 1970s and early 1980s; under the 2024 Flood Safety Act, the state is rebuilding them basin by basin. A June 9 DEC release announced the latest batch — draft updates across more than 100 towns in nine counties, produced by Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota’s GeoSpatial Services and spot-checked in the field, with public meetings in Arlington and Morrisville in mid-June. Moore said a fresh look at southwestern Vermont had added roughly 15,000 acres of previously unmapped wetlands while removing about 5,000 acres the old maps had shown in error.

But better maps answer only one of the committee’s objections. LCAR’s third ground was that the rule leaned on maps the state’s own rules call approximate and not a basis for fixing precise boundaries — a problem improving maps could ease. Its first two objections were statutory: that an agency cannot trade wetland protection for housing on its own authority, and that halving the buffer across an entire class of areas exceeds what the law allows. Neither turns on map quality. And the new maps remain drafts of “approximate” wetland locations; under Vermont’s rules, only a field delineation by a qualified scientist sets a legal boundary — the very step the rule was meant to let builders skip.

That field step is where the housing argument bites. Moore said delineations can be done only in certain seasons, so a developer who encounters an unmapped wetland late can lose a full construction season waiting. Better maps, she said, would let builders lay out a subdivision “with confidence” without waiting for a seasonal field visit, and landowners who think a mapped wetland is drawn too broadly can petition to have it corrected.

Analysis

There is an irony the administration’s framing leaves out. The same flooding that displaced the Barre families Scott invokes is part of why the buffers are now harder to touch. The 2024 Flood Safety Act — the Legislature’s response to the catastrophic 2023 and 2024 floods — strengthened wetland protection in part because wetlands absorb floodwater, setting the state’s goal as a net gain of wetland acreage. Reducing wetland buffers to house flood victims runs up against a protection the floods themselves produced.

Underneath the housing-versus-wetlands argument is a quieter question about who decides. LCAR’s position is that the Legislature already weighed housing against wetland protection when it wrote the net-gain policy into statute, and that an agency cannot re-weigh it by rule. The administration’s position is that the trade is modest, temporary, and confined to a sliver of the state. Both can be true at once. What the law does not settle is whether the trade is worth making — and if Scott adopts the rule over the objection, the Natural Resources Council has promised to carry that question from the Statehouse into a courtroom.

For a Barre family still out of a home after the floods, the administration says the rule could be the difference between a unit at Prospect Heights and a longer wait. For a town downstream, the buffer is part of what slows the next flood. For a builder, the maps decide whether a project pencils out or stalls a season. The rule tried to resolve all three at once. The committee said an agency cannot.

Compass Vermont is independent and reader-supported. We bring the data. You form the opinions.

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At a June 18 press conference two days after signing the partial repeal of Act 181, Gov. Phil Scott credited rural landowners and the broken supermajority for the reversal — then faulted lawmakers for stalling his housing proposals. His housing commissioner, Alex Farrell, said S.325 “does not represent progress on housing.” A Compass review of the bill’s version history found it deleted housing expansions the Senate itself had written.

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Two days after he signed the partial repeal of Act 181, Gov. Phil Scott stood before reporters on June 18 and did little celebrating. He credited the rollback to the rural landowners who organized against the 2024 land-use law and to the narrower partisan margins that followed the November 2024 election, which broke the Democratic supermajority. He praised the Legislature’s reversal as an act of political nerve — it “takes courage to admit you’re wrong and be willing to change course,” he said — and then turned the event into a critique of what lawmakers have not done on housing.

The sharpest line came from his own housing chief. S.325 “is not a housing bill” and “does not represent progress on housing,” said Alex Farrell, commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development, who noted that several of the governor’s proposals were left out this year. Scott pressed the same point, faulting lawmakers for campaigning on the housing crisis while declining the permitting changes his administration seeks — among them a rejected rule to narrow the state’s wetland buffer from 50 feet to 25 feet, which the administration estimates would have cleared the way for roughly 2,000 housing units. (Compass will examine the wetland-buffer dispute in a separate piece.)

Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, went further, casting the 2024 passage of Act 181 over Scott’s veto as a supermajority overreach and the rural backlash as long overdue. Vermont, he said, does not “need special interest groups and enviro groups to tell us how to manage land.”

The lawmakers who wrote Act 181 tell the story differently — and the bill Scott signed is narrower than either side’s framing suggests.

What Scott signed

Scott signed S.325 on the evening of June 16, repealing two of the most contested pieces of Act 181: the “road rule,” which would have required an Act 250 permit for private roads longer than 800 feet across much of the state, and the “Tier 3” review that would have added permitting scrutiny near headwater streams, habitat connectors, and other sensitive areas. Both were repealed before they took effect. Most of the act takes effect July 1, 2026; the new farm-business exemptions take effect a year later. (Office of the Governor; VTDigger / Vermont Public)

What survives is the deregulatory side of Act 181 — the Tier 1A and Tier 1B permit exemptions designed to speed housing in already-developed areas. Compass examined the bill’s version history when it cleared the Legislature in May: the final text removes the 2024 law’s conservation provisions while leaving its development exemptions intact, and along the way it deleted housing expansions the Senate itself had written into the bill.

S.325 reached the governor’s desk by an unusual route. It began the session as an unrelated study bill and was rewritten in committee into the vehicle for changing Act 181 — first to delay the law’s rollout, then, after the House Environment Committee acted in the spring, to repeal the road rule and Tier 3 outright. The House adopted the final conference report on a voice vote, with no roll call on that final step — though it had given the underlying repeal proposal near-unanimous approval weeks earlier, putting members’ support on the record. The Senate adopted it 28-2 on May 27 — after a 27-3 first vote and a motion to reconsider — with Sens. Martine Gulick, a Chittenden County Democrat, and Tanya Vyhovsky, a Chittenden County Progressive, the only recorded opposition. (VTDigger, May 7; Compass analysis)

Act 181 itself became law in 2024 over Scott’s veto, when the Democratic supermajority of the time passed it despite the governor’s objection that it leaned too far toward conservation and not far enough toward housing — the same objection at the center of this year’s rollback. (Vermont Public)

What the repealed measures would have done

Act 181 restructured Act 250, Vermont’s 1970 development-review law, around a tiered, map-based system. Tier 1 zones — generally downtowns and already-developed areas with existing infrastructure — were exempted or eased to encourage housing. The Tier 2 “road rule” would have triggered Act 250 review for private road construction over 800 feet in much of the state, aimed at limiting forest fragmentation. Tier 3 would have added review in mapped sensitive ecosystems. As the state rolled out draft maps over the past year, opposition from rural landowners, municipal officials, and housing advocates intensified. (VTDigger, May 27)

The final bill strikes Act 181’s road-jurisdiction and Tier 2/3 sections outright and repeals the related Tier 3 rulemaking and Tier 2 reporting requirements; the section-by-section breakdown is here.

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The case for the rollback

Landowners who organized against the law argued its conservation measures amounted to an overstep of property rights set by distant planners, would devalue their land, and would make establishing new homesteads prohibitively expensive. The grassroots group that formed in opposition, which VTDigger reported in June is now called Rural Vermont Rising, says it has over 15,000 members in a Facebook group and is organizing local chapters. Sen. Russ Ingalls, R-Essex, who helped organize a March demonstration at the Statehouse, framed the movement as a lasting political force, saying rural Vermont “has found their voice.” Neil Ryan, a Corinth cattle farmer and a prominent leader of the movement, said after the signing that the Statehouse needs “a refresh or a reset.” (VTDigger, May 27; June 16)

The case for the original protections

The lawmakers who built Act 181 had cast the tiered system as a single bargain: loosen review where the state wants growth, tighten it where forests and water are most vulnerable. Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury, chair of the House Environment Committee and an architect of the law, reversed her earlier resistance, telling colleagues on the House floor that the conservation measures “were alienating rural landowners and were not the right tool for the job.” She and other conservation-focused legislators have suggested future protections should rely on incentives rather than mandates. Sheldon, who faced intense online blowback this spring that drew a rebuke from legislative leadership, is not seeking reelection. (VTDigger, May 7)

The conservation advocates Beck alluded to — among them the Vermont Natural Resources Council and Audubon Vermont — had testified as the bill moved and have long championed the habitat and headwater protections Tier 3 would have established.

The signed bill does not close the conservation question so much as defer it. It funds a $30,000 study to design a future public-engagement plan — down from roughly $300,000 the Senate’s version had carried for model housing plans and Tier 3 public engagement — and it creates a standing Joint Legislative Environmental Oversight Committee of six lawmakers, three from each chamber, with continuing oversight of the Land Use Review Board and Agency of Natural Resources permitting, set to sunset July 1, 2029. (Compass analysis)

Analysis

The dueling framings at the signing — a rural-rights victory on one side, a stalled housing agenda on the other — both describe S.325 without quite explaining it. The bill did not unwind Act 181. It unwound one side of it, and trimmed the other.

The 2024 law paired two moves: easing Act 250 review in places marked for growth, and adding review in places marked as ecologically sensitive. This year’s bill removed the second move — the road rule and Tier 3 — while leaving the first in place. That is the kernel of truth in Farrell’s “not a housing bill”: the housing side did not emerge enlarged. The Senate’s own version of S.325 had extended the existing Act 250 housing exemptions to 2030 and added a new exemption for designated village centers; the House cut the timeline back to 2028 and deleted the new exemption, and the conference committee restored neither. The deregulatory architecture that pro-development advocates wanted survives, but the additional housing tools the Senate had attached to this very bill did not.

Whether that means the bill does nothing for housing is contestable — supporters of the repeal argue that removing the road rule and Tier 3 itself clears barriers to rural homebuilding, and the Tier 1 exemptions that survive were Act 181’s central housing play. What is not contestable, on the version record, is that the bill ended the session carrying less housing policy than the Senate sent over.

For a developer building inside a designated downtown or already-developed area, the Tier 1 path remains open. For a rural landowner who would have faced new review for a long private road or for building near a mapped sensitive area, a permitting requirement that was set to arrive has been removed. For a Vermonter who valued the forest-fragmentation and headwater protections, those rules are not delayed but repealed, with replacement routed into a study whose outcome is undefined.

The repeal also leaves the question Scott raised in 2024 unanswered. The law’s housing targets and the regional Future Land Use mapping that determines where housing can be built with Act 250 relief are unchanged; Farrell has urged regional commissions “to be more expansive with their mapping” to meet those targets. The bill directs his department to report by Jan. 15, 2027 — after the next election — on whether the development exemptions already in law have produced primary homes, second homes, short-term rentals, or some mix. The rollback removed two conservation tools while commissioning a study to find out what the surviving tools are building.

The fight now moves to the ballot. Ingalls and others have signaled that the coalition built around Act 181 intends to stay organized through the August-to-November cycle, and several of the law’s original architects — Sheldon among them — will not be on it.

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ANALYSIS

The state’s signature housing law promised to measure whether Vermont is closing its housing gap. The first report landed in May — and it shows production falling, public money propping up its best recent year, and the one question that matters most still unanswerable in most of the state.

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When Vermont passed Act 181 in 2024, the headlines went to what it loosened — land-use rules, appeal rights, the machinery of Act 250. The quieter and, for the housing debate, more consequential piece was a mandate to keep score. The year before, the HOME Act of 2023 had required the state to set housing targets — region-by-region numbers for how many homes Vermont must build to climb out of its shortage. Act 181 added the accountability: it directed the Department of Housing and Community Development to build the tools to measure progress against those targets and report to the Legislature every year through 2030.

That measurement now exists, and its first report arrived in May 2026 — one of the clearest statewide pictures Vermont has had of its own housing production. It is not encouraging.

A new way to see

For years, Vermont could not say with any speed how much housing it was building. It leaned on U.S. Census building-permit estimates, released once a year and already a year stale. The Department of Housing and Community Development’s new Housing Development Dashboard changes that. Drawing most heavily on Enhanced 911 address data — the same system that maps a location for emergency dispatch, refreshed weekly — the dashboard tracks new units close to real time, in the state’s own words as close as it has ever been able to get. Its counts now generally land within 300 to 400 units of the Census permit figures, close enough to trust the trend.

This is a genuine capability the state did not have two years ago. It is also the reason the rest of the report carries weight: these are not advocacy estimates but the state’s own preliminary measurement of its own performance.

What the count shows

The numbers are sobering. The dashboard’s preliminary counts — which DHCD cautions are not yet official or final — show statewide housing production falling sharply in 2025, to roughly 1,600 new units from about 3,000 the year before. Across recent years, Vermont is averaging about 2,300 new homes annually. To reach the targets the state set for itself — between 27,900 and 41,200 new homes by 2030, a range built to account for the roughly 15 percent of Vermont’s housing that serves as seasonal or second homes — it needs to build 5,600 to 8,200 a year. Vermont is producing roughly a third of what it needs, and the most recent year moved in the wrong direction.

The report adds a detail that should temper any optimism about the better year. More than $700 million in state and federal housing money was invested between fiscal years 2021 and 2026, and the report says that influx “may help explain” the 2024 increase in units, particularly multi-family ones. In other words, the year Vermont came closest to building enough followed an extraordinary surge of public investment — a surge the report does not establish as permanent. The next year, production fell by nearly half.

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Why the count matters

A production target can read like bureaucratic bookkeeping. It is not. The number of homes Vermont builds is the lever that moves what Vermonters pay, through a mechanism housing economists call filtering. When new housing opens at any price point, the households who move into it vacate other units, which are filled by households leaving cheaper ones, and so on down the ladder. New supply at the top sets off a chain of moves that reaches the middle and the bottom — slowly, imperfectly, but measurably. Economist Evan Mast, studying 12 metro areas, estimated that 100 new market-rate units set 45 to 70 people moving out of below-median-income neighborhoods within about five years; a register study of Helsinki traced the same chains reaching lower-income residents quickly; and a review by NYU’s Furman Center found that added supply generally moderates rents, while cautioning it never reaches the lowest-income renters on its own.

Vermont has one place where the data is rich enough to watch this happen. Chittenden County tracks its own production through the Building Homes Together scorecard, a tally drawn from every municipality’s records — the kind of granular local count the rest of the state cannot yet produce. In 2023, the most recent year scored, the county added 720 homes against an annual target of 1,000 — 72 percent of its goal, far ahead, proportionally, of the statewide third. And the county that built nearest its target is the county now seeing its rental market loosen: an appraisal firm’s local tracking, reported by VTDigger, shows Chittenden’s rental vacancy climbing back toward a healthier range over the years those new apartments came online. Where Vermont built closest to its need, the squeeze appears to have eased — a pattern consistent with the filtering mechanism, though not proof that supply alone drove it.

What the count still can’t show

Here is the limit the new dashboard does not erase. It counts units built. It does not track rents or vacancies — so it can tell Vermont where homes are going up, but not what that construction is doing to the cost of living. Chittenden has independent market data because a private appraisal firm produces it; most of the state does not. For cities like Rutland, the only public rent figures come from commercial listing sites, which can swing from month to month and often reflect a handful of listings rather than the market. They are not a substitute for a consistent rent or vacancy series — which, outside Chittenden, does not exist.

The yardsticks themselves are not fully locked in. The targets are, in the state’s own words, an aspirational planning tool with no penalty for a town that misses them, and the regional future-land-use maps meant to steer Act 181’s growth toward those targets are still moving through Land Use Review Board approval. As Compass reported in April, only five of Vermont’s eleven regional commissions had submitted draft maps, none had received final approval, and the deadline for the rest does not arrive until the end of 2026. Vermont, in other words, has built the instrument to measure its housing crisis faster than it has finished agreeing on what counts as success — and faster than it can measure whether the building it does is reaching the people priced out.

Why so little of what counts most gets built

Part of the shortfall is a cost problem the state’s own numbers lay bare. The households with the least room sit far below the line the private market serves: Vermont’s Housing Needs Assessment puts the median income of a tenant in one of the state’s 7,268 federally tax-credited apartments at about $16,800 a year. For those Vermonters, only subsidized housing is within reach.

But subsidized housing is the slowest and most expensive kind to build. The cost of developing a rental unit in Vermont has risen roughly 50 percent since 2020, the Vermont Housing Finance Agency reports, and its own cost analysis found evidence that affordable projects’ costs have climbed faster than construction costs generally, partly because such projects lack economies of scale and must stack many funding sources, each with its own compliance burden. The Terner Center at UC Berkeley, analyzing California projects, found each additional public funding source adds about four months and roughly $20,460 per unit — a California figure, not a Vermont measurement, but one that points to a financing burden that travels. The result is a squeeze the dashboard’s falling line reflects: the homes Vermont most needs cost the most to build, public money appears to have lifted its strongest recent year of production, and that money is not guaranteed to last.

None of this argues against subsidy, which buys what the market will not — a two-bedroom tax-credit apartment in Vermont is rent-capped around $1,382 or lower, locked in for decades. It argues that subsidy alone cannot carry the load, and that the production Vermont can sustain without a permanent public surge is the production its new dashboard now shows falling short.

The measurement caught up. The building hasn’t.

Vermont spent two years building the ability to see its housing problem clearly. The first clear look shows a state building roughly a third of what it needs, producing less in 2025 than in 2024, leaning on public money it has not promised to sustain, and still — outside one county — unable to see whether the homes it does build are reaching the people being priced out.

That is not a failure of the dashboard. The dashboard is the rare piece of good news here: Vermont can finally count. The harder news is what the counting reveals. The instrument has caught up to the ambition. The building has not.

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By Stowe Mountain Rescue

Our rescue last night was a perfect demonstration of why you should call for help earlier, rather than later. A woman in her 70s had summited the Chin and was on the Halfway House Trail on Mt Mansfield.

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Her digital mapping technology had failed and, unfamiliar with the mountain, the side trail had her confused. A combination of disorientation and exhaustion and the time of day led her to play it safe and call for help.

First off, it has to be said, some credit to her for being up on Mt Mansfield in the first place – we respect that instinct to blaze past 70 and keep adventuring and enjoying the outdoors. She called us in the early evening and two team members drove up the Toll Road and took an enjoyable hike along the ridge to go help her out. If she had held off from calling and soldiered on to the point of collapse, it would have been a full-team litter carry in the dark.

Everyone, no matter what age or physical condition, should do an honest assessment of their capabilities and preparedness before heading into the backcountry. Our friend from last night was fairly well-prepared, but she could have used a spare battery pack for her phone. Needless to say, a paper map would have served her well. Keeping an eye on the remaining daylight and your physical capacity is crucial, and on both counts she was right to call when she did.

When Netflix added a wave of History Channel presidential documentaries on May 18, timed to the country’s 250th anniversary, the lineup included a familiar Vermont face. “Theodore Roosevelt,” the two-part, five-hour portrait of the 26th president, features Edward “Ted” Kohn — a professor of history at Norwich University — as one of its recurring expert voices.

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On screen, Kohn is credited simply as “Professor of History, Norwich University.” Off screen, he also serves as dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences and ranks among the foremost Roosevelt scholars working today. His books on Roosevelt include Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt, Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt, and A Most Glorious Ride: The Diaries of Theodore Roosevelt, 1877–1886 — the first time Roosevelt’s early diaries appeared in print.

The series keeps heavyweight company. It was executive produced by Pulitzer Prize–winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and drawn from Goodwin’s bestseller Leadership: In Turbulent Times. British actor Rufus Jones plays Roosevelt in the dramatized sequences, while the analysis comes from a roster of historians that includes Douglas Brinkley, H.W. Brands, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad — along with Roosevelt’s great-grandson, Tweed Roosevelt. Kohn is among the experts threaded throughout.

His road to the project ran through several continents. A Chicago native, Kohn earned his bachelor’s degree at Harvard and his Ph.D. in history at McGill University, then spent fourteen years in Ankara, Turkey, chairing the American Culture and Literature department at Bilkent University before joining Norwich in 2017. His Roosevelt work has put him in front of national audiences before — on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Much of his scholarship centers on the young Roosevelt and the New York years that shaped him, the formative stretch the documentary traces from a sickly childhood to the governor’s mansion and beyond.

“Theodore Roosevelt” landed on Netflix as part of a larger America-250 release that also brought the History Channel’s “Washington,” “Abraham Lincoln,” “Grant,” and “FDR” to the platform. For Vermont viewers cueing up the Roosevelt installment, one of the experts breaking down the president’s life teaches right here in the state — at Norwich University.

Congress increased federal voucher-renewal funding in February — but Vermont is still funding fewer vouchers than it's authorized to provide, the rural waitlist is frozen, and the conditional state backstop built for the crisis went untapped. Here is the fuller picture behind this week's improved news.

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Vermont’s federal housing voucher program is in better shape this month than it has been in more than a year. After encouraging funding notices from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in May, the nine local housing authorities that administer Section 8 in Vermont are mostly out of “shortfall” — no longer spending faster than money comes in — and Burlington has started issuing new vouchers off its waitlist for the first time since early 2025.

That is real, and it matters to the thousands of low-income Vermonters who depend on the subsidy. But “out of shortfall” and “recovered” are not the same thing, and three facts sit underneath the good news that change what it means for most renters in the state.

1. Where you live decides whether the freeze is over

The single most important detail for a Compass reader is geographic. The recovery is uneven, and it favors the cities.

According to reporting from VTDigger and Vermont Public, the Burlington Housing Authority hopes to issue roughly 200 new vouchers by year’s end — a number its director stresses is not locked in — and is prioritizing families, young people aging out of foster care, and people with disabilities, because of the specific federal funds available. Rutland has room for perhaps 10 to 15 more, but a HUD official told it not to issue them, with no clear explanation yet.

And the largest provider in the state — the Vermont State Housing Authority, which serves the many towns that have no local housing agency of their own — is not issuing off its general waitlist at all. VSHA can convert 52 domestic-violence survivors from expiring COVID-era temporary vouchers to permanent ones, and honor 26 project-based vouchers tied to affordable housing in Newport, Middlebury, and Waterbury. Beyond that, its general waitlist stays frozen. VSHA’s own books show why: it is authorized for 4,495 vouchers but had only 3,852 leased at the end of 2025, with 764 it cannot afford to fund.

For the towns VSHA covers — the many that have no local authority of their own, including much of rural and small-town Vermont — the operative fact is not “Burlington is issuing again.” It is: you are still waiting, and the door has not reopened. (The status of several of Vermont’s other local authorities — Barre, Montpelier, Winooski and the rest of the nine — isn’t spelled out in the current reporting; the confirmed picture covers Burlington, Rutland, and VSHA.)

2. The federal money came back. The vouchers Vermont already lost didn’t.

ANALYSIS

The reason most authorities are out of shortfall isn’t mysterious, and it isn’t only belt-tightening: in February, Congress passed a real budget. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, signed February 3, raised HUD’s funding by more than $7 billion over the prior year and put roughly $35 billion toward renewing existing voucher contracts — a level federal housing advocates judged sufficient to renew the tenant-based assistance already in use. After a year of operating on a stopgap and staring down proposed House cuts, the authorities got something close to solid ground under them. That is the good news, and it is the larger part of the story than the daily framing of “encouraging notices” suggests.

But solid ground going forward doesn’t restore what was lost going backward. Through 2025, Vermont shed hundreds of vouchers to attrition — not issued off waitlists, rescinded from people mid-search, shelved when a tenant moved out or died. Those didn’t come back when the 2026 money arrived. The people turned away in 2025 were not made whole; they returned to the back of the line. So the program exits the crisis smaller than it entered it, even with funding improved.

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Director Kathleen Berk had warned of a sharper version of this — a “downward spiral,” in which federal funding, set partly on prior-year spending, would keep ratcheting down as rolls shrank. The 2026 funding picture appears to have eased the immediate crisis, and HUD’s updated rules now weigh an agency’s shortfall risk to prevent terminations. But easing the crisis isn’t the same as reversing the loss. Vermont is still authorized by the federal government for more vouchers than it is funding — by Berk’s November accounting, about 1,200 short of the ceiling statewide. What 2026 stabilized is a smaller baseline, not the one Vermont is entitled to operate.

3. The immediate hole was small. The fix Berk asked for wasn’t — and the state funded neither.

Here’s the part that got lost in the back-and-forth. The crisis everyone scrambled over last December was actually small. By Berk’s November numbers, it came to about $1 million — enough to keep roughly 940 households, across five of the nine authorities, from losing their vouchers that month — and the authorities mostly patched it themselves.

The real problem was much bigger, and Berk said so plainly: Vermont is allowed to run about 1,200 more vouchers than it’s paying for. Funding all of them — filling the program back up to the size the federal government already authorizes — would cost roughly $18 million a year. That’s the number that matters, because it’s the gap between the help Vermont could be giving and the help it actually is.

The state funded none of it. Instead, in Section 79 of the FY2026 Budget Adjustment Act (Act 74, signed in March), lawmakers built a narrow safety valve: while the Legislature is out of session, a state board can tap part of a $50 million federal-emergency fund to keep an authority from canceling vouchers people are already using — but only under strict conditions, and only to stop cancellations, never to fund new vouchers. So even at its most generous, the tool couldn’t touch the 1,200 vouchers Berk was asking for. Then the February budget passed, the immediate danger eased, and the authorities say they never needed the state money. The safety valve went unused, and the $18 million question went unanswered.

And it isn’t that the state had no money. The same budget act set aside tens of millions for exactly this kind of federal trouble — the $50 million emergency fund, plus roughly $75 million more held in reserve for federal shortfalls and other needs. The money was there. What didn’t exist was any way to spend it on growing the rolls back: every tool the state built pointed at stopping losses, none at restoring the vouchers Vermont had already let go.

ANALYSIS

We’re not telling you whether that caution was prudent or excessive. The administration’s case is real: federal funding was genuinely up in the air last winter, so it wanted to weigh all priorities in the regular budget and be sure any state money met federal rules before spending it — and the February budget did make the spending unnecessary. The authorities’ case is just as real: people were losing vouchers in real time, and the bigger fix — roughly $18 million to refill the 1,200 vouchers Vermont is allowed but isn’t funding — still hasn’t happened, even now that federal money is flowing again. We’re laying out the shape of the choice: a small immediate problem, a much larger structural one, a cautious conditional answer, and a chunk of voucher capacity Vermont still isn’t using. You can weigh it yourself.

The federal backdrop the daily coverage compresses

The “funding reduction from Congress” that triggered all of this has a specific shape worth knowing.

Washington never passed a real 2025 budget. It kept the government — and Section 8 — running on autopilot at the prior year’s funding levels while rents kept climbing, which is a cut in everything but name for a program whose costs rise with the market. HUD’s own estimate put the House’s funding level more than $3.7 billion short of simply renewing the vouchers already in use — what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called the worst shortfall in the program’s history. HUD scraped together a $200 million emergency fund for the hardest-hit agencies and trimmed some newer voucher types to about 93 cents on the dollar, while protecting renewals for people already housed. That was the squeeze the February 2026 budget finally lifted — but it had run for the better part of a year, and Vermont’s losses were locked in before relief arrived.

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That national context also explains the Rutland puzzle — an authority sitting on money it was told not to spend, unable to get a straight answer from a HUD it called “severely understaffed.” There’s a likely reason, even if Rutland couldn’t get it confirmed: on December 22, 2025, HUD told housing authorities that any agency which had taken emergency shortfall money in 2025 was now flagged as at risk again in 2026 — and agencies in that situation are generally barred from handing out new vouchers until HUD lifts the hold, no matter what’s in the bank. Rutland had its own shortfall last December, so it fits. But the fact that a director can’t get HUD to simply say so is telling on its own. By the fall, HUD had lost an estimated 2,300 employees — about a quarter of its staff — since January, after DOGE plans earlier in the year floated cutting as many as half. An agency hollowed out that fast struggles to give clear answers, and that, too, is part of the logjam.

What we’re watching

• Did the state pathway ever get used — and does the $18 million question come back? Reporting suggests the authorities “have not needed” the state funds once the federal budget passed and the May HUD notices came in. If so, the safety valve lawmakers built may have quietly gone unused. But Berk’s bigger ask — to fund the roughly 1,200 vouchers Vermont is allowed but isn’t paying for — was never answered. Watch whether it comes back in the next budget.

• Whether the lost ground gets recovered. Funding stabilized the baseline, but it didn’t restore the hundreds of vouchers Vermont shed in 2025. Watch whether authorities — Burlington especially — can issue fast enough to rebuild the rolls, or whether the smaller footprint simply becomes the new normal.

• The rural reopening. The real test is VSHA’s general waitlist. With federal funding improved, the question is no longer whether the money exists — it’s when, and whether, the largest authority starts issuing to the towns that have waited longest.

Section 8 is the rare program that uses the private market to keep some of the most vulnerable Vermonters housed — one of the few exits from a shelter, a motel room, or a tent. The federal money improved. But Vermont is funding fewer vouchers than it’s authorized to provide, the largest authority still hasn’t reopened its rural waitlist, and where you live still decides whether any of it reaches you.

Compass Vermont is independent, reader-supported Vermont journalism. We bring the data. You form the opinions.

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Public Safety Is the Question Vermont Keeps Asking. Chittenden County Is Where It’s Loudest

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Public safety is one of the questions Vermonters keep returning to — in the Statehouse, in downtowns around the state, and increasingly at the ballot box.

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Nowhere is the argument sharper right now than in Chittenden County, where a new poll has put it at the center of the race for State’s Attorney — and how voters read that poll could help shape who wins.

The survey, released June 8 by Campaign for Vermont Prosperity, an advocacy nonprofit that describes itself as nonpartisan, questioned 512 likely Chittenden County voters about crime, safety, and the office most associated with both. The number the group put at the top of its announcement: challenger Bram Kranichfeld leads two-term incumbent Sarah George by 15 points, 35 to 20, with 45 percent undecided.

It is worth saying clearly at the outset what this poll is and isn’t. It was not commissioned by either campaign. Executive Director Ben Kinsley told Compass that Campaign for Vermont designed the questionnaire internally and paid for it from its own operating funds, with no candidate involvement; Kranichfeld confirmed independently that he had no advance knowledge of it. No campaign put a thumb on the scale. That is a fair point in the poll’s favor, and it is the right place to start.

It is not, however, a reason to take the headline number at face value — because that number describes a far broader electorate than the one that will actually choose the next State’s Attorney.

Both George and Kranichfeld are Democrats, a primary matchup Compass covered when Kranichfeld entered the race in March. In Chittenden County — the most populous and among the most Democratic counties in the state — no Republican has entered the race, which makes the August 11 Democratic primary the contest that effectively chooses the next State’s Attorney. And the poll’s two head-to-head figures point in opposite directions depending on who is counted. Among all likely voters, Kranichfeld leads by 15. Among Democrats — the voters who decide August 11 — George leads by 15. Campaign for Vermont’s own write-up notes George is “deeply underwater with Independents and Republicans,” and that is precisely where Kranichfeld’s overall edge comes from: respondents who will not cast a ballot in the Democratic primary.

Asked directly whether leading with the all-voters figure implied George would lose the primary, Kinsley said it did not. Primaries are hard to predict, he noted, particularly in Vermont, where any voter can request a party’s ballot. But, he acknowledged, George “has better numbers among Democrats and that’s a leg up in the primary.”

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Whose voters show up in August

That open-primary point is the real complication. Because Vermont voters choose a party’s ballot at the polls rather than registering by party, the August Democratic electorate will not be limited to self-identified Democrats. Independents — who have no primary of their own, and who lean toward Kranichfeld in this poll — can freely take a Democratic ballot. So, in principle, can Republican-leaning voters. How many do, and which way they break, is unknown.

And it is exactly what this survey cannot measure. Its sample is screened for likely general-election voters — a far larger and different group than the small, highly engaged universe that turns out for an August primary. So while George leads among the voters the poll identifies as Democrats, whether that lead holds among the people who actually show up in August is a question the instrument was not built to answer.

Both campaigns read it the same way

The most telling confirmation comes from the candidates themselves. Neither treats the all-voters number as the score that counts.

George, in a written statement to Compass, pointed past it: “Even with that framing, this poll shows me leading the Democratic primary by fifteen points.” She added that the result reflected voters’ ability to “spot the difference between an honest conversation and a loaded one” — her interpretation; the poll shows she leads among Democrats but does not establish why. She also defended her record and asked that the full questionnaire be released alongside the toplines.

Kranichfeld, who confirmed he had no advance knowledge of the poll, cast himself not as a front-runner but as a challenger with work to do: “Running against an incumbent is a tough race,” he wrote, urging “voters who want a change in Chittenden County to make their voices heard in the Democratic primary in August.”

A challenger said to lead by 15 declining to claim he is winning, and an incumbent said to trail pointing to her own 15-point lead — both, independently, locating the real contest in the August primary.

What the poll found

On its own terms, the survey reports a county uneasy about safety, and that unease is not a Campaign for Vermont invention. By the group’s own figures, 79 percent of respondents view local law enforcement favorably. Sixty-eight percent say they would feel unsafe walking alone in downtown Burlington at night — a finding the group reported across party lines, with 58 percent of Democrats, 87 percent of Republicans, and 72 percent of Independents saying they feel somewhat or very unsafe. Seventy-nine percent say crime in the county has worsened over ten years; 42 percent name drug-related crimes the most urgent issue to address, and 24 percent homelessness. Fifty-one percent disapprove of George’s job performance — 37 percent strongly — while among Democrats she keeps a narrow positive rating, and 31 percent name her as bearing primary responsibility for public safety, more than any other official named.

The concern is corroborated well beyond this poll. Over the past year, roughly 100 or more downtown business owners have signed open letters to Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak demanding action on safety; the Burlington Business Association reported that a large share of downtown businesses have seen falling foot traffic and lost staff over safety concerns; and the City Council has spent on downtown patrols in response. Those are real indicators of public anxiety — though not, in themselves, proof that crime has risen.

What that anxiety does not settle is the underlying facts of crime itself. Kinsley was direct that the worsened-crime figure measures sentiment, not statistics: it is “strictly voter perception,” he said, adding that whether actual rates have risen is a separate question with its own data. This piece concerns the poll, not the underlying crime trends, which Compass did not independently assess here.

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Who built it, and what hasn’t been released

The survey was conducted April 30 to May 4, using a mix of automated calls, live dialing, and text messages, weighted to Census demographics, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.33 percentage points. Campaign for Vermont designed the questionnaire itself and contracted an outside call center to place the calls, Kinsley said — though he could not name the vendor during the interview and said he would look it up. [FLAG: vendor name still outstanding] The poll cost roughly $6,000 to $7,000, paid from operating funds; no donor earmarked it. Campaign for Vermont is a 501(c)(4) organization that does not take positions on candidates, Kinsley said: the data is “out there for people to interpret however they want.”

The posted results include toplines and party crosstabs but not the full questionnaire in field order or complete crosstabulations. Those, Kinsley said, are kept confidential, citing concern that screening questions could expose personally identifiable information. That withholding is now contested by the candidate the poll most concerns: George’s call to publish the full questionnaire puts an organization whose stated mission is transparency at odds with the incumbent it surveyed over exactly that — disclosure.

The questions behind the numbers

The wording of two questions does work that topline percentages obscure — and because Campaign for Vermont wrote the instrument in-house, that wording reflects the group’s choices, not an independent firm’s.

One asked respondents to choose between wanting prosecutors to “prosecute crimes and hold offenders accountable,” favored by 69 percent, and preferring “a focus on prosecutorial discretion and addressing root causes,” at 31 percent. The framing puts the affirmative term — accountability — on one side of a choice working prosecutors do not actually face as an either/or; discretion and accountability are exercised together.

Another carried the survey’s most charged topic. It described a March federal immigration raid in South Burlington, noting that some viewed the protests as largely non-violent while others said protesters assaulted law enforcement — then asked whether those “taken into custody for resisting arrest or assaulting law enforcement” should be charged, carrying that second, contested characterization into the operative question. Whether the order in which respondents heard questions like these shaped their answers to the approval and head-to-head items is something only the full field-order questionnaire would show — and Campaign for Vermont has not released it.

Why it matters

A poll is a tool, and like any tool it can be aimed. The anxiety this one captures is real, and it crosses party lines. The disagreement it points to is real too: one candidate argues that an approach pairing accountability with treatment has made the county safer, the other that voters are ready for a different balance. Both of those things are live, and the poll captures them.

What it cannot tell you — what no June survey can — is how much that anxiety will move a voter, which ballot they will choose, and who will care enough to show up. The headline number describes an electorate that will not pick the next State’s Attorney. The number that will points the other way. How much crime weighs on the decision, and on whom, will only be known in August.

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A federal-grant project led by UVM Extension will map what Vermonters need to thrive, drawing in part on Local Minutes, an AI tool that searches municipal meeting records. The tool's own disclaimer says it should not be the sole basis for important decisions.

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The University of Vermont is trying to learn more about what Vermonters need to thrive — not in the abstract, but through what UVM Extension describes as a statewide assessment of community needs, assets and perceptions. The project is called the Vermont Assessment of Assets, Angles, and Need, or VAAAN, and UVM Extension says it will use a mixed-methods approach to explore what is needed across a broad range of basic social themes, what assets communities already have, and how needs and assets are perceived.

One named partner is Local Minutes, an artificial-intelligence service that ingests municipal meeting minutes and other public documents and lets users ask questions about them. The premise is straightforward: if you analyze what selectboards, school boards and commissions are actually talking about, patterns of community concern may emerge.

It is an ambitious idea, and in places a genuinely useful one. It is also being built mostly outside the institutions Vermonters might assume would define their needs — and on a foundation whose builders are unusually candid about its limits.

The money, and who is at the table

VAAAN is paid for by federal money routed through the university. The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships, funded by a $14 million, four-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, awarded the project $250,000 in its third grant round. In the institute’s official list of awarded proposals, the grant is titled “Redefining Community Needs Assessment,” its UVM partner is Extension, and its named community partner is Local Minutes. The stated problem: Vermont “lacks an annual comprehensive assessment of community needs to inform planning.” The stated solution: a “living and interactive ‘Vermont Analysis of Need.’”

A note for the record: in grant documents the project is the “Vermont Analysis of Need,” abbreviated VAN; in UVM Extension’s public-facing material it is called VAAAN. The available materials describe the same project.

What the public grant materials and UVM Extension’s announcement do not show is a formal role for state government — no indication that the Legislature, Gov. Phil Scott’s office or any state agency commissioned the assessment, reviewed it or holds authority over it. The project’s own public framing points inward as well as outward: Interim Director of Extension Chris Callahan has tied VAAAN to UVM’s strategic plan and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ research priorities.

VAAAN does plan to convene two advisory committees — one drawn from, in Callahan’s words, “positions of decision-making power and relative wealth of resources,” and another from the grassroots level. Whether that first committee will include state officials or legislators is not yet public.

How the project decides what counts as “need”

The scraping is not the whole method, and it would be unfair to suggest the project intends to read minutes and simply declare what towns are missing. By UVM Extension’s own account, VAAAN is a mixed-methods effort: the Local Minutes analysis is described as one part of a broader process that includes a review of literature, the advisory committees and additional validation.

The project also says it is alert to how the same need looks different in different places. Co-investigator Mariya Shcheglovitova, a human geographer and Extension assistant professor of community and economic development, has described the tool detecting that smaller rural communities discuss school closures and the squeeze between property taxes and local control, while larger towns frame education around childcare and trades.

[ANALYSIS] But the discovery layer sets the initial agenda. The validation steps described publicly appear designed in part to catch false positives — themes the AI flagged that turn out not to matter. The harder problem may run the other way: false negatives — needs that never surface because the people who carry them do not attend meetings and do not appear in the minutes. A survey of experts might backfill some of that, but the public method still leaves an important distinction: measuring civic conversation is not the same as measuring community need.

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What the tool actually is

Here the project’s foundation deserves a close look, because Local Minutes is plain about what it is and is not.

The service says it obtains documents "from municipal and public body websites using automated methods." In practice that means gathering posted minutes and agendas from town websites and the platforms many municipalities use to host them — structured records that can be pulled directly and then made searchable, with the AI doing its main work at the point where users ask plain-language questions. Those records are public by law. Under 1 V.S.A. § 312, public meeting minutes must be available after five calendar days, and minutes must be posted within five calendar days to a website if the public body maintains or has designated one as its official website. Except for draft minutes replaced by updated minutes, posted minutes cannot be removed from the website sooner than one year from the date of the meeting.

That posting duty is conditional on having a website in the first place — which helps explain the coverage gap. A February 2026 Norwich Observer item, citing Local Minutes, reported that the site covered 179 of Vermont’s 247 municipalities, or roughly 72 percent. The towns left out are disproportionately the smallest and least-resourced — the ones least likely to maintain a usable website.

The tool was built, and has been described publicly, as a transparency aid: a way for ordinary citizens to find out what their town government did. Seven Days reported at its 2025 launch that founder and software engineer Duane Millar Barlow came up with the idea after joining Essex’s Conservation and Trails Committee and discovering how difficult it was to dig useful history out of past meeting minutes. That origin is worth keeping in view, since the tool’s original public-facing purpose was civic transparency.

And it does that job. But Local Minutes’ own disclaimer is unusually frank about the boundaries of what it can be trusted to do. The AI, it warns, “may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information (often called ‘hallucinations’).” Responses “might contain errors, inaccuracies, or omissions.” It is “not an official government source” and “not an authoritative record.” And, most pointedly: it “should not be the sole basis for making important decisions or taking action,” and “lack of an answer is not proof of the non-existence of information.”

[ANALYSIS] None of that is a knock on Local Minutes. Those are appropriate disclaimers for a free convenience tool, and the company should be credited for posting them. The question is what happens when an instrument built with that level of caution becomes a named, grant-funded input for an assessment designed to inform planning and institutional priorities. The humility appropriate to a citizen’s lookup tool becomes a live issue when the same outputs help guide where attention and resources go.

A transparency tool, asked to do a different job

[ANALYSIS] This is the heart of it. A transparency tool answers a descriptive question: what did this body discuss and decide? A needs assessment answers a more judgment-based one: what do communities require to thrive? The first is about the record. The second is about people — including the people who never enter the record. A tool can be useful for the first and still incomplete for the second, precisely because the second depends on seeing what the documents leave out.

The risk is not hypothetical, and the same grant round documents the foil. In the cycle that funded VAAAN, the Leahy Institute also awarded $237,198 to the Vermont Professionals of Color Network for a “Vermont Community Data Assessment” — a project premised on the fact that available Vermont data leaves gaps in understanding populations not always captured in data collection. Set those two awards side by side and the tension is clear: one project exists because existing data under-represents some Vermonters; the other proposes to read need in part from meeting records, which tend to over-represent whoever shows up to meetings and whichever towns maintain a website.

Vermont has rules for government AI. This project doesn’t appear to be covered.

The state has not been casual about artificial intelligence. Act 132 of 2022 created a Division of Artificial Intelligence inside the Agency of Digital Services and an AI Advisory Council. The statute directs the division to review AI systems “developed, employed, or procured in State government.” It also directs the division to consider policies to protect Vermonters from unfair discrimination caused or compounded by government AI and to address systems “that have not been tested for bias or have been shown to contain bias.” The AI Advisory Council is scheduled to be repealed on June 30, 2027.

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[ANALYSIS] That framework, by its own terms, governs AI used or bought by state government. On the public record, VAAAN is a UVM Extension project involving a private vendor and federal grant funding — not a state procurement — so it does not appear to fall under that same review structure. That is not a violation of state AI law. It is a governance question: Vermont has built a bias-conscious oversight regime for state-government AI, while a federally funded university project designed to map Vermont’s needs sits outside it.

What it’s for

The people building VAAAN describe something genuinely collaborative. Co-investigator Gianni Solórzano has framed the eventual tool as a way to break down silos — a place where someone working on, say, food security could filter by region, see who else is doing that work, and build a partnership rather than duplicate effort. That is a real problem, and access to hard-to-search municipal records is a real public good. On both counts, the instinct behind the project is sound.

The open questions are narrower, and they are the ones worth watching as the project develops over the next two years: whether anyone in state government is consulted or accountable; how heavily the AI layer is weighted against the human ones, and whether that weighting is documented; and whether a tool built to reveal what towns say can be trusted to help reveal what Vermonters need — especially the Vermonters who rarely make it into the minutes.

Compass will be following the project as its advisory committees form and its methodology is published.

This story has been updated to more precisely describe how Local Minutes gathers municipal records, following a reader comment.

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There was a time when a Vermont schoolhouse meant a woodstove in the corner and somebody’s job was keeping it fed. The state is offering money to bring wood heat back to public buildings — but the boiler-room version, not the cast-iron one.

The Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation is taking applications for its Advanced Wood Heating Assistance program, funded by a $300,000 USDA Forest Service grant. Town offices, garages, schools and even grange halls can apply. The grants reimburse up to half a project’s cost — to a maximum of $50,000 for a brand-new system, or $25,000 for upgrading an existing one.

The “advanced” part is the catch for anyone picturing smoke and split logs. These systems run on locally sourced pellets, chips or cordwood, can be fully automated, and are built to meet current air-quality rules — a long way from the woodstoves that gave wood heat its sooty reputation. The state’s pitch leans local: by a 2016 estimate cited by FPR, 80 cents of every dollar spent on wood heat stays in Vermont, versus about 22 cents for oil or propane.

It’s not just theory. Craftsbury Academy installed a wood-pellet boiler with a similar grant in 2022, and Joe Houston, operations director for the Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union, told the state the system has been a solid improvement.

There’s a reason the money is on the table. Automated wood systems can cost two to five times what a comparable fossil-fuel boiler runs to buy and install, according to the state’s wood-heat roadmap — a day-one expense that the long-term fuel savings take years to repay. The grants are meant to soften that upfront cost.

Applicants don’t just file a form, either. The state runs a pre-application process first — an intake call and a site visit from mechanical engineers, with approval from the US Forest Service’s Wood Energy Technical Team before a formal application is invited. Questions go to wood energy specialist Molly Willard at FPR.

More information is on the department’s website.

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