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EPA Told Vermont to Double Its Lake Cleanup Pace. Two New Plans Say the Runoff Target Will Be Missed Again

Vermont Towns Face a July 2027 Ban on License Plate Cameras, State Says

Rural Vermonters Are Pushing Back on Land-Use Rules. A 30-Town Dispute Shows Why

Lake Willoughby Tower Cleared by Supreme Court Would Change the View — and Could Change Who Can Reach Help

Vermont Agency That Settled a Medicaid Case Last Week Is Also Running the Bennington Agency That Settled With the State in March

Fixing the Waterbury Dam: $1 Million More From Vermont if Congress Pays, a $30 Million Gap if It Doesn’t

Volunteers Keep Pulling Tires From Vermont Rivers. A Bill to Make Tire Makers Pay for Disposal Died in Committee

Police Bypass State’s Attorney Sarah George on Williston ICE Cases. Vermont’s AG Is Bringing Charges

Leaf Peepers, Look Before You Climb: Elmore and Spruce Fire Towers Are Closing

A Trailer That Can Power 50 Homes for 10 Hours—While Crews Repair the Lines

At the bottom: how to check your own Vermont voter registration, including if you told the DMV not to register you, and when your November ballot should arrive.

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday let the Trump administration restart an expanded federal system for checking whether registered voters are U.S. citizens.

For Vermont voters, the immediate effect is likely to be small.

The court did not order Vermont to hand over its voter list. It did not require Vermont to use the federal system. And it did not touch a Vermont law that bars state and local officials from giving the full voter list to a federal agency so it can be matched against other government records.

What the court did

In a 6-3 unsigned order, the justices paused a June ruling by a federal judge in Washington. That ruling had shut the system down for violating federal privacy laws. The majority said a 1996 law gave the Department of Homeland Security authority to request and receive citizenship information from other federal agencies. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying the majority misread the law.

The order is not a final ruling. It lets the government use the system while the case continues, and that will run past the Nov. 3 election.

The system is called SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has run SAVE since 1987, mostly to check whether immigrants qualify for government benefits. Over the past year and a half, the administration merged SAVE with Social Security records covering nearly all Americans. The overhaul also added bulk searches, allowing states to submit large numbers of voter records at once rather than checking voters individually.

Since May 2025, the expanded SAVE system has checked more than 65 million voters in 26 states and flagged 28,635 as possible noncitizens, according to the administration’s filing. The administration says SAVE does not declare anyone ineligible to vote. It only reports that a person’s citizenship couldn’t be confirmed.

Why little changes in Vermont

• States choose whether to use it. Nothing in Friday’s order makes any state run its voters through SAVE.

• Vermont law bars the bulk upload. Under 17 V.S.A. § 2154, no state or local agency may knowingly give a federal agency the full statewide voter checklist, or a town’s portion of it, for the purpose of comparing voters’ information against other federal or state databases. The voter checklist is Vermont’s term for its official list of registered voters. Uploading the whole list to SAVE is exactly that kind of comparison.

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• Vermont’s top election official opposes the expanded system. Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas was one of 12 secretaries of state who formally objected to the SAVE overhaul last December. In a column this month, she wrote that Vermont “will not comply with any unlawful demand for personal voter data.”

• Mass removals before November face a federal limit. Federal law generally restricts systematic removals from voter lists within 90 days of a federal election, a limit the court noted. Whether that rule also protects people alleged never to have been eligible to register is now before the Supreme Court. Individual eligibility reviews can still happen.

• Washington doesn’t have Vermont’s list. This is a separate case. On Sept. 17, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Lanthier dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking Vermont’s full voter list. She ruled that the federal law the department relied on didn’t give it that power. In states that did hand their lists to the Justice Department, the department has an agreement with DHS to run them through SAVE.

Friday’s ruling did not newly protect Vermont voter data, and it did not newly expose it. Vermont’s restrictions were already in state law, and they are still there.

Why “little” and not “nothing”

The federal side of SAVE includes Vermonters, too. The Social Security records DHS merged into the system cover people in every state, and Friday’s order lets DHS use them. What Vermont controls is whether its voter checklist gets run against those records.

Vermont’s law also covers only the full list or a town’s list. It does not appear to bar an election official from checking a single voter. The case isn’t over, and the Legislature could change the law.

The question Vermont hasn’t settled

The same Vermont statute that bars handing over the list also directs the Secretary of State to make reasonable efforts to compare it against federal and state databases “where possible.”

That matters because of this summer’s DMV audit. The state estimated that roughly 20,000 people who had told the DMV not to register them had been sent into the voter registration system anyway over the years, as Compass reported in August. Fewer than 900 were removed in the August cleanup. Many of the remaining records had other evidence supporting registration, such as a past vote. The state said it could not say how many of the removed records belonged to people who weren’t eligible to vote.

The two sides read the ruling differently. DHS General Counsel James Percival called Friday’s decision “a victory for election integrity.” The voting-rights groups that brought the case called it “profoundly disappointing,” arguing the system wrongly flags eligible citizens. DHS itself has acknowledged SAVE’s results are not always accurate.

The Supreme Court’s decision on the 90-day question will come this coming term, after November.

Check your own registration

• Look yourself up at the state’s voter portal: vote.vermont.gov/public/dashboard.

• If you told the DMV not to register you and want to see whether you’re on the list anyway, the portal will show it. Your town clerk can help you correct it.

• Your November ballot goes to every registered voter by mail. The Secretary of State’s office has said ballots will go out by Oct. 1. If yours hasn’t arrived by mid-October, call your town clerk.

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State employee? At the bottom: how to request flexible work or a disability accommodation, and where to turn if your request is mishandled.

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Vermont state employees who regained more work-from-home time this summer could be called back to their offices at least three days a week after a Vermont Supreme Court ruling Friday, Sept. 25.

The unanimous decision, written by Justice Nancy Waples, upheld the Scott administration’s authority to impose the requirement under a telework policy the state and its employees’ union negotiated in 2012.

It reverses an April 1 Vermont Labor Relations Board order. That order required the state to:

• drop the three-day rule

• let affected employees return to their earlier telework schedules

• offer reinstatement to employees who left because of the requirement

• reimburse workers for resulting financial losses

The opinion itself sets no new return-to-office date. Employees will need instructions from the administration about what happens next.

What changed this summer

The requirement affected roughly 3,000 employees, about a third of the executive branch workforce. It took effect Dec. 1, 2025, after a Superior Court judge refused to block it, as Compass reported.

The labor board ruled against the administration in April. The state then asked to keep the three-day rule in place while it appealed. The board said no, and so did the Supreme Court.

The state rescinded the three-day standard on June 21, according to VSEA’s June 26 update. The union said some employees had returned to their previous schedules, while others were running into obstacles.

Friday’s ruling clears the way for the administration to restore the requirement. For employees who went back to working more days from home, that could mean another change in commuting and family arrangements.

What it means for taxpayers

The ruling overturns the board’s requirement to reimburse employees for financial losses caused by the three-day rule. In April, Scott’s office objected that the board’s order would ask Vermont taxpayers to pay for “commuting costs and other expenses.”

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The labor board had already put the compensation requirement on hold on May 8 while the appeal proceeded. Friday’s decision removes that requirement in this case.

Office space is a separate expense. The state committed to a five-year, $2.3 million lease for 22,000 square feet at Pilgrim Park in Waterbury to accommodate returning workers, as Compass reported in April. That averages about $460,000 a year, or $1,260 a day over the lease term.

Why the court ruled the way it did

Both sides agreed that telework is a working condition subject to bargaining. The question was whether their existing agreement already allowed the state to impose the three-day requirement.

The 2012 agreement, known as Policy 11.9, makes telework voluntary and gives management “sole discretion” over approval. It also says either the employee or employer can end a telework arrangement “at any time, with or without cause.”

The labor board read the policy as giving department and agency leaders authority to make those decisions based on their operations. It concluded that the governor’s blanket requirement went beyond that agreement.

The Supreme Court disagreed. It found that the policy gave the state broad authority to approve, limit or end telework, and that the governor could exercise that authority directly. The policy guaranteed neither an existing work-from-home schedule nor approval of a new one.

The court also said the policy did not require the state to prove an operational need before ending a telework arrangement. It found Scott’s assessment of his administration’s needs reasonable, and said judging the wisdom of his decision was outside the court’s role.

The ruling therefore settles the authority question in this case. It does not establish that three days in the office will improve productivity or public services.

Because it reversed the board’s underlying decision, the court did not decide whether the board had exceeded its authority in ordering reimbursement and other remedies.

The positions behind the dispute

Scott has argued that more time in the office strengthens collaboration and service to Vermonters. His office said the three-day standard “balances the interests of state employees with Vermonters’ expectations and our goals for team collaboration and communication.”

VSEA challenged the administration’s right to impose a statewide requirement without further bargaining, and argued publicly that state offices lacked room for everyone being called back. “The governor cannot unilaterally change policies that have been bargained,” VSEA Executive Director Steve Howard told WCAX after the April ruling.

Friday’s decision rests on the court’s conclusion that the three-day requirement was allowed by the policy already negotiated.

If you’re a state employee seeking to work from home

• Flexible working arrangement. Vermont law, 21 V.S.A. § 309, lets employees request changes such as working from home or adjusting their hours.

  • Employers must consider requests at least twice per calendar year, discuss them in good faith and communicate a decision.

  • Approval is not guaranteed.

  • Put your request in writing to your supervisor. If a written request is denied in whole or in part, the denial must also be in writing.

• Disability accommodation. Working from home can be a reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act, depending on the disability and the job’s essential duties.

  • Ask your supervisor or HR to begin the accommodation process.

  • The employer may offer another effective accommodation, and telework is not required if it would cause undue hardship.

• The state’s telework process. Policy 11.9 provides a process for requesting telework but does not guarantee approval. Ask your supervisor or HR which forms and instructions apply following the ruling, or check humanresources.vermont.gov.

• If you believe a request was mishandled. State employees can contact the Vermont Human Rights Commission at (802) 828-2480 about flexible-work procedures or disability discrimination.

  • A denial by itself does not establish a violation.

  • Union members can also contact their VSEA staff representative.

  • The Supreme Court expressly left compliance with the flexible-work statute outside this appeal.

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Compass Vermont is independent and reader-supported.

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ANALYSIS

If you live in one of the 30 Two Rivers towns, the box at the bottom shows how to find which category your property falls in on the new map, how to check whether a project would need an Act 250 permit, and how to ask for a map correction.

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Rural opposition to Vermont’s land-use rules did not end when lawmakers rolled back parts of Act 181. A proposed land-use plan covering 30 towns in east-central Vermont has drawn objections from landowners and town boards. It offers a concrete example of the broader dispute over how much government should limit what people can build or do on their land.

The proposal comes from the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission. Its planning goals include protecting forests and farmland and directing growth toward established communities. The dispute concerns how those goals would translate into binding restrictions on development, and how much say landowners and towns should have in setting them.

The objections concern specific provisions. The draft included limits on how many homes or buildings a project could include, restrictions on heating systems, and a requirement to leave most of certain large parcels undeveloped. Commission staff has since proposed removing or softening several requirements. Other restrictions would remain, and the state’s Land Use Review Board has questioned both their justification and the evidence of public support. Those proposed revisions still need the commission board’s approval.

That makes Two Rivers a useful case study in the broader rural pushback: what planners proposed, why residents and town officials objected, and how the proposal is changing under scrutiny. Its particular restrictions should not be assumed to apply in other regions.

Understanding the dispute also requires knowing when the rules would actually bind a landowner. For housing and commercial development, that largely turns on whether a project requires an Act 250 permit. Here is what the draft would require, what staff proposes changing, and what remains contested.

What a Regional Plan Does

Each of Vermont’s 11 regional planning commissions writes a regional plan. The plan includes a map that sorts land into categories, each with its own rules. Three categories cover most rural land in Two Rivers:

• Rural Conservation: large forests and other land mapped for its natural resources. It carries the strictest limits on building.

• Rural Agriculture and Forestry: working farm and forest land.

• Rural General: rural land where scattered homes and some small businesses are expected.

Act 181 of 2024 required every regional commission to redraw its map using new state categories. The June rollback, Act 152 of 2026, left that requirement in place.

A regional plan is not zoning. The commission confirmed to Corinth’s selectboard that the regional map has no direct effect on town zoning, and that the housing targets in the plan carry no penalty if a town misses them. The plan can affect decisions through two main permitting processes:

• Act 250, the state’s development permit. Projects that need one must conform to the regional plan.

• Public Utility Commission reviews of solar projects and cell towers.

The map can also help towns. Village centers and other growth areas drawn on it can qualify for state tax credits. They can also qualify for Tier 1B status, which lets housing projects of up to 50 units on 10 acres or less skip Act 250 entirely. A town has to ask for Tier 1B, and it needs both zoning and subdivision rules to qualify, the commission told Corinth.

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Less Land Would Fall Under the Strictest Limits on Building

The proposed map would reduce the amount of land placed in the region’s most restrictive category for development, from about 48% of the region to 34%, according to the commission’s acreage tables.

Under the current plan, that category is called Forest Based Resource Area. The proposed replacement is called Rural Conservation. Both are intended to limit development in forests and other rural land, and the commission says their rules are similar.

The change varies by town. In Hartland, the share of land in the most restrictive category would fall from about 30% to 2%. In Pomfret, it would fall from 57% to 24%.

Across the region, that share would fall in 24 towns and rise in six: Fairlee, Granville, Hancock, Pittsfield, Rochester and Stockbridge.

For a landowner, moving out of the most restrictive category could mean fewer limits on a future building project. Most of that land would move into Rural Agriculture and Forestry, which still has development restrictions. A change on the map would not, by itself, give an owner permission to build.

The practical question is which category would cover your property, what rules come with it, and whether your project would require the state permit that makes those rules apply.

Why the Dispute Continues

A smaller area under the toughest building restrictions does not resolve the other objections to the plan. For a landowner, the concern can also be what rules apply to a future home or business, and who gets to set them.

The original draft, for example, would have prohibited oil, propane or gas as the main heating source in new homes and businesses requiring an Act 250 permit. Other provisions would have required electric-vehicle chargers or limited the number of buildings and the kinds of businesses allowed in certain areas.

After receiving objections, commission staff proposed removing or softening several of those requirements. The board has not yet approved those changes, and other restrictions would remain.

That helps explain why the dispute continues even though the proposed map places less land in its most restrictive category. The argument concerns both where development is allowed and how much control regional rules should have over it.

When the Plan Would Apply, Decision by Decision

The thresholds below come from state law and the Land Use Review Board’s current jurisdiction rules. The proposed changes come from the commission’s staff recommendations, which the board has not yet voted on.

Building a house. One house below 2,500 feet generally doesn’t need an Act 250 permit, so the regional plan doesn’t apply to it. The commission’s own example: five homes of any size, with driveways, would not trigger Act 250.

• Above 2,500 feet: Any construction needs a permit. In Rural Conservation, the plan says that land must stay mostly undeveloped.

• Land already under an Act 250 permit: A significant change can require a permit amendment regardless of size.

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Dividing land into lots. A permit is needed for six or more new lots within five years in a town that doesn’t have both zoning and subdivision rules. In towns that have both, the threshold is 10 or more lots within five miles or the same Act 250 district in five years. Lots created by a spouse, parent or child can count toward the total.

• The 80% rule: The original draft required subdivisions of Rural Conservation parcels over 30 acres to leave at least 80% of the land undeveloped. Staff proposes dropping that requirement. For projects on lots over 50 acres, it would instead require reasonable efforts to build near forest edges, existing development and roads.

• The 10-building cap: Subdivisions in Rural Conservation could still contain no more than 10 main buildings. Staff proposes keeping that rule.

Building several homes. A permit is generally needed for 10 or more housing units within five miles in five years. The commission’s handout and FAQ say a landowner can build up to five units without Act 250, which is true, but state law and the Land Use Review Board’s rules put the trigger at 10.

• Homes per acre: The original draft limited projects off paved roads to one main building per two acres in Rural General and one per five acres in Rural Agriculture and Forestry. Staff proposes replacing those limits with a cap per project: 50 homes in Rural General, 25 in Rural Agriculture and Forestry.

• Paved-road access: The draft required these housing projects to have access onto paved roads. Staff proposes deleting that rule.

• Heating: The draft’s fossil-fuel heating ban applied to these homes. Staff proposes dropping it for homes.

• One acre of pavement and roofs: In Rural Conservation, a project could still cover no more than one acre with roofs, roads, driveways and parking. Staff proposes keeping that limit.

Starting a business. A permit is needed for commercial construction involving more than an acre of land in a town without both zoning and subdivision rules, or more than 10 acres in a town with both. The count covers all the land the project uses, not just the building.

• Farm businesses: Storing, selling or processing the farm’s own products is exempt. An exemption for qualifying farm events and farm stays takes effect July 1, 2027.

• Farm events: The original draft capped permitted farm businesses in Rural Agriculture and Forestry at 20 events a year. Staff proposes deleting that cap.

• EV chargers: The draft required chargers at new Act 250 developments. Staff proposes making that a recommendation.

• Truck traffic: The draft required businesses that generate daily truck traffic in rural areas to locate on paved roads next to growth areas. Staff proposes deleting that rule.

• Heating: For businesses requiring an Act 250 permit, staff proposes recommending alternatives to oil, propane or gas when those alternatives are cost-effective.

• Retail stores: Stores whose main business is retail would still be barred from Rural General and Rural Agriculture and Forestry. Staff proposes keeping those limits.

• What’s allowed in Rural Conservation: Only farming, forestry, homes, outdoor recreation, home businesses, farm businesses and conservation. Staff added the two business types to the original list.

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Leasing land for solar or a cell tower. These projects go through the Public Utility Commission instead of Act 250. The draft says solar farms larger than house scale, 15 kilowatts, “shall not be located” in Rural Conservation. It says cell towers can go there only if no other reasonable location or technology can meet coverage needs. The Public Utility Commission decides those applications under state law. It gives regional plans at least “due consideration” and, in some cases, “substantial deference,” according to the commission’s FAQ.

Who Should Decide

The commission reported 114 commenters across 27 towns. Submissions included 11 official letters from town bodies and a petition with 120 signatures, according to the commission’s own count. Much of the disagreement is about how far a regional plan should reach:

• Bridgewater’s selectboard noted that the town’s voters have rejected zoning three times. It asked that “must” and “shall” in the plan become “may,” turning requirements into recommendations. The commission’s reply pointed to its proposed revisions, which would do that for dozens of policies.

• Fairlee’s planning commission said the language reads as highly regulatory, and that people could reasonably see the regional commissions as a de facto county government. The commission answered that the Legislature deliberately built a system with separate state, regional and local layers, and that local zoning doesn’t take priority over the others.

The state’s Land Use Review Board, in its Aug. 6 preliminary review, questioned whether the plan’s mandatory rules infringe on landowners’ constitutional property rights without enough input from the people who own the land. It asked the commission to show that towns and residents support rules including the 10-building cap, the one-acre limit and the rural retail ban, or to make them recommendations. It called the one-acre limit arbitrary and potentially very limiting, and said the retail ban could rule out a general store. It also asked the commission to show that its rural rules won’t fall hardest on lower-income, older and rural residents.

The commission disputes that its draft infringes constitutional property rights. It said the state board “erred” in holding stricter policies to a different approval standard, and that it sees no basis for that standard in statute. In the commission’s view, a town’s support is expressed through the commissioner each town appoints to the board. The commission noted that the state board has already approved one regional plan with mandatory language, and that mandatory language in past Two Rivers plans has held up in court.

The process itself drew objections. In August, the commission acknowledged that it violated Vermont’s open meeting law in March by voting on a land-use change without allowing public comment, the White River Valley Herald reported. That March vote had softened a rule: new year-round buildings in certain interior forest areas went from “shall not” to “should not.” The board voted again after allowing public comment, and adopted a rule requiring an opportunity for public comment on agenda items.

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What Happens Next

The board’s next scheduled meeting is Sept. 30. Once the board settles the revisions, the commission will post a second draft at least 30 days before a final hearing and notify every town.

Every regional commission must have an adopted plan under Act 181 by Dec. 31, 2026, according to the Land Use Review Board. The Two Rivers commission told Fairlee’s planning commission that an extension doesn’t appear possible, and that it is still researching how the deadline affects the plan. After the commission adopts the plan, the Land Use Review Board decides whether to approve it. An adopted plan runs eight years.

Corinth’s selectboard asked the commission to state as plainly as possible what the plan does and doesn’t require of landowners. The commission said it will clarify how its policies apply through Act 250 and explain what triggers that review.

CHECK YOUR LAND (TWO RIVERS TOWNS)

Is your town in Two Rivers? Barnard, Bethel, Bradford, Braintree, Bridgewater, Brookfield, Chelsea, Corinth, Fairlee, Granville, Hancock, Hartford, Hartland, Newbury, Norwich, Pittsfield, Plymouth, Pomfret, Randolph, Rochester, Royalton, Sharon, Stockbridge, Strafford, Thetford, Topsham, Tunbridge, Vershire, West Fairlee and Woodstock. Other regions are redrawing their maps under the same law, and the statewide map shows all of them.

Find your property’s category: Open the draft map and type your address in the search box at the upper right. To see how your parcel changes, use the old-versus-new comparison tool, which shows percentages by parcel.

Would your project need Act 250? Start with the state’s jurisdiction list. If your land already has an Act 250 permit, or you’re unsure, ask your district coordinator for a written jurisdictional opinion through act250.vermont.gov. It’s the only definite answer.

Think your land is mapped wrong? The commission takes correction requests based on conditions on the ground until the plan is adopted. After adoption, a minor change, which can include one involving fewer than 10 acres, needs a yes vote from your selectboard and the commission board. The request then goes to the Land Use Review Board for a decision, and it doesn’t require amending the whole plan. Contact TRORC at regionalplan@trorc.org, 802-457-3188, or 128 King Farm Road, Woodstock, VT 05091.

Comment on the second draft: It will be posted on the commission’s regional plan page at least 30 days before the final hearing. Send comments to regionalplan@trorc.org.

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At the bottom: how to find the Westmore case in the state’s filing system, the 30-day deadline to weigh in on a new tower, and who gets notified when antennas are added to an existing one.

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On Sept. 4, the Vermont Supreme Court upheld the state permit for a 140-foot telecommunications tower near Lake Willoughby. The Westmore residents who have fought the tower for more than two years asked the court last week to take another look, VTDigger reported. They want to protect the setting of a lake that has been a National Natural Landmark since 1967.

The case for the tower rests on communications in a place where they often fail. The ambulance squad that covers Westmore has committed to putting its radio antenna at the top. The tower is also built to hold cell phone equipment, though no cell carrier has signed on.

A Place Where Signals Fail

Cell service along the lake is poor, and neither side disputes it.

• In July, a hiker dropped a phone off a cliff on Mount Pisgah, triggering an automatic crash alert and a response from more than a dozen emergency agencies. The hiker didn’t know the alert had gone out because there was no cell service, WCAX reported.

• Business owners near the lake told WCAX that customers often complain about the lack of cell service and ask to use their Wi-Fi.

• Ray Lanier, who has owned a home on the lake for 34 years and opposes the tower, told Seven Days he gets no cell service at his house.

In 2025, Vermonters made 233,237 calls to 911. Of those, 181,069 came from cell phones, about 77 percent, according to the state’s Enhanced 911 Board. In places without cellular coverage, those calls can’t be made over the cell network.

What the Tower Is Committed to Carry

The Glover ambulance squad committed in a February 2024 letter to putting its antenna at the top of the tower, and the owner agreed to charge no rent, according to the owner’s federal court filing. The squad told WCAX it encourages any new commercial tower to make room for public safety communications.

Gaps in responder radio are a statewide problem. In a January report, Vermont’s Public Safety Communications Task Force found that fire and EMS radio networks “do not provide sufficient coverage” and “place public safety responders and the communities they serve at great risk.” It said many fall “well short” of the standard of covering 95 percent of their service area. The task force’s plan for a statewide responder network would rely almost entirely on existing towers. In Westmore, the hearing officer found no existing facility could meet ITW’s coverage objectives.

The tower’s owner, Massachusetts-based Industrial Tower and Wireless, also sells two-way radio by subscription. It’s push-to-talk radio for businesses and agencies, licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, and it is not cell phone service. The Public Utility Commission’s final order approves the tower for “wireless mobile radio service to first responders in the area and to the Petitioner’s own wireless commercial mobile radio service customers.”

Where Cell Service Comes In

The tower has room for cell carriers, the companies that sell phone service, like AT&T and Verizon. Renting space on one tower to several companies is called collocation, and it’s state policy because it means fewer towers. The Public Utility Commission noted that “the new tower will include adequate space for future collocation opportunities.”

The owner, known as ITW, told a federal court in 2024 that the carriers it approached had “deferred their decision until ITW obtains” a state permit. No carrier has signed on in the public record. That leaves a loop at the center of the dispute: without a permit, carriers won’t commit, while opponents cite the lack of a carrier commitment as evidence that the tower’s cellular benefit is speculative. Hunter Thompson, the state’s telecommunications director, told Seven Days last year there’s “no guarantee” carriers will come. “I can completely understand the frustration of the residents of Westmore, but that is the value proposition,” he said.

If a carrier does sign on, how far its coverage reaches will depend on its equipment and the terrain. State and federal law give streamlined review to certain antennas added to an existing tower (details at the bottom).

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What Residents Want Protected

For opponents, the loss is the view. “The views of the gap are going to be marred forever,” Donna Dzugas-Smith, who leads the opposition, told Seven Days, referring to the cliffs at the lake’s south end. “This is the Lake Lucerne of North America!” Lanier said.

The state agreed the tower will change the setting. The hearing officer found it “will not fit within the context of the wooded area.” He ruled that the effect on the scenery wasn’t severe enough to deny a permit, because trees and terrain hide most of the tower and most public views are more than a mile away. The Public Utility Commission adopted that finding, and the Supreme Court upheld it.

The residents also say the process is hard on ordinary people, and the state doesn’t entirely disagree. Michael Swain, special counsel to the Department of Public Service, told VTDigger earlier this year that the process has formalities that “may make participation as a party to a proceeding challenging for non-lawyers.” This year the Legislature, in Act 129, added a required public meeting in town before a developer files for a larger tower project.

Supporters see the trade differently. The landowner, Peter Hyslop, who leases the site to ITW, told Seven Days that better emergency response and the prospect of cell coverage outweigh the downsides. “I feel it’s going to be a very, very minimal impact,” he said.

“This isn’t over,” Dzugas-Smith told VTDigger. If the tower is built, the Glover ambulance antenna goes on top. Whether cell service follows along Route 5A depends on whether a carrier signs on.

How to Check on a Tower Near You

• Look up a case. The Public Utility Commission posts every tower application in its online filing system, ePUC. Search by town. The Westmore tower is case 24-1755-PET.

• Before a developer files. Act 129 requires a warned town meeting before the application is filed. The applicant must attend, and the Department of Public Service attends if the town requests it. The requirement doesn’t apply to minor changes to existing towers or to smaller projects, such as new towers no taller than 140 feet that meet the state’s size limits.

• After a developer files. Comments, requests to join the case as a party and requests for a hearing are due within 30 days of when the application is served. The Public Utility Commission does not consider anything filed late, including from the town.

• When antennas are added to an existing tower. For additions that qualify as minor changes (the law’s term is “de minimis”), notice goes to the landowner, the selectboard and the Department of Public Service. Only those three may object to that classification, within 30 days.

• The full process. The Public Utility Commission’s citizen’s guide walks through it.

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At the bottom: how to find the town list on the federal record, track the federal money and read the company’s books.

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A home generator keeps one house running when the power goes out. Now imagine the utility bringing that kind of backup to a cluster of homes: a trailer full of batteries that could keep the lights on while crews repair a storm-damaged power line.

That is the idea behind a Vermont project involving Green Mountain Power and Waterbury-born NOMAD. When the project was announced in 2023, GMP and the company said each unit would be capable of powering about 50 homes for 10 hours. NOMAD announced Aug. 26 that the U.S. Department of Energy had cleared the roughly $19 million project to enter construction, with up to eight units expected at five sites in GMP territory.

You would not necessarily have to live near one to benefit. When the batteries are not needed for an outage, GMP can use their stored electricity during periods of high demand, reducing how much expensive power it buys. GMP says savings from its broader battery network benefit all its customers. A GMP customer in Williamstown could share that cost benefit even if a trailer were stationed in Barre.

The outage protection is more specific: which homes stay powered depends on where GMP connects a battery, the condition of the local lines and how much electricity those homes need. The project offers a way to provide backup to groups of homes; it does not guarantee coverage for every household in a participating town.

The August announcement does not name the sites. A 2024 federal record does: Newbury, Pownal, Barre, Bennington and St. Johnsbury.

What It Is

The mobile battery does two jobs, and unlike a battery bolted to a pad it moves — a fairground in July, a village in December, possibly another county the night your town goes dark.

• Backup when the power fails. When a line goes down, the battery can keep a small section of grid running while crews repair it.

• Savings on the days power costs the most. During periods of high demand, such as heat waves and cold snaps, GMP can use stored electricity to reduce how much power it buys at high prices. In 2023, GMP reported that its battery network saved customers up to $3 million a year during those peaks.

What It Looks Like

GMP has already done this once. During a scheduled six-hour shutdown in Essex in 2023, utility engineers calculated the power the Twincraft Skincare plant needed, then used a NOMAD battery to run a small section of line so the plant kept working while crews worked around it.

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Here is how it could work in one of the five towns. Freezing rain brings a limb down across the line into a village center at suppertime, and everyone downstream normally waits in the dark until a bucket truck gets up an iced road. With a battery parked nearby, GMP would cut an undamaged stretch of circuit off from the rest of the line and let the battery carry it while the crew works the dead section. A cluster of homes, or the fire station, could stay on. Ten hours covers a lot of overnight repairs, though not a multi-day outage without a recharge.

The 2023 plan also called for EV charging in each unit, so residents could charge cars during an outage. The August announcement does not say whether that is still in it.

Where the Town Names Come From

The five names come from DOE’s environmental review record, signed in May 2024 under DE-OE0000952, the award number the August announcement cites. It lists St. Johnsbury as the primary project location and names GMP as a subrecipient, meaning the utility gets part of the federal award for its share of the work. The announcement does not say whether those five locations are still the sites.

The record says only “Barre, VT,” without saying whether that means Barre City or Barre Town, which are separate municipalities.

All five were picked as Justice40 communities, a federal policy that aimed to send 40 percent of the benefits of certain clean-energy investments to places a federal screening tool scored as disadvantaged on income, energy costs and climate risk. The Trump administration ended Justice40 in January 2025; the project continued.

Who Builds Them

Waterbury is still home to NOMAD’s engineering staff and the center that monitors every unit it has deployed. The filing lists 18 full-time employees, with plans for about 25 by year’s end.

Where the units get put together is less clear. The filing says a contract manufacturer, CMP Advanced Mechanical Solutions, assembles NOMAD’s systems in Montreal and Binghamton, N.Y. NOMAD’s website still says its systems are “Engineered and built in Vermont.”

The Company Behind the Project

On July 1, NOMAD was bought through a merger by LIXTE Biotechnology Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed cancer-drug company in Boca Raton, Florida. The combined company renamed itself NOMAD Power Solutions, kept the Florida headquarters and now pitches its batteries to utilities and AI data centers.

The merger required NOMAD to file its own books with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and those arrived last week: audited 2025 figures, unaudited ones for early 2026.

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• Sales quadrupled in 2025, to $9.4 million from $2.3 million.

• Sales then dropped sharply. NOMAD took in $621,000 in the first six months of 2026, against $6.6 million in the same months of 2025 — nine cents for every dollar a year earlier. The filing does not say why.

• Customers have paid in advance. NOMAD reported $8.8 million in deferred revenue on June 30 — payments received for contractual obligations it had not yet completed.

• It was nearly out of cash. NOMAD had $170,000 on hand June 30, the day before the merger closed, and $156,000 at the end of 2025 — less than the $225,000 a Vermont electrical supplier sued it over in December for unpaid invoices. The filing says the supplier filed a satisfaction of judgment in August, stating the debt was paid.

• The merger brought in $16.5 million, some of it used to pay off loans carrying 15 percent interest.

One number needs clarification. NOMAD reports a net loss of $153.6 million for the first half of 2026, startling for a company this size. About $148.6 million of it — nearly 97 percent — came from non-cash accounting charges tied to warrants, which give investors the right to buy stock at a set price. Its operating loss was $2.9 million, and its operations used $1.7 million in cash.

NOMAD’s accountants attached a going-concern warning to the 2025 statements, the flag raised when there is substantial doubt a company can keep operating another year. The company says its cash and customer payments should carry it through 2026, that it will need more money by then, and that it has no committed source yet.

The corporate reshuffle is not finished. A stockholder vote on converting the merger’s preferred shares into common stock was adjourned Sept. 4 without any business conducted and reconvenes Oct. 2, to give the company time to finish its Nasdaq listing application.

How the Federal Money Flows

The $9.5 million is not a check up front. It is a cooperative agreement, which reimburses eligible costs after they are spent and submitted, covering about half the project. The other half is a non-federal share, and the filings and federal records reviewed for this story do not spell out how it is split.

As of this week, the federal spending database showed $3.68 million paid out, about 39 cents of every federal dollar committed. The agreement is currently scheduled to end Sept. 3, 2027.

Eight trailers will not storm-proof Vermont. But this is a demonstration project, and if these get built, five towns find out whether a battery that can be driven where it's needed beats one bolted down where it isn't — and the rest of the state gets the answer without paying for it.

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Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark’s office is prosecuting protesters cited at a July 24 sit-in at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement surveillance center in Williston. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George declined to charge protesters from two earlier sit-ins at the same building.

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A spokesperson for Clark confirmed Tuesday that all 13 people cited in July will be prosecuted, and they are due in court Thursday, Sept. 24, on misdemeanor unlawful trespass, Seven Days reported. State Police have started sending these cases to the attorney general instead of to George, according to the same report.

The State Police count has varied. One version of the department’s July 24 release listed 12 adults and one juvenile. Another listed 13 adults.

Can someone else prosecute a case the county prosecutor won’t? Under Vermont law, yes, and it has happened before, including to George.

Two Offices, the Same Power

Most criminal cases in Vermont are handled by the elected state’s attorney in each county. But 3 V.S.A. § 152 gives the attorney general the same authority anywhere in Vermont as a state’s attorney. Lawyers call this concurrent jurisdiction. In plain English, either office can file the same case, and neither one needs the other’s permission.

So a state’s attorney’s decision not to prosecute doesn’t bind the attorney general.

How the Cases Ended Up With the Attorney General

The route around George took shape over the spring:

• February. State Police arrested 11 people and cited two more on Feb. 9 after they refused to leave the White Cap Business Park building that houses ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center. George declined all 13 cases. Her letters said prosecuting them “would not serve the ends of justice or the best interests of the residents of Chittenden County,” Vermont Public reported. She noted that most had little or no criminal history, several were elderly, and all were nonviolent.

• April. George declined to charge six people arrested March 11 while protesting an ICE raid in South Burlington. She referred three of the cases to the Burlington Community Justice Center for a restorative process instead of court. At a press conference later that month with Gov. Phil Scott, Public Safety Commissioner Jennifer Morrison, who oversees the State Police, said, “I understand now clearly that she is an activist first and a prosecutor second,” the Boston Globe reported. “We follow the rule of law.”

• May arrests. Police arrested four more protesters at the Williston building on May 14. George later declined those cases too, saying she would not spend her office’s limited resources on them. Her letters noted that Morrison planned to send such cases to the attorney general. “We invite her to do so if she disagrees with our decision,” George wrote, the Rutland Herald reported.

The July cases went to the attorney general. Clark’s office has a policy against discussing pending cases. George told Seven Days she could not comment on the attorney general’s decision until after the arraignment.

It Has Happened Before, Including to George

In December 1978, a state trooper arrested a driver in Windsor County for drunken driving. In January 1979, Windsor County State’s Attorney Michael Sheehan decided not to prosecute. Attorney General Jerome Diamond met with the trooper, other State Police and a member of the governor’s office, then asked Sheehan to reconsider. When Sheehan said no again, Diamond filed the charges himself. Sheehan sued to stop him. The Vermont Supreme Court ruled against Sheehan, holding that the two offices share equal authority to bring criminal cases. By declining, the court said, the state’s attorney “did not preempt the field — he withdrew from it.”

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In 2019, George dismissed three murder and attempted-murder cases because she said she could not rebut the defendants’ insanity defenses. Scott asked then-Attorney General T.J. Donovan to review them. Donovan refiled the first in September 2019 and eventually refiled all three. George publicly called his reasoning “disingenuous and hypocritical.” A jury convicted one of the three, Aita Gurung, in 2022. In 2025 the Vermont Supreme Court upheld the conviction and the attorney general’s authority to refile.

What’s different this time is the order of events. In 1979 and 2019, the attorney general stepped in after a county prosecutor had reviewed the specific case and said no. This time, the police sent the July cases straight to the attorney general.

What the Protesters Face

Vermont’s trespass law sets different penalties for different kinds of trespass:

• Staying after being told to leave. Entering or staying somewhere without permission after being told to leave carries up to three months in jail, a $500 fine, or both.

• Entering a locked building. Entering a nonresidential building that is normally kept locked carries up to one year in jail, a $500 fine, or both.

The specific charges will be read at Thursday’s arraignment, the first court appearance, where each person enters a plea.

If You’re Cited at a Protest in Vermont

• Two offices can charge you. Either the county state’s attorney or the attorney general can file the case. A decision not to prosecute by one office doesn’t bind the other, or a future state’s attorney.

• A citation doesn’t guarantee a prosecution. A prosecutor still decides whether to pursue the case. For prosecution deadlines, though, Vermont law counts an arrest without a warrant or the issuing of a citation as the start of the prosecution.

Seven clergy members were arrested at the same building Sept. 4 and cited for unlawful trespass, with a court date of Oct. 20. The group now calls itself the Clergy 7, and its members have said they will keep demonstrating. Where their cases go may show whether sending protest cases to the attorney general is becoming routine.

Want to know whether your own town runs plate reader cameras, what its contract costs, and what happens to a photo of your plate? Skip to the box at the bottom.

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Vermont towns, cities and state agencies will be barred from using license plate reading cameras starting July 1, 2027, unless lawmakers change the law, the Agency of Transportation says.

The provision is one sentence. Section 1609 of Title 23 says that “no State agency or department or any political subdivision of the State shall use automated license plate recognition systems or automated traffic law enforcement systems.” An automated license plate recognition system, usually shortened to ALPR, is a camera that photographs passing plates and turns them into searchable computer records. An automated traffic law enforcement system is a camera that mails out speeding tickets.

Vermont’s current plate reader rules are repealed and the ban takes their place on July 1, 2027. An earlier date, July 2, 2025, would have applied if the Agency of Transportation had been “unable to secure federal funding” by June 30, 2025 for a pilot program testing speed cameras in highway work zones. The Legislature’s website still lists both dates.

The Agency of Transportation told Compass the funding was approved, so the later date governs.

“Federal funds through the Highway Safety Program had been approved for use on a pilot program as authorized by Act 135,” said Patrick Murphy, the agency’s State Policy Director. About $1 million was estimated for the program before the June 2025 deadline, he said, though the agency said it is unclear whether an exact amount was ever obligated. There is no precise figure.

“The Agency’s position is that the law has therefore not been repealed but will be repealed in 2027, absent any additional legislative action otherwise,” Patrick Murphy said.

The work zone pilot itself never happened, and never had to for the 2027 date to hold. “Logistical, staffing, and long-term financial challenges have made it difficult for the Agency, in concert with the Department of Public Safety, to establish an operational pilot within the framework outlined by the Legislature,” Patrick Murphy said. The federal money has since gone to other projects, and no speed camera has ever operated in a Vermont work zone. Compass reported a year ago that the work zone pilot was stalled and that other states had solved the same problems.

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What the rules are until then

Until July 2027, Vermont’s current plate reader rules still apply. Under Section 1607, the law requires that:

• Cameras be operated by officers holding plate reader certification from the Vermont Criminal Justice Council.

• Local police have access to the most recent week of camera data, with older records held by the Department of Public Safety.

• Requests for records less than six months old be in writing and show specific facts and reasonable grounds.

• Records older than six months be released only on a warrant or a court order in a pending criminal case.

• Records be destroyed after 18 months, unless held longer under a preservation request, a disclosure order or a warrant.

• The data stay out of private lawsuits. It cannot be subpoenaed in a divorce or an insurance fight.

Those are the requirements the law sets. Whether any particular record was transferred or destroyed on schedule is a separate question, and one the statute alone cannot answer.

Section 1607 governs Vermont law enforcement, and Section 1609’s prohibition reaches state agencies and political subdivisions. Neither section restricts a business or a property owner who puts up a camera for their own purposes. The prohibition follows who is using the system, not who owns it, so a town that buys a private company’s cameras is still a town using them.

What the state’s own cameras did

Vermont’s regulated plate reader program had nearly disappeared before Flock arrived. The Department of Public Safety’s 2021 annual report counted one mobile unit in the entire state, operated by the Essex County Sheriff’s Department. It submitted 2,959 plate readings that year, about eight a day, and generated 16 alerts. None of the 16 led to an enforcement action. The report lists no requests for stored readings from any agency in or out of Vermont. The year cost $7,700, all of it State Police spending to run the server.

The report is not internally consistent. Its main text says the Department of Motor Vehicles no longer uses plate readers and sent no data to the state database, while a footnote says DMV “did report three alerts which resulted commercial motor vehicle enforcement.” The report does not reconcile the two.

Section 1607 requires that report every January 15, and the amended reporting provision took effect July 1, 2025. The 2021 report is the most recent one Compass could locate on the Legislature’s website.

Manchester, the one Vermont town that bought in

Manchester installed five Flock Safety cameras in 2023, stopped using the system in 2025 when the current rules took effect, and is using it again now. The town pays $15,000 for the current contract year, which runs through March 2027, or about $41 a day, the Bennington Banner reported in August.

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The 2025 stoppage came down to a practical problem. The law tells towns to hand older camera records to the state, and Town Manager Scott Murphy told the Banner then that the state “didn’t set up any method to take it in.” He said the town was not using the system until the question was cleared up.

Manchester later asked the state where it stood and was told its use complied with the law, because of how the information was stored and because the hardware in Manchester was not the use the law was written to address, VTDigger reported in June from emails it obtained. The same reporting, which describes the town’s officers as having paused their searches, found that data from Manchester’s cameras was included in searches run by law enforcement agencies around the country until March, when the town changed its settings to end that.

The selectboard took up the cameras’ future on Aug. 18 and tabled it. Members plan to visit the police station to see the technology and look at less invasive options, with any decision left to fall budget season.

Police there describe the cameras as an investigative tool. “My focus is less on the company itself and more on how we use the technology here in Manchester,” Police Chief James Blanchard told the Banner. Scott Murphy, the town manager, put the case for keeping them bluntly: “We don’t want to turn into a Brown University shooting. That is how that person was caught.”

Selectboard member Jonathan West said the product has changed since the town signed on. “What began as a very straightforward license plate reading tool has evolved into a much larger, cloud-based network,” he said.

The unresolved question of out-of-state searches

Vermont police reach plate data the state does not collect. VTDigger reported in June that Vermont departments search Flock’s national network of more than 80,000 cameras through NESPIN, the New England State Police Information Network, a police information-sharing nonprofit, and that Vermont officers ran more than 100 such searches over three years.

Whether the 2027 ban reaches that practice is an open question. Section 1609 bars state agencies and towns from using plate reader systems, and says nothing one way or the other about systems that sit outside Vermont. Nothing in the record settles whether searching another state’s cameras counts as using a system under the ban.

Police say the access matters. Berlin Police Chief James Pontbriand called it “a very important tool to law enforcement” that “might open up doors to us that we would never have been able to get to ourselves.” Hartford Police Chief Connie Kelley said her department turns to it for “significant crimes,” adding, “you save one child, that’s enough for us.”

Others see the reach itself as the problem. “I don’t think we should have to expect that we are tracked in every single one of our movements along public roadways,” ACLU of Vermont advocacy director Falko Schilling told VTDigger. Rep. Barbara Rachelson, who helped write Vermont’s first plate reader law in 2013, said the out-of-state searching is “concerning on so many fronts that I would want to see legislation to be explicit about these situations.”

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The national fight

Flock Safety, the Atlanta company that made the cameras Manchester bought, has become the subject of town meeting fights across the country. It has also started losing customers. NPR reported in February that at least 30 American localities had deactivated cameras or canceled Flock contracts since the start of 2025, many after learning that federal immigration agents had searched their local camera data. Flock says each customer controls who can see its data.

Those fights are playing out town by town, in places where the decision belongs to the select board or the city council. In Vermont, the Legislature has already made it, and the date is on the calendar.

Four tries, no change

Moving the 2027 date takes an act of the Legislature, and four attempts have come and gone.

• H.500, from Rachelson, would have blocked the repeal and kept the current rules. It drew one committee hearing in April 2025 and went no further.

• S.35 would have deleted the repeal and the ban outright and made work zone speed cameras permanent. One hearing in May 2025, then nothing.

• S.263, from Sens. Andrew Perchlik and Thomas Chittenden, would have pushed the repeal to 2029 and let a town use traffic cameras for speeding, red lights and excessive vehicle noise if voters approved at town meeting, with the power to rescind that approval by petition and a later vote. Introduced in January 2026, it got a Senate Transportation hearing on Feb. 26 and stayed there.

• Draft language prepared for House Transportation on April 22, 2026, by Legislative Counsel Damien Leonard, would have pushed the sunset to 2029 during work on S.326, the annual motor vehicle bill. S.326 became Act 153 on June 16. The extension is not in it.

Lawmakers return in January with about six months before the ban takes effect. Vermont Public reported last December that Burlington was weighing plate readers of its own, and raised the question of what Section 1609 would mean for a city that bought them. The agency that would have run the pilot has now given its answer on the date: the clock runs out July 1, 2027.

Check your own town

Does your town run plate reader cameras?

• Search your select board or city council minutes for “Flock,” “license plate” or “ALPR.” Most Vermont towns post minutes on their municipal website, and camera contracts generally surface in budget discussions.

• Ask your police department, in a public records request, for any plate reader contract, its annual cost and term, the department’s operating policy, and any data-sharing agreements, including whether the department can search camera networks outside Vermont such as NESPIN. Ask that last question even if your town owns no cameras, because access does not require owning one.

• Read the state’s own accounting. Section 1607 requires the Department of Public Safety to report to four legislative committees every January 15 on camera counts, readings, alerts, investigations aided and costs. The most recent one Compass could locate covers 2021.

What if a camera photographed your plate? If it was a camera a Vermont police department uses, the law puts older records with the Department of Public Safety, requires a warrant or court order for anything more than six months old, and calls for destruction after 18 months unless a preservation request, disclosure order or warrant extends it. A camera a business or property owner runs for their own purposes is outside those police rules, and the 2027 ban, which applies to government use, will not change that.

If your family gets Medicaid-funded developmental or mental health services and those services were cut, reduced or suspended, the bottom of this story explains the notice you should have received and who can tell you whether you can still appeal.

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Update, Sept. 23: The Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living responded after publication. Its answers are below.

ANALYSIS

Health Care & Rehabilitation Services of Southeastern Vermont settled a Medicaid case with the State last week, agreeing to pay $391,816, the Attorney General’s Office announced. Since spring, HCRS has also been managing United Counseling Service in Bennington, an agency that settled its own Medicaid case with the same state office in March. The two agencies’ boards are now exploring whether HCRS should take UCS over.

HCRS and UCS are two of Vermont’s ten designated agencies: private nonprofits the State contracts with, one per region, to deliver mental health, substance use and developmental disability services. HCRS covers Windham and Windsor counties. UCS covers Bennington County.

HCRS chief executive Anne Bilodeau is also serving as UCS’s interim chief administrative officer, and HCRS’s chief financial officer, Sarah Truckle, is UCS’s interim deputy administrative officer, according to the Bennington Banner, which reported the arrangement in August. Both boards passed resolutions to explore an acquisition. Bilodeau said the exploration began in earnest in late July and that such discussions generally take three to four months, with another four to six months of legal work after a vote.

UCS’s board has described the arrangement as a way to strengthen the agency’s stability and services. Bilodeau told the Bennington Banner that officials from the Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living and the Department of Mental Health will be fully involved in acquisition discussions, and that state officials have met with both boards. Bilodeau became HCRS’s chief executive on April 1, 2026. Truckle joined HCRS in September 2025, after the period covered by last week’s settlement.

What the State says now

The settlement agreement carries a matter number from 2024. The Attorney General’s Office has not said when the investigation opened.

Compass asked HCRS when it first learned of the investigation and whether it disclosed the investigation to the State, UCS’s board or UCS staff when it took on management of UCS. HCRS responded with a statement that did not address either question.

The Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living referred HCRS to the Medicaid Fraud and Residential Abuse Unit in May 2024, the department said — nearly two years before HCRS took on management of UCS.

DAIL said the HCRS matter involved understanding and interpreting the state’s previous payment model for developmental services — the system that set individual client budgets and governed what agencies had to return — and was “not related to the health, safety or quality of direct services provided to individuals.” That payment model was replaced on Oct. 1, 2025. DAIL said the returned-funding problem in the settlement cannot arise under the new one.

Asked whether it weighed the investigation before approving the UCS arrangement, DAIL said it was aware that the HCRS matter concerned the old payment model, noted that HCRS has since installed a new chief executive, chief financial officer and developmental disabilities services director, and said that “as with any matter involving DAIL’s approval, the Department considers all available and relevant information prior to making its decision.”

DAIL did not say how many HCRS clients were affected, or whether HCRS must contact those who never received required notices. It referred both questions to the Medicaid Fraud and Residential Abuse Unit.

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What HCRS settled

The State alleged three things between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2024:

• HCRS kept Medicaid money it was required to return when a client’s services ended or a client’s budget was cut soon after new funding arrived.

• HCRS made significant changes to clients’ budgets or services without documenting that the services were medically necessary.

• HCRS failed to send clients required notices when their services were reduced or suspended, and didn’t document that it told clients or caregivers about significant changes.

Of the $391,816, $301,397 is restitution, money paid back to the Medicaid program. The rest is damages and penalties. Half is due within 30 days of the agreement’s effective date and the rest within six months. For scale, HCRS took in roughly $175.8 million agencywide over the three fiscal years the settlement covers, according to the agency’s Form 990 filings — the settlement is about two-tenths of one percent of that, or roughly $357 a day.

HCRS does not dispute the facts as the State describes them. In the agreement, HCRS says additional facts would show it lacked the required intent, or that any misconduct was a mistake, and it denies breaking any state or federal law. In its statement to Compass, HCRS said the problems were in its Developmental Services program and “date back to the COVID-19 pandemic,” when service delivery changed rapidly. The period covered by the settlement runs from July 2021 through June 2024. HCRS said it began working cooperatively with the Attorney General’s Office and state regulators once concerns were raised, and “took immediate action to improve compliance, reporting, and quality across multiple areas.”

What the notices do

When a Medicaid recipient’s services are cut, suspended, denied or reduced, the recipient is supposed to receive a written Notice of Adverse Benefit Determination. That notice is not a courtesy letter. Under Vermont Medicaid’s provider rules, it is what tells a recipient a decision has been made and that it can be challenged, and it sets the deadline for doing so.

When an agency doesn’t send that notice, a client may never learn a decision was made or that there was anything to contest. Whether a particular person can still appeal depends on their own circumstances, and the Office of the Health Care Advocate can tell them where they stand.

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The settlement’s corrective requirements look forward: write policies, keep records, send notices from now on. The agreement does not require HCRS to find past clients who never received a notice or to reopen any past decision. Compass asked HCRS whether it has contacted those clients. The statement didn’t say.

Neither the settlement nor the Attorney General’s announcement says how many clients were affected. The agreement describes the conduct as happening “in certain cases” and, twice, “on numerous occasions.”

Where the kept money was supposed to go

When a client’s services end, unspent money is supposed to go back to the State’s Equity/Public Safety fund. It doesn’t get redistributed automatically. An agency has to apply on behalf of a named person, and an Equity Funding Committee reviews the request before the State decides. The committee meets monthly.

The State has a name for money agencies send back: Returned Caseload Funding. Money that isn’t returned reduces what’s available to reallocate to other people who need it.

At least four settlements in under three years

HCRS is the fourth organization in Vermont’s network of designated and specialized service agencies to settle with the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud and Residential Abuse Unit since late 2023. The Attorney General’s Office announced all four:

• Green Mountain Support Services, Morrisville, December 2023 — $459,190, with $75,000 suspendable if the agency met the settlement’s cooperation terms, for billing for services not delivered. The State brought in Champlain Community Services to oversee the agency. Green Mountain Support Services is a specialized service agency rather than one of the ten designated agencies.

• United Counseling Service, Bennington, March 2026 — $483,464, after the State found at least 10 cases of ongoing service and supervision failures that the Attorney General said created serious and preventable risks to service recipients and the public. The Bennington Banner reported in August that UCS remains on provisional designation, upgraded in June to provisional without intent to de-designate, with a state review again in December.

• Northeast Kingdom Human Services, May 2026 — $65,335, covering neglect of a vulnerable adult and overbilling the agency reported itself.

• HCRS, September 2026 — $391,816.

The HCRS and UCS investigations both began with referrals from the State’s disability department. In two of these cases, the State’s answer to a struggling agency was to bring in another agency’s leadership.

HCRS also settled an earlier case. In June 2021, it agreed to pay $170,037.76 after billing Medicaid for nearly a decade of work by an employee barred from federal health programs — a problem HCRS identified and reported itself, and for which the acting U.S. Attorney publicly credited the agency.

If Your Services Changed

When Medicaid-funded developmental, mental health or substance use services are denied, reduced, suspended or ended, you are supposed to receive a written Notice of Adverse Benefit Determination. That notice is what tells you a decision was made and how to challenge it.

If your services changed and you never received that notice, the Office of the Health Care Advocate at Vermont Legal Aid can tell you where you stand and which deadlines apply to your situation. The help is free: 800-917-7787.

To report suspected Medicaid fraud, the Attorney General’s online reporting form takes complaints. The form notes that submissions may become public record.

At the bottom: where to check which trails are open, and the seven alternative hikes the state recommends in place of Elmore and Spruce.

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Hikers heading up Elmore Mountain or Spruce Mountain for the foliage this fall won’t get the view from the top. Both fire towers are expected to stay closed through October for safety repairs, the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation announced Tuesday.

The trails close for shorter stretches. Helicopters will fly materials and equipment to each summit when the work starts and back down when it ends. Trails, tower areas and parking areas will close during those flights, starting in late September. Some trails and parking areas will reopen after a few days.

On Spruce Mountain in Plainfield, the 360-degree view comes from the tower. Trail Finder lists it as the payoff of the climb. Elmore has a lower lookout. The Fire Tower Trail passes the site of the old fire watcher’s cabin, which has a scenic viewpoint of its own. Whether hikers can reach it depends on which trails are open.

The work on both towers includes:

• Fencing in key areas around the towers

• Metal grating in place of the wooden stair treads, which the department says is safer and lasts longer

• A fresh coat of paint on all the metal

• Grounding to improve protection against lightning strikes

The project continues a restoration effort the department began in 2025. That year it announced $450,000 from the U.S. Economic Development Administration for repairs to the Bear Hill tower in Allis State Park and the Burke Mountain tower. It also announced $60,000 from the federal Recreational Trails Program for safety railings on five towers: Spruce, Elmore, Okemo, Bald Mountain and Mt. Olga.

This year’s work is paid for with a match from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a National Park Service program that pays up to half of a project’s eligible costs. The state’s share comes through the Capital Construction Act and the Lands and Facilities Trust Fund. The department’s announcement does not say what this round costs.

Vermont’s fire towers were built to watch for wildfires when much of the state had been cleared for farming and the woods that remained were full of dry, dead trees. Today the remaining towers are hiking destinations.

Before you go: Elmore and Spruce closures

• Check which trails are open: Trail Finder’s Elmore State Park and Spruce Mountain pages, plus any notices posted at the trailheads

• Timing: Closures start in late September. Some trails and parking areas reopen after a few days. Both towers are expected to stay closed through October.

• Instead of Spruce Mountain: Owls Head or Silver Ledge in Groton; Little Deer or Devil’s Hill in Peacham

• Instead of Elmore Mountain: Belvidere Mountain in Lowell; Worcester Mountain in Worcester; Laraway Mountain in Belvidere/Johnson

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At the bottom of this story: where to take old tires now, what it costs, and when and where to drop them off at Wheels for Warmth, Oct. 29 and 30.

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September is Vermont River Cleanup Month. The Agency of Natural Resources marked it with Secretary Julie Moore joining Friends of the Winooski volunteers along the river in Montpelier, and cleanups are happening across the state throughout the month.

The volunteers keep finding the same thing: tires. The Connecticut River Conservancy’s annual Source to Sea Cleanup has logged 14,849 tires pulled from the river’s watershed across four states since 1999. Last year, one crew on the Black River in Springfield hauled out 17 tires and 15 and a half shopping carts.

Getting rid of a tire the legal way costs money. Vermont bans tires from landfills. Tire dealers typically charge $3 to $5 a tire to take them, according to the Department of Environmental Conservation, and transfer stations that accept tires charge a fee too. Fees vary. When Seven Days tracked Vermont’s tires in 2002, dealers charged $2 to $3.

How Big the Tire Problem Is

The state’s figures come from a presentation by Matt Chapman, director of ANR’s Waste Management and Prevention Division, to the House Environment Committee in January:

• Vermonters throw out an estimated 645,000 tires a year, roughly one per resident.

• A 2013 state report estimated 417,000 to 458,000 problem scrap tires in piles statewide. Chapman cited that estimate again in January. The presentation gave no updated count.

• Chapman’s presentation cited an industry estimate that 95% of scrap tires are legitimately managed.

• Vermont is “one of 14 states with no scrap tire management program.”

The Proposal Lawmakers Considered

H.204, sponsored by then-Rep. Chris Taylor, a Milton Republican, and Rep. Leanne Harple, a Glover Democrat, would have made tire makers responsible for old tires. The approach is called extended producer responsibility: the company that sells a product pays to take it back at the end of its life. Vermont already uses the same approach for electronics and mercury light bulbs.

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Under the bill:

• Dropping off old tires would have been free, at no fewer than two year-round sites in every county. Tire dealers, towns and licensed waste facilities could sign up as sites at no cost.

• Sites would have had to take up to 12 tires per visit, of any brand.

• In the first year, tire makers would have had to collect as many old tires as half the new ones they sold in Vermont the year before, or pay 50 cents to $1 for every tire they fell short. That money would go toward proper tire disposal, including clearing old piles.

• Tire makers would have had to propose a plan for clearing old piles, which could include paying property owners or bounties on tires turned in.

• At least half of collected tires would have had to be recycled or reused. Burning them for fuel wouldn’t count.

• Handing your tires to an unlicensed hauler would have counted as illegal dumping.

ANR’s testimony recommended changes: requiring certified haulers and facilities, moving registration of new tire makers to the organization running the program, and pushing the start dates back two years.

The committee also heard from the tire business. Mark Rochefort, owner of Vermont Tire; Sean Moore of the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association; Matt Cota of the Vermont Vehicle and Automotive Distributors Association; and Mitchell Jay, owner of Central Vermont AutoMart, testified in person. None posted written testimony. According to FYIVT’s account of the Feb. 4 hearing, industry groups opposed the bill. They argued that producer-pays programs focus on collecting tires rather than building markets for recycled rubber, and could bring added costs and unintended consequences. John Leddy of the Northwest Vermont Solid Waste Management District also testified; FYIVT reported that district managers described today’s collection system and the limited market for recycled tire rubber.

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The committee took up H.204 on six dates between April 2025 and a final work session on Feb. 10, 2026, but never sent it to the House floor. A Senate version, S.177, never got past being assigned to a committee. Both bills died when the two-year legislative session ended, so any tire program would need a new bill in January.

Who Would Pay

Today, you pay: $3 to $5 a tire at the dealer, or the transfer station’s fee. Under H.204, dropping off tires would have been free, and tire makers would have paid for collection and recycling. The bill does not establish what would happen to retail tire prices.

When the Vermont Daily Chronicle covered the bill in January, readers commenting on the story argued Vermonters would simply buy their tires in New Hampshire.

What Has Cut Litter Elsewhere

None of these efforts involved tires, and none shows how H.204 would have worked. They show what has moved littering behavior before.

A 2009 national study for Keep America Beautiful found 81% of the littering it observed was deliberate, and that people litter more where trash is already lying around.

Two campaigns and one law have measured results:

• Texas. The “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign aimed its ads at young men 16 to 24, the group researchers found did most of the littering. Roadside litter fell 72% between 1986 and 1990.

• Bottle deposits. State-funded studies in the 1970s and 1980s found drink-container litter fell 69% to 84% after deposit laws took effect, according to a group that advocates for them. Vermont passed its bottle bill in 1972.

• Nationally. Keep America Beautiful’s 2026 study found litter in waterways down 45% since 2020. The group counts beverage and packaging companies among its funders. In 2021, Greenpeace criticized an earlier Keep America Beautiful study for putting the focus on individuals rather than packaging.

Compass covered the sewage side of river pollution in April: We Know What Vermont Farms Contribute to Lake Pollution. What About the Sewers?

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Getting Rid of Old Tires

• When you buy new tires: the dealer will usually take your old ones, typically for $3 to $5 each. Fees vary.

• At a transfer station: many town and solid waste district sites take tires for a fee. Call your district or town first to check price and limits.

• Wheels for Warmth, Oct. 29 to 31: drop off tires Thursday and Friday, Oct. 29 and 30.

  • 2 to 6 p.m.:

    • Vermont Granite Museum, 7 Jones Bros. Way, Barre

    • Casella Waste Systems, 220 Avenue B, Williston

    • Casella Construction, 1385 US-7, Pittsford

  • 1 to 5 p.m.:

    • Stowe Events Field, 80 Weeks Hill, Stowe

    • Calkins Rock Products, 34 Calkins Dr., Lyndon

    • SEVCA, 91 Buck Dr., Westminster

  • Tires good enough to resell go on sale Saturday, Oct. 31, 8 a.m. to noon, in Barre and Pittsford. Tires that can’t be resold cost $5 each ($10 for truck tires) and are donated for farm use.

  • Proceeds pay for emergency heating help through Vermont’s community action agencies. Details from Capstone Community Action

• Don’t hand tires to someone offering to haul them cheap unless they’re a licensed hauler. Tires that disappear that way can end up dumped.

• More: Vermont DEC tire disposal page

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How to look up your own lake's health rating and what's been funded in your town — at the bottom of this story.

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The state has released two five-year cleanup plans covering most of northwestern Vermont, with public comment open through Oct. 29. Inside both, the Department of Environmental Conservation writes that it does not expect to meet its next phosphorus reduction target for runoff from roads and developed land, and is considering making up the difference in other sectors.

The Missisquoi Bay plan covers 24 towns from Swanton to Lowell. The Lamoille River plan runs from Greensboro to Milton, covering 34. Both are dated Sept. 18.

“Public participation is critical to the success of each tactical basin plan, helping us to advance Vermont’s clean water goals in ways that are also responsive to local needs,” DEC Commissioner Misty Sinsigalli said in announcing the drafts.

Phosphorus is the nutrient that feeds the blue-green algae blooms that close Vermont beaches in late summer; some of those cyanobacteria produce toxins, which is why the state posts advisories. Since 2016, a federal cleanup order — a “total maximum daily load,” or TMDL, essentially a pollution budget — has required roughly a one-third cut in the phosphorus reaching Lake Champlain from Vermont’s share of the watershed by 2036.

A quarter of the way, with more than half the clock gone

The Missisquoi plan’s reduction target totals 100,429 kilograms of phosphorus a year; the Lamoille’s, 17,234. As of state fiscal year 2025, Missisquoi reports achieving about 25 percent and the Lamoille about 26 percent. Excluding rivers, which both plans expect to take decades longer, the figures are 36 and 32 percent.

Ten of the twenty years are gone.

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A caveat belongs on every number in these plans: they are estimates of what projects should accomplish, calculated from modeled pollutant loads and expected efficiency rates, not measurements taken in the bay. They also mix reporting years — farm data runs through fiscal 2024 because 2025 reporting was incomplete, other sectors through 2025.

• Agriculture carries most of it in Missisquoi. Fields and pastures face an 82.8 percent reduction, the steepest demand in either plan. Farms have climbed from about 7 percent of that target in 2016 to roughly 45 percent as of fiscal 2024 — the largest single gain of any sector in the basin — though the figure slipped from a 2023 peak near 49 percent, and fiscal 2025 reporting is incomplete.

• Lamoille’s forests are past their number. Estimated reductions there have exceeded the sector’s numerical target since 2018, reaching 144 percent.

• Runoff lags in both. Developed-land work sits at about 7 percent of target in Missisquoi and, for stormwater specifically, 7.7 percent in the Lamoille, though Lamoille roads are further along at 23.3 percent.

That last category is not only a municipal obligation. It covers state highways owned by VTrans, municipal roads, regulated storm sewer systems, and private sites with three or more acres of impervious surface.

The sentence in both plans

Against a five-year target set in 2021, Missisquoi’s developed-land projects had delivered 522 kilograms a year — 20 percent of a 2,562-kilogram goal set for fiscal 2026. The Lamoille’s had delivered 697 of 1,650, or 42 percent. Both figures stop at fiscal 2025, a year short of the target year.

The plans say those figures may understate the work. DEC tracks grant-funded road upgrades but relies on towns to report work they fund themselves, and the Missisquoi draft warns “the Agency expects this could lead to its undercounting of phosphorous reductions.” It flags a second undercount: the credit for a road fix is an average across road slopes, and the next round of inventories targets steeper roads, where real reductions “may be higher than the previously assumed average.”

Then both plans say the same thing about what comes next. From the Missisquoi draft:

“Measured phosphorus reductions did not meet the recent five-year target. While the Agency believes that existing or new programs provide opportunities to increase phosphorous reduction trends, it does not expect to meet the next five-year target either. ... the Agency is considering opportunities to realize greater reductions in other sectors that will address the shortfall in Basin 6’s developed lands sector.”

The Lamoille plan says the same of its own non-regulatory developed-land projects.

Neither plan says which sectors would absorb the difference. In Missisquoi, agriculture is the largest, at roughly half the basin’s reduction target.

One clause there does not match the plan’s own table. The draft calls developed land “only 15%” of the basin’s overall reduction target, but Table 11 assigns the sector 7,371 kilograms of a 100,429-kilogram total — about 7.3 percent. The plan does not reconcile the two figures.

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What EPA said fifteen months ago

A report card dated June 17, 2025, signed by Ken Moraff as director of the Water Division at EPA’s New England office, reviewed four basins including these two.

EPA found reductions across Vermont’s portion of the Lake Champlain watershed had grown from 12.5 metric tons a year in 2016 to 54.7 in 2024 — 26 percent of the 212.4 metric tons required. Then:

“the pace of reductions must increase from a current average of 5.275 metric tons to 12.13 metric tons per year in the future to stay on track to meet required phosphorus reductions by 2036.”

“without an increase in the pace of reductions, we remain concerned that phosphorus goals will not be achieved in the timeline in the Lake Champlain TMDL.”

That assessment rested on the estimates available then, and those estimates move. Vermont’s Clean Water Initiative 2025 Performance Report now puts the Lake Champlain basin at 35 percent, up from 26 a year earlier. It attributes such revisions partly to reporting lag — data collection “necessarily introduces a lag,” later years fill in earlier ones, an effect “akin to the true-ups seen in Federal economic indicator reporting and is not indicative of a shifting trend in progress” — and partly to accounting changes, including a 2021 switch to reporting phosphorus as delivered load rather than load at the source. Compass examined the counting behind that report in January.

How these basins compare

By EPA’s 2025 figures, Missisquoi sits toward the top of the large basins and the Lamoille nearer the bottom: Northern Lake Champlain 30.5 percent, Missisquoi 24, Otter Creek 17, Lamoille 15, and Winooski 14 on a report card final for that planning cycle. EPA credited Missisquoi with doubling its progress from 12 percent. Because those reviews were conducted in different years, the ranking is rough.

EPA also concluded Vermont is “on track to satisfactorily complete the five-year actions” in both plans — a judgment about whether the state is doing what it said it would. Its finding that reductions are running at less than half the required rate was a broader assessment across Vermont’s Lake Champlain basins, not a rate calculated for these two.

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Why this reaches your town

Under the Municipal Roads General Permit, towns must inventory road segments where runoff drains to a stream and upgrade at least 7.5 percent of non-compliant segments a year. A full reassessment is due in the fall of 2027; once it is complete, 20 percent of segments rated “very high priority” must be upgraded annually as part of that same 7.5 percent, not on top of it. All of it must be done by Dec. 31, 2036 — the same deadline as the lake. VTrans reimburses up to 80 percent of documented construction costs through its Municipal Grants-in-Aid program.

The Missisquoi plan names one town, Bakersfield, as possibly needing its recorded work updated in the state’s drainage map or benefiting from additional drainage-upgrade support.

There is improvement to point to. Lake Carmi in Franklin — designated in 2018 as the state’s only “lake in crisis” under 10 V.S.A. § 1310 — received an aluminum sulfate treatment last fall that binds phosphorus in the sediment. The plan reports $5.5 million invested there through fiscal 2025 and, through fiscal 2024, reductions of more than 1,600 kilograms a year, roughly 99 percent from farms changing practices; Compass reported record spring clarity after the treatment. The Lake Champlain Basin Program’s 2024 State of the Lake found Missisquoi Bay’s 2023 phosphorus level its lowest since 1994, while noting no segment has stayed consistently below its limit since 1990.

Both plans also leave one thing blank. The Missisquoi draft reads: “The 2021 Basin Plan identified 43 strategies to protect and restore surface waters. Of X of these are complete,” with a footnote that the report card “was not completed by the date of this draft.” The Lamoille plan carries the same blank against its 63 strategies.

Check your own water

Your lake’s health rating. DEC’s Lake Score Card rates 823 Vermont lakes on nutrients, invasive species, shoreland condition and mercury.

What’s been funded in your town. The Clean Water Project Explorer filters state-funded water projects by town and basin back to 2016, and exports to a spreadsheet.

Before you swim. The Vermont cyanobacteria tracker posts conditions at monitored beaches. Observations are collected weekly, not in real time, and as the Health Department warns, “Not all Vermont bays, lakes, and ponds are monitored.”

Your town’s road work. Road erosion inventory results by town appear in DEC’s MRGP Implementation Table and its Drainage Infrastructure Resource Tool map, linked from the Municipal Roads Program page.

To comment. Through Oct. 29, to Karen Bates, Watershed Planner, at Karen.Bates@vermont.gov or 802-490-6144. The Lamoille meeting is Sept. 22 at 6:30 p.m. at the Lamoille County Regional Planning Commission, 52 Portland St., second floor, Morristown; DEC asks in-person attendees to register by emailing Bates. The Missisquoi meeting is Sept. 30 at 6:30 p.m. at the Northwest Regional Planning Commission, 75 Fairfield St., St. Albans. Zoom links are on the Basin 6 and Basin 7 pages.

Updated Sept. 23, 2026 to add the agriculture sector's progress since 2016.

How to check whether your home sits in the dam's inundation zone, and where the state posts its 82-page emergency plan — at the bottom of this story.

Crews working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are drilling into the Waterbury Dam spillway through the end of October, collecting information engineers need to finish the design of a $76.2 million rebuild of the dam’s flood gates.

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The rebuild would let the dam hold back more floodwater than it is allowed to hold today. Since the 2000s, when its flood gates began jamming, the state has capped how high water may rise against them.

What the project costs Vermont depends on Congress. If Congress raises the federal ceiling and funds the project to it, the state needs about $1 million beyond the $4.5 million it has already committed. If no more federal money arrives, the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation told Compass Vermont, the gap the state would need to cover comes to roughly $30 million.

If you use Waterbury Reservoir or live along the Little River or the Winooski below the dam: at the bottom of this story, how to sign up for DEC’s notices on the reservoir drawdown and construction schedule, and how to look up the mapped river flood hazard at your own address.

What the dam does

The Waterbury Dam holds back the Little River above its meeting with the Winooski. The Corps designed it after the 1927 flood, and it was finished in 1938. It stands 187 feet tall and runs 2,100 feet long, and DEC credits it with preventing about $4 million in flood damage a year, according to a February 2026 presentation to the House Corrections and Institutions Committee.

The state rates it high hazard. That rating describes what a failure would cost, not how likely a failure is: DEC estimates about 5,000 people and 1,400 structures sit in the area a failure would flood.

The dam also supports Green Mountain Power’s 5-megawatt hydro plant and the boating and camping at Little River State Park and Waterbury Center State Park.

The spillway is the dam’s controlled overflow channel, built to carry off water the reservoir cannot hold rather than let it spill over the earthen dam itself. Waterbury’s spillway has three curved steel flood gates. Each gate swings on a pair of steel arms that pivot on pins set into the concrete, and those arms carry the push of the water against the gate.

The limit on the flood gates

Engineers track the reservoir by elevation, its height in feet above sea level. The flood gates sit at elevation 592 and reach to about 618. They were designed to operate up to elevation 617.5.

Since the jamming in the 2000s, the state has held that operating limit at 610.8, which DEC describes as roughly two-thirds of the way up the gates. Above that height, running the gates under more water pressure could damage the arms, DEC said in written answers to Compass. So once a flood pushes the reservoir past 610.8, the Dam Safety Program starts opening the gates and letting water through rather than holding it.

The restriction did not shrink the reservoir. What it takes away is the ability to hold floodwater back in the top 6.7 feet of it. Lowering the operating elevation from 617.5 to 610.8 means “the flood attenuation storage is reduced as inflows when reservoir levels are above El. 610.8 would be passed downstream rather than stored as originally designed,” Ben Green, the state’s dam safety engineer, wrote.

The reservoir has not reached 610.8 since the limit went in, DEC said, “but it certainly could during a major storm event.” The July 2023 flood peaked at 604.32, about 6.5 feet below the limit. July 2024 peaked at 601.05. The highest reading on record, however, came in May 1940: 613.45, about 2.5 feet above where the limit now sits.

Temporary fixes along the way

Testing in 2022 found the pivot pin on one arm of Gate 2 slightly crooked, which adds friction. Green said analysis showed the arm would be overstressed if the gate were operated with water above 608.4 feet, 2.4 feet below the limit. The state welded steel plates onto Gate 2’s arms so the gate can run safely up to 610.8.

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That was part of about $785,000 in interim repairs DEC dates to spring 2024, which also included steel beams flown in by helicopter to shore up the spillway bridge. The program finished after the July 2023 flood, which peaked about four feet below 608.4.

In September 2025, a routine inspection turned up a problem with the brakes on the motor that raises Gate 3. The state took the gate out of service and switched on the dam’s emergency plan at its lowest, non-emergency level. Crews left the gate fully closed rather than open while a new motor was ordered. It went in in January 2026, for about $20,000. No storm in those four months called for opening Gate 3, Green said.

What the drilling is for

The 1938 concrete and the rock beneath it have not been tested in the detail a final design needs. This fall’s work, run from a barge, a work boat and truck-mounted drill rigs, covers about 15 holes drilled into the spillway concrete, the bedrock and the edge of the earthen dam, plus two steel samples cut from Gate 3, DEC said.

The results tell engineers how much of the concrete piers has to come out, whether the concrete sits solidly on the rock, and whether Gate 3 can be refurbished or has to be replaced. The plan already calls for new Gates 1 and 2, a new bridge over the spillway, new lifting equipment and a concrete apron to keep the river from wearing away the rock below the spillway.

The drilling was scheduled for this past spring. DEC said it moved to the fall because of Corps scheduling and negotiations with the Corps’ consultants “as the scope of the program was refined to be within the project budget.”

Who pays

The price has come down from $92 million to $76.2 million, and the state negotiated its share down from 35 percent of design and construction to 7.1 percent of the project’s cost, according to the February presentation. Asked about a 7.5 percent share and a roughly $50 million federal figure that circulated in early 2025, DEC told Compass that 7.1 percent is the correct rate and that $40 million is the federal money appropriated.

So far $44.5 million is appropriated: $40 million federal and $4.5 million from the state.

The rest turns on two separate acts of Congress.

Federal law sets a general limit of $60 million on what the Army Corps may spend at any one dam under the program Vermont is using, Section 1177 of the 2016 WIIN Act. Since 2024 the Corps has been able to spend above it only by making a formal determination and getting Congress to authorize that specific project.

Congress can also change the number outright, through the Water Resources Development Act, the bill it passes every two years to authorize Corps work. Both chambers have now moved a version, and they do different things.

The Senate’s would write the project into federal law by name. Section 1305 of S. 4949, as reported by the Environment and Public Works Committee, strikes that 2024 exception and puts a single sentence in its place: the Corps “shall not expend more than $90,000,000 under this section for the Waterbury Dam Spillway Project, Vermont.” That is $30 million above today’s limit, and more than the project’s entire $76.2 million estimate — enough that the limit would stop being what holds the money back. The bill has not reached the Senate floor.

The House bill does not mention Waterbury. H.R. 9497, which passed 415-9 on Sept. 16, changes a different number in the same law: the amount Congress authorizes itself to spend on the national dam rehabilitation program each year, which its Section 302(d) raises from $60 million to $80 million. That is the whole program, not this dam.

DEC told Compass this month that WRDA 2026 carries an $80 million authorization for Waterbury. That figure matches the House’s program-wide number rather than the Senate’s project-specific one.

Vermont’s delegation has been down this road once already. In May 2024, Sen. Peter Welch announced that the Senate committee’s water bill that year would authorize $100 million for the Waterbury Dam. That figure did not survive into the law Congress passed. What WRDA 2024 did instead was leave the $60 million limit alone, add the exception the Senate now proposes to replace, and extend the program’s funding authorization through 2030.

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An authorization is not money in any case. Congress has to appropriate the dollars separately, and DEC said any added federal money carries the 7.1 percent non-federal cost share with it.

Source: DEC’s February 2026 presentation for the first two figures, DEC’s written answers to Compass for the third. All are DEC estimates, and DEC said the total will get more precise as design advances. The $13 million and $30 million figures are DEC’s. Compass could not reproduce either from the published cost and appropriation numbers, which yield about $11.7 million and $31.7 million.

That last figure is not a bill anyone has voted to pay. It is the hole that would be left in a $76.2 million project, and it is nearly seven times what the state has put in so far.

Asked where the money would come from if the federal share falls short, DEC said it is working with the Scott administration, the Legislature and Vermont’s congressional delegation. It did not name a source.

Construction is penciled in for roughly 2028 to 2030, pending funding, and is expected to take about two years.

What it means for the reservoir

To do the work safely, the state will have to lower Waterbury Reservoir by 30 to 50 feet, with the exact drop set during final design, according to DEC. The drawdown would likely happen over the winter before the first construction season, with work starting that spring. DEC said it does not yet know how long boat ramps, the state parks or the hydro plant would be affected.

Once the project is finished, DEC says, the dam would no longer need the seasonal drawdowns it uses now, which it expects to improve water quality in the reservoir and the Little River.

Check your own situation

If you live downstream. The Flood Ready Atlas maps river flood hazard, but it does not show dam-failure inundation. That mapping lives in the dam's Emergency Action Plan, and the state posts those publicly in the Vermont Dam Inventory. Type your town in the "Town Name Containing" box and hit Search, click View next to the dam, then open the Documents tab and the EAP folder. Waterbury Dam's plan runs 82 pages and was updated in April 2026. Every regulated dam in Vermont has one.

Use the reservoir, the boat ramps or the state parks? DEC runs an email list for project notices, including the drawdown and the construction schedule: sign up here. The project page is at dec.vermont.gov.

Want to know the flood risk at your address? The state’s Vermont Flood Atlas takes a street address and shows the special flood hazard area and river corridor mapped around it: floodready.vermont.gov. Those maps cover river flooding. They do not map what a dam failure would inundate, so being outside a mapped flood zone does not by itself answer the dam question.

Questions about the project? DEC’s contact is Ben Green, Vermont Dam Safety Program, 802-622-4093, Benjamin.green@vermont.gov.

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Editor’s Note: Updated Sept. 23, 2026: added a pointer to the dam's Emergency Action Plan and inundation mapping.

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Barre property owners: how to look up your new assessment, and how to check whether your school tax can be based on your income instead, is at the bottom of this story.

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Barre voters rejected the same school budget for the third time on Tuesday, and the district’s two towns split again. Barre City approved it, 628 to 526. Barre Town rejected it, 993 to 737. District-wide the $57.1 million budget failed by 154 votes out of 2,884 cast, and about 65 percent of the no votes came from Barre Town.

Barre Town voters were looking at a tax rate going up 9.2 percent while Barre City’s fell by nearly a third. Most of that Barre Town increase has nothing to do with the schools.

What the No Vote Was Actually About

The district breaks Barre Town’s 11-cent rate increase into three parts in its own September 8 budget presentation. On a Barre Town home assessed at $200,000, here is what each part costs per year:

RatePer yearProperty appraisal five years out of date7.1¢$142School spending2.9¢$58Expiring merger incentive1.0¢$20Total increase11.0¢$220

School spending is 26 percent of the increase. The slides put it plainly: the appraisal adjustment “accounts for 65 percent of the tax impact for FY27.”

So the part of Tuesday’s ballot that was actually the school budget came to about $58 a year on a $200,000 home — under $5 a month. Rejecting it means the district keeps borrowing at roughly $700 a day in interest, and the board is now weighing cuts to winter sports, transportation and extracurricular activities.

The other $162 was on the ballot too, and no vote could have removed it. It is not something the school board controls.

Same House, Same Bill

The other question Barre property owners are asking is which town is paying more. Neither. On a house worth the same amount, the school tax bill is the same to the dollar.

Barre Town’s rate is 39 percent higher. Barre Town’s assessments are 28 percent lower. The two cancel out. Property owners in both towns pay 0.939 percent of what their property is actually worth, and neither town is carrying the other.

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That is not a coincidence. It is the machinery working as designed, and it has a name.

What the CLA Does

The Common Level of Appraisal, or CLA, is the ratio between what a town says its properties are worth and what those properties actually sell for. Towns bill taxes on their own assessed values, and assessed values go stale between reappraisals while the market keeps moving. So the state divides each town’s education tax rate by its CLA. A town whose assessments have fallen behind the market gets its rate scaled up to compensate, so it still pays its fair share. The town does not pay more real money. The rate number just gets bigger.

Barre City finished a full reappraisal this year, its first since 2006. Under a change the Legislature made this year, a town’s CLA is set at 100 percent in the year it completes a reappraisal, so Barre City’s assessments now match the market and its rate gets no adjustment at all. Barre Town’s assessments date to 2021 and its CLA has slid to 71.75 percent, so its rate is scaled up by that much.

Here are the two rates the district projected, per $100 of assessed value:

Because Barre City’s CLA is 100 percent, its 93.9-cent rate is the district’s underlying rate with nothing added to it. Divide 93.9 cents by Barre Town’s 71.75 percent and you get $1.309 — exactly what the district projects for Barre Town. The entire gap between the two rates is that one division.

Your Own Bill, Compared With Last Year

A separate question, and the one that catches people: what happened to your bill?

In Barre Town, nothing was reassessed, so the 9.2 percent rate increase is a 9.2 percent bill increase. A property assessed at $200,000 goes from $2,398 to $2,618.

In Barre City, the rate fell by a third but assessments rose about 68 percent on average, so bills went up. The district’s own example: a property assessed at $100,000 last year is assessed at roughly $168,000 now, and its bill goes from $1,393 to $1,578 — up about 13 percent. Individual properties moved by very different amounts in the reappraisal, so that 13 percent describes the average, not any particular house.

So the average Barre City owner’s bill rose more than the average Barre Town owner’s, while their rate was falling. That is what a reappraisal does. It does not mean Barre City is subsidizing Barre Town — the table above still holds. It means Barre City had been paying on out-of-date numbers and is now paying on current ones.

Both towns are above the statewide average. The Legislature applied a $100 million one-time buy-down to hold Vermont’s average education tax increase this year to about 3.5 percent.

The Part That Is About Money

There is one way Barre Town property owners genuinely pay more, and it has nothing to do with the rate: their houses are worth more.

Barre Town’s median home value is $281,400 against Barre City’s $210,400, per Census estimates. At the same 0.939 percent, that is about $2,640 a year in Barre Town and about $1,980 in Barre City — a difference of roughly $670, driven entirely by property values.

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Barre Town’s median household income is $93,210 against the city’s $65,625. Barre Town is 88.4 percent owner-occupied; Barre City is 50.4 percent, meaning about half of Barre City households never receive a school property tax bill at all. Poverty runs 2.5 percent in Barre Town and 17.3 percent in Barre City, and roughly half the district’s students live at or below the poverty line — most of them in the city.

The district is also not a big spender. Barre proposed $12,648 per pupil against a statewide range from $10,698 to $24,106, and it spends less per student than Montpelier or Paine Mountain. The budget on the ballot was a 2.11 percent increase. Board chair Garrett Grant has made that point repeatedly: “The budget’s a 2.1% increase. Inflation for the last 12 months is about 3.5%, so well below inflation.”

Barre Town voters were not inventing a grievance. Their bills did go up 9.2 percent, they lost a merger incentive the state had offered them to join a district they voted against joining in 2018, and the district’s own budget FAQ was still posting a Barre Town rate of $1.428 this week — a February figure attached to a bigger budget voters had already rejected, 12 cents above the number actually on Tuesday’s ballot.

What Happens Now

With no approved budget after June 30, 16 V.S.A. § 566 lets the school board borrow against up to 87 percent of the last approved budget — roughly $48.6 million, against the $55.9 million the district spent last year. Barre is operating on a bank line of credit and expects to pay up to $22,000 a month in interest, about $700 a day, to keep the schools open. The authorized amount, the interest rate and the lender appear in no public district record.

The same statute says that if the board borrows, “it shall determine how all funds shall be expended.” That is why the cuts now under discussion do not go back to voters. Winter sports, transportation and extracurricular activities are on the table, with about $350,000 still to find and staff contracts and health insurance already locked in. Grant has said the board hopes to meet the week of September 22 to decide when to try a fourth time.

Nothing in Vermont law sets a deadline for that fourth vote, installs a fallback budget, or brings the state in. Barre can keep voting, and keep paying $700 a day, for as long as it takes.

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What a Barre property owner should check

• Your assessment. Barre City reset every assessment this year — look up your new value and the grievance process at barrecity.org/assessment.html. Barre Town assessments are unchanged from 2021; the Assessor’s Office takes valuation questions at barretown.org.

• Whether you pay on income instead. If your household income is modest, your school tax may be figured on your income rather than your property value. Check eligibility for the property tax credit at tax.vermont.gov.

• Not your neighbor’s rate. A higher rate in Barre Town does not mean a higher bill. If you’re comparing with someone in the other town, compare what the two houses would sell for.

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The box at the bottom of this story explains how to tell whether you’re owed money or debt relief, who will contact you, and what to check before you sign a used-car loan.

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Credit Acceptance Corp., one of the country’s largest lenders to car buyers with poor credit, will cancel an average of about $7,700 in car-loan debt for each of 60 Vermonters. It will also repay 87 others about $1,400 apiece under a settlement with New York’s attorney general and 40 others, including Vermont’s.

The bigger change is what the Michigan lender has to do for the next five to seven years. Credit Acceptance must cap the prices dealers can charge its riskiest borrowers. It must tell those borrowers the odds of falling behind before they sign. And it must forgive most of what they owe if the car is repossessed in the first year or so.

What Vermont Gets

Vermont’s share is $701,251:

• Debt canceled: $462,871 across 60 borrowers, about $7,715 each

• Cash repaid: $124,841 across 87 borrowers, about $1,435 each

• Paid to the state: $113,539, about 16 cents of every dollar in Vermont’s share. The consent judgment lets the Attorney General use it for consumer-protection work or any other lawful purpose.

Nationally, New York’s attorney general said the deal erases about $634 million in debt for more than 55,000 borrowers. Vermont’s 60 are about one in every 900 of those borrowers. Vermonters are about one in every 525 Americans, so Vermont’s share of the debt relief is smaller than its share of the population.

Whose Loans Qualify

Credit Acceptance gives every loan its own score. The score is the company’s prediction of what percentage of the loan it will collect. The attorneys general allege that borrowers could not reasonably afford many of the low-score loans. That includes loans where Credit Acceptance predicted it would not collect even the amount it lent.

The debt relief covers loans written between November 2015 and November 2025 that met three tests:

• Credit Acceptance’s score was below 56.

• The car payment took 13% or more of the borrower’s income. On $3,000 a month, that’s a $390 payment.

• The borrower still owed money on Dec. 1, 2025.

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Borrowers who qualify fall into two situations:

• The car was repossessed within 18 months and sold at auction. Many of these borrowers still owed a deficiency balance, the part of the loan the auction didn’t cover. That balance is wiped out.

• The car was not repossessed and sold. These borrowers get the rest of the loan canceled, the lien released and the title sent to them.

In both situations, Credit Acceptance must ask the three credit bureaus to delete the account from the borrower’s credit report.

Why a Lender Makes a Loan It Doesn’t Expect to Be Repaid

The answer is in how Credit Acceptance pays dealers. According to Credit Acceptance’s annual filings with the SEC, the dealer gets the buyer’s down payment plus a cash advance from Credit Acceptance. The size of that advance is based on what Credit Acceptance forecasts it will collect. The filings say this combination typically gives the dealer a cash profit at the time of sale.

Credit Acceptance then collects the payments. It doesn’t need a borrower to pay off the full loan to come out ahead. It needs to collect more than it advanced. New York’s attorney general said the average annual interest rate on the loans exceeded 38%.

What Changes at the Dealership

These rules cover buyers with a credit score under 600 who finance through Credit Acceptance. Most also cover buyers with no credit score:

• A price cap, for scores under 600. A car can’t sell for more than 109% of its highest book value, from a guide such as Kelley Blue Book or NADA. A car that books at $15,000 tops out at $16,350.

• A book-value sheet before you sign. This applies to every buyer whose dealer runs the loan through Credit Acceptance’s system. The dealer must show the car’s estimated retail value so you can compare it to the sticker price. Dealers also can’t raise the price after entering a buyer’s loan application.

• A warning about the odds. The dealer must show what share of borrowers with similar credit have fallen behind on car payments, and what happens if you stop paying.

• A limit on loan length. A used-car loan can’t run longer than 75 months, or the industry average plus 12 months, whichever is longer.

• Income checks. Credit Acceptance must verify what you earn and keep the records.

Add-on products get their own protections. A vehicle service contract is an extended warranty. GAP coverage pays the difference between what you owe and what insurance pays if the car is totaled. The attorneys general allege dealers were packing these products into loans without buyers really agreeing to them. Under the settlement:

• You must sign a form showing your monthly payment with and without each add-on.

• Credit Acceptance must remind you in writing within 10 days what you bought and how to cancel it.

• Canceling has to be simple, and the refund goes toward your loan.

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The Repossession Off-Ramp

For loans written after Dec. 1, 2025, Credit Acceptance must forgive 95% of the deficiency balance if the car is repossessed early. It also can’t sue the borrower or sell the debt to a collector. Two groups qualify:

• borrowers with credit scores under 500 whose payment took at least 13% of their income

• borrowers with no credit score whose payment took a quarter or more of their income

The repossession has to happen within 12 to 18 months, depending on the borrower’s score and income. The off-ramp applies to loans written through November 2031.

Two Readings of the Same Deal

Attorney General Charity Clark said in her release that “there is no room for deception in the marketplace.” Credit Acceptance denies any violation of law, and the judgment includes no finding of liability.

Credit Acceptance’s statement to investors says the settlement “does not require material changes to the Company’s operations.” The statement also says the settlement required no charges beyond money Credit Acceptance had already set aside.

The settlement takes effect Nov. 2, and Credit Acceptance must wipe out the qualifying debt by then. The dealership rules follow within about six months.

SERVICE BOX: Are You Owed Anything?

You don’t apply. If you qualify, you’ll be contacted:

• Debt relief: Credit Acceptance will notify you by letter, email or text that your account is closed and nothing more is owed.

• Cash repayment: a claims administrator chosen by the states will notify you.

You may qualify for debt relief if:

• your car-loan payments go to Credit Acceptance, and

• the loan was written between November 2015 and November 2025, and

• you still owed money on it as of Dec. 1, 2025.

Cash repayment goes to borrowers the states select, mostly people whose cars were repossessed. The claims administrator will contact you if you’re one of them.

If your debt is canceled: the lien comes off your title, and the account should come off your credit report. You can check your report for free at annualcreditreport.com a few months after Nov. 2.

Before you sign a used-car loan:

• Ask for the book-value sheet.

• Read the add-on form that shows your payment with and without the extras.

• If you already bought an add-on you didn’t want, you can cancel it through Credit Acceptance.

Questions: Vermont Attorney General’s Consumer Assistance Program, 800-649-2424 or ago.vermont.gov/cap.

ANALYSIS

Vermont Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore spent nine paragraphs before a congressional subcommittee on Sept. 3 arguing about a drinking water loan fund. She spent two clauses on data centers, in the closing paragraph, prefaced by “before closing, I just want to touch briefly.”

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Those two clauses were read as a contradiction of Gov. Phil Scott’s veto of Vermont’s data center bill. They are not.

“The federal proposal I discussed in my testimony and H.727 are different proposals with different scopes and requirements,” Moore told Compass in a written statement this week. “My testimony should not be interpreted as a change in the Scott Administration’s position on H.727 or the reasons Governor Scott vetoed that bill.”

The documents say the same thing. The water protection Moore endorsed in Washington appears nowhere in the bill Scott vetoed — not in the House version, not in the Senate version, not in the one that reached his desk. Both documents have been public since before she testified.

What she went there to do

Moore appeared before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment not as a data center witness but as vice chair of the water committee at the Environmental Council of the States, the association of environmental agency heads from every state, the District of Columbia and the territories. The subject was reauthorizing the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Nearly all of her testimony concerned the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund — the federal pot that lends states money to fix pipes, wells and treatment plants, with repayments cycling back in to lend again. Moore asked the subcommittee to treat the bill’s $1.126 billion figure as a floor, and made the case with Vermont numbers: project demand this year running at 185% of 2021 levels, loan agreements 255% higher than four years ago.

The money she went to Washington to argue about is money Vermont water systems are already not getting. Congressionally directed spending — earmarks — comes off the top of the fund before states see any of it, which shrinks both the pool available for loan forgiveness and the share states keep to pay the staff who inspect systems, certify operators and help small towns directly. Vermont’s loss runs about $2.3 million a year. That share has paid for asset management plans at the state’s smallest municipal systems and for leak detection that found and fixed leaks totaling more than 115,000 gallons a day.

Moore also described a bind. Communities that need the work most cannot take on more debt, but forgiven loans never return to the fund, and many states will not issue a loan at all if it would push a system’s rates above 1.5% of local median household income. “It feels like a death spiral,” she told the subcommittee.

Then, at the end, the two clauses. She said she supports requiring owners and operators to help pay for the water infrastructure impacts they create, and supports source water vulnerability studies coordinated with states.

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What the federal draft does

The bill she was referring to is the Water Cost Accountability Act of 2026, a discussion draft the same subcommittee is weighing. It does two things.

First, it makes a condition of the revolving fund: a state taking a grant must prohibit a public water system from recovering, from any customer other than the data center’s owner or operator, the incremental cost of connecting that data center or of expanding the system’s source, treatment, storage or distribution capacity to serve it. In plain terms — if a data center needs a bigger water main, the data center pays for the bigger water main, not the households on the same system.

Second, it orders EPA to report within 18 months on where data centers get their water, covering facilities that average more than 200,000 gallons a day over any 30-day stretch.

That is a rule about who gets the bill. It creates no permit, mandates no technology, reviews no site. It decides which customer pays for a pipe.

What H.727 contained

Vermont’s bill did none of that.

Its protection against cost-shifting was about electricity. Any data center of 20 megawatts or more would have had to sign a “large load service equity contract” approved by the Public Utility Commission, insulating other ratepayer classes from all costs of the facility’s deployment — new generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure, energy capacity and resource adequacy costs.

Its water provisions did something different:

• Required closed-loop cooling, meaning a sealed system that recirculates the same water rather than continuously drawing fresh supply.

• Stripped the exemption that lets groundwater withdrawals under 57,600 gallons a day proceed without a permit.

• Required a surface water withdrawal permit, with withdrawals halting during drought.

• Required every applicable ANR water quality and water resource permit, plus a state water quality certificate.

• Required PFAS monitoring and prohibited the addition of PFAS to discharged water.

• Triggered additional environmental assessment above 150,000 gallons a day of surface water.

Nothing in the bill addresses what a public water system may charge its other customers. The provision Moore endorsed in Washington is not a weakened version of something in H.727. It is absent from it.

Asked whether ANR or its departments have received any inquiry from a developer about water supply or wastewater capacity for a data center in Vermont, a spokesperson said she did not believe so, and was checking with agency staff.

Scott vetoed the bill May 28. The House fell seven votes short of an override, 83 to 52.

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The administration’s position

Moore’s statement placed her comments inside a position the administration says it has held throughout.

“At the federal level, I expressed support for the principle that families and other ratepayers should not be expected to bear infrastructure costs created by a large new water user such as a data center,” she said. She pointed to Kerrick Johnson, commissioner of the Department of Public Service, raising the same concern about electric ratepayers during testimony on H.727. Johnson appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Digital Infrastructure on Feb. 12.

Scott’s veto letter made a broader version of the argument: that Vermont law already provides substantial regulatory authority to prevent harmful impacts, citing Act 250, Public Utility Commission oversight, environmental permitting requirements, energy siting rules and municipal zoning. “The last thing Vermont should do is worsen our economic challenges by adding new and unnecessary regulatory systems,” he wrote.

The letter also proposed a path. If the Legislature wants a data center bill, Scott wrote, it should start with something closer to the version the House passed, with additional and substantial changes to prevent unintended economic consequences in other sectors.

That House version was narrower than what reached his desk. It had no energy transformation payment, no virtual power plant requirement, and a definition of a facility that reached only a single site or adjacent ones. But it carried the same water provisions — the same cooling mandate, the same permitting requirements, the same PFAS prohibition.

On water, the starting point the governor named and the bill he vetoed say nearly the same thing.

At the bottom of this story: how to find out whether your town is on the buyout list, what a buyout offer is actually based on, and who to call if you’re still waiting.

Ninety-eight Vermont properties have been awarded federal flood buyouts since August 27, and nearly a quarter of them — 23 — are in Plainfield, a town of 1,236 people.

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That count comes from Vermont Emergency Management, which provided Compass with a town-by-town breakdown in written answers this week. Vermont’s congressional delegation announced the funding on September 14 as “at least 90” homes. The state’s current records put it at 98, and Vermont Emergency Management says the number moves as new FEMA awards arrive.

Here is where the 98 properties are:

• Plainfield — 23

• Starksboro — 13

• Huntington — 11

• Richmond — 9

• St. Johnsbury — 7

• Groton — 5

• Hardwick — 4

• Waterbury, Woodstock — 3 each

• Barre, Ludlow, Lyndon, Springfield — 2 each

• Barre Town, Bolton, Brighton, Coventry, Hinesburg, Holland, Johnson, Lunenburg, Marshfield, Randolph, Wardsboro, Worcester — 1 each

The awards trace back to four federally declared disasters — the summer 2023 floods, the January 2024 floods, the summer 2024 floods and the August 2024 flood — plus 11 properties funded through a separate FEMA program called Swift Current, which pays for buyouts of homes that flood repeatedly and carry federal flood insurance.

Plainfield carries the load

Twenty-three buyouts in one small Washington County town is the largest concentration in the state, and it is roughly one in four of every buyout award Vermont has received in the past three weeks. Plainfield lost a Mill Street bridge over the Great Brook in the July 2024 flood, along with several apartments, a year after the July 2023 flood hit the same village.

Every one of those 23 properties will be demolished. The land goes to the town under a federal deed restriction that bars new structures on it permanently — not for ten years, not until the town changes its mind. Permanently.

The announcement described about a third of the program

Vermont Emergency Management told Compass it has now awarded 260 buyout properties cumulatively, including the 98 received since August 27. Seventeen owners who were awarded a buyout have since withdrawn. Three more buyouts are awaiting award.

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So the $33.2 million the delegation announced this week is the most recent batch of a program that has been running since the 2023 flood, not the program itself.

What the money is, and whose it is

The $27.6 million for buyouts is the federal share, not the full cost. Vermont Emergency Management confirmed that the corresponding total project cost is about $36.8 million, with roughly $9.2 million in non-federal match — and that the state is covering that match, so towns pay nothing. Governor Phil Scott’s budget put $12.5 million toward the local match in 2024 for exactly this purpose.

Neither the delegation’s announcement nor the coverage of it mentioned the state’s share. About a quarter of the cost of these buyouts is Vermont money.

The other $5.6 million in the announcement is not buyout money at all. Vermont Emergency Management broke it into $4,878,659.31 in FEMA management costs — the administrative cost of running the mitigation programs — and $731,775 for local hazard mitigation plans, which goes to towns to write their own flood-risk plans. That means about 15 cents of every dollar in the $33.2 million headline pays for administration rather than reaching a property owner.

Spread across 98 properties, the $36.8 million works out to roughly $375,000 per property. That is not the check a homeowner gets. The award budget also covers appraisal, legal and closing work, demolition, and grading and seeding the empty lot afterward.

What a homeowner actually receives

Once a property is awarded, the state assigns a professional appraisal firm. For most properties, Vermont Emergency Management says, the value used is the property’s pre-event value — what it was worth before the flood, not after.

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Then the offer can shrink. The state runs what it calls a duplication-of-benefits review, checking whether the owner already received disaster help from local, state or federal sources for the same loss. Prior flood insurance payments, Increased Cost of Compliance payments, Small Business Administration assistance and other disaster aid can all be deducted from the final offer, depending on what the money was used for.

The plain version: the appraised number is the starting point, not the payout.

Who owns the land afterward

The delegation’s announcement said the state would demolish the structures. Vermont Emergency Management gives a more specific answer: the municipality takes title to the property, subject to the federal deed restrictions and the perpetual open-space requirement. The state manages the acquisition and contracts the demolition work.

That distinction matters to the towns on the list. The property comes off the grand list and stays off it. In Plainfield’s case, 23 times.

Money still will not arrive tomorrow. Appraisals, legal work and closings all come after the award.

If You’re in a Buyout Town

Is my town on the list? The 25 towns with new awards are listed above. Buyout applications are filed by the municipality, not by the homeowner — your selectboard or town office is the first stop, not FEMA.

Where do I check my status? Your town office. Vermont Emergency Management works through the municipality on every buyout, so the town is where to check on an award or ask about applying.

What will my offer be based on? For most properties, the pre-flood appraised value, minus any disaster assistance you already received for the same property — flood insurance, Increased Cost of Compliance, SBA loans, prior FEMA aid.

What happens to the land? The town takes title, the structure is demolished, and the lot must stay open space permanently under federal deed restriction.

I was awarded a buyout and want out. Seventeen owners statewide have withdrawn after being awarded. Withdrawal is possible; start with your town office.

More coming? Vermont Emergency Management says three additional buyouts are awaiting award, and that new FEMA awards continue to arrive.

GlobalFoundries and Marvell Technology announced Thursday morning an expanded multi-year agreement that increases manufacturing capacity at GlobalFoundries’ Essex Junction plant — Vermont’s largest, for-profit. private employer — for a chip technology the artificial intelligence buildout has made suddenly scarce.

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The chips are made from silicon germanium, silicon with germanium mixed in, a combination that handles extremely high-frequency signals while burning less power than ordinary silicon. That makes silicon germanium the workhorse material inside optical transceivers: the components that convert electrical signals into pulses of light, send them down a fiber, and convert them back at the other end.

Inside an AI data center, that conversion is the choke point. Thousands of processors have to talk to each other fast enough to work as one machine, and copper wire can no longer carry the volume over the distances involved without overheating. Light can. GlobalFoundries says its current silicon germanium supports 200 gigabits per lane — a lane being a single optical channel, with modern links bundling several together.

Robb Johnson, Marvell’s vice president of foundry technology, said connectivity is becoming increasingly critical as data center architecture reorganizes around AI, and that the company is investing aggressively to lead the shift toward higher-bandwidth optical designs. Shankaran Janardhanan, who runs GlobalFoundries’ photonics and radio-frequency business, framed the agreement as confirmation that silicon germanium sits at the center of high-speed optical networking for AI infrastructure. Neither company put a dollar figure, a production volume or a completion date on the expansion.

A month of agreements, one of them Vermont’s

Thursday’s announcement is GlobalFoundries’ third in nine days.

On Sept. 8, the company finalized a $375 million research award with the U.S. Department of Commerce for quantum work. On Sept. 9, it and Monolithic Power Systems announced a long-term manufacturing agreement putting new power-chip production at the company’s 300-millimeter fab in Singapore, with volume production starting in early 2027. Then Marvell, in Essex Junction.

That sequence is the thing to notice. GlobalFoundries runs plants on three continents and routes new business among them. The work announced this month could have gone to New York or to Singapore. The Singapore agreement did. This one came to Vermont.

Why this lands in Vermont

The Essex Junction plant, which GlobalFoundries calls its Burlington facility — a name inherited from IBM, which built the site in the late 1950s and ran it until the 2015 sale — is the largest private employer in the state.

How large is harder to pin down. Published accounts differ, and no current figure has been released:

• About 2,300 employees at the campus, in 2019 reporting by Seven Days

• Around 2,000 workers, in 2024 reporting by WCAX citing the Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation

• An estimated 1,800, in Seven Days reporting on the federal CHIPS award

GlobalFoundries does not break out site-level headcount in its financial reports.

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The plant’s weight in the state economy is easier to see. Frank Cioffi of the Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation told WCAX in 2024 that GlobalFoundries accounts for around 40% of Vermont’s exports and draws workers from 10 of the state’s 14 counties. The campus consumes more electricity than the entire city of Burlington, enough that the company won state approval in 2022 to form its own utility and buy power wholesale.

Vermont taxpayers have money in the building. The 2024 CHIPS package directed $125 million in federal funding to modernize the Essex Junction fab, with $4.5 million in state money on top — just under $130 million combined. The bulk of GlobalFoundries’ $1.5 billion federal award went to Malta, New York.

The federal money and the customer

GlobalFoundries is a foundry — it manufactures chips that other companies design — and a foundry’s health is measured in how much of its plant is running and who has committed to buy the output. Marvell has been buying from Essex Junction for years: a wafer supply agreement between the two companies took effect in 2019, and GlobalFoundries describes the relationship as running more than a decade. Thursday’s announcement enlarges it.

The added capacity will go toward three product categories: pluggable optical transceivers, near-packaged optics and co-packaged optics. The last two are the industry’s answer to the same bottleneck — instead of running signals across a circuit board to a separate optical module, the light-conversion hardware gets moved right up against the processor, or into the same package with it.

Those categories are why Thursday’s announcement connects to something Vermont already had a stake in.

On July 29, GlobalFoundries signed a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce — a signed statement of what both sides expect to do, short of a binding contract — for a $300 million CHIPS research award covering optical materials, wafer technologies and advanced packaging. The company said the work would run through its facilities in Malta, New York and Burlington, Vermont, and would target near-packaged optics and co-packaged optics — the same two categories in the Marvell agreement, at the same plant. GlobalFoundries makes the link itself in the new release, saying it combines silicon germanium, silicon photonics and advanced packaging for exactly those architectures.

Marvell was one of the companies that publicly backed the July announcement, alongside AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Corning, Lumentum, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Qualcomm. Seven weeks later it signed a capacity expansion at one of the two named sites.

That photonics award is still a letter of intent and has not been finalized, unlike the quantum award that closed on Sept. 8. And under a separate agreement tied to it, the Department of Commerce took equity amounting to roughly one percent of GlobalFoundries. The federal government is now a small shareholder in the company that owns Vermont’s largest private plant.

Who runs the machines

A chip fab runs on technicians, not engineers. Someone has to load and unload the machines, run the preventive maintenance, catch a tool drifting out of spec at two in the morning, and move wafers between process steps. Those are the jobs the plant has the most of, they run on 12-hour shifts around the clock, and the entry-level versions ask for a high school diploma and the ability to stand for a shift.

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The state has put money into the on-ramp. GlobalFoundries and Vermont State University jointly run a paid technician apprenticeship — the first of its kind in the U.S. semiconductor industry — that hires high school graduates, pays a full-time salary from day one, and covers coursework toward an associate degree. The federal Employment and Training Administration put $850,000 behind expanding it. Separately, the UVM-led V-GaN Tech Hub, a consortium of UVM, GlobalFoundries and the state, received $23.7 million with a target of training more than 500 new semiconductor workers over five years.

Openings are posted at gf.com/careers and on Vermont JobLink, the state Department of Labor’s job board. They’re worth a look.

Whether Thursday’s agreement adds to that list is the part nobody has answered. Expanding capacity at a chip plant can mean installing new tools, which takes crews and operators, or it can mean giving one customer more of a cleanroom already built and already running. Compass ran into the same question last November on the gallium nitride licensing arrangement at this plant, where the “thousands of jobs” figure turned out to describe a projected regional supply chain rather than hiring inside Fab 9.

What to watch

GlobalFoundries reports third-quarter results this fall, and agreements of this size tend to surface there — capital spending, utilization rates, or the business-highlights section where the company has disclosed similar deals before. Any Vermont construction work would need local permits, which are public. The job board is the other place it would show, and that one anybody can check.

The Cabot Hosiery Mills sock sale, the annual clearance of Darn Tough seconds that pulls thousands of shoppers into Northfield every fall, will run Saturday, Nov. 21 and Sunday, Nov. 22, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. both days.

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The dates were printed on a sheet of paper taped to the side of a company box truck in Northfield’s Labor Day parade on Sept. 7, where Compass photographed it. They have not appeared anywhere else. The company’s own help-center page — the one that exists specifically to answer the question of when the sale is — still lists last year’s dates and hasn’t been touched since October 2025.

If you’re going

• When: Sat., Nov. 21 and Sun., Nov. 22, 8:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m.

• Where: Nantanna Mill, 7 Belknap Ave., Northfield

• Parking: 470 Main St., within walking distance of the sale

• Overflow: Shuttle service from the main mill at 364 Whetstone Dr.

That the dates arrived this way is not a surprise. Pinning down the sock sale has always been part of the sock sale. For years the company posted the dates late and quietly, often on Facebook a week or two out, leaving shoppers to work backward from the hunting calendar. The sale has traditionally lined up with Vermont’s November rifle deer season, and it was originally pitched as a party for “hunter’s widows.”

The draw is the math. Darn Tough socks run about $25 a pair at retail; at the mill, seconds and irregulars have gone for half that or less, and the military-style bundles have historically been the best deal in the building. People have left home at midnight to be first in line, and by opening time cars back up from the factory out to Route 12 through downtown. Compass reported last November that roughly 12,000 people came through the 2019 sale — about twice the population of the town hosting it.

The sale went dark in 2020 and stayed on hiatus for three years before returning in 2023.

The company behind it has kept growing. Cabot Hosiery Mills was founded in 1978 by Marc Cabot, who bought and rebuilt an empty Northfield mill, and his son Ric joined in 1989 before launching the Darn Tough brand in 2004. In February the company promoted Angelica Taylor from chief operations officer to president, the first person outside the Cabot family to hold the title; Ric Cabot stays on as CEO. The company now knits under three labels — Darn Tough Vermont, Wide Open and Cabot & Sons — out of plants in Northfield and Waterbury.

At the Labor Day parade, the company handed out free socks along the route. The more valuable giveaway was taped to the truck.

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