After Lawmakers Rejected His Wetland Rule, Scott Says He's Still Pushing — and Expects a Lawsuit if He Proceeds
At his June 18 press conference, the governor framed the contested 50-to-25-foot wetland buffer rule as roughly 2,000 homes the state won’t get and pointed to flood-displaced families in Barre. The committee’s objection ran along party lines; the Vermont Natural Resources Council says it will sue if he proceeds. Compass lays out what the rule actually does — and what is still genuinely in dispute.
Gov. Phil Scott used his June 18 press conference to signal that a wetland rule a legislative committee objected to last month may not be finished. Asked whether he might act by executive order to push it through, the governor said his administration is “working behind the scenes” to find a resolution “to get what we want,” and acknowledged it could “move the rule forward even though it’s rejected” — a path he conceded would likely draw a legal challenge.
The rule would loosen wetland restrictions to make room for housing, and Scott framed its rejection in stark terms: roughly 2,000 homes statewide that, he said, the rule would have made room for. He pointed to Prospect Heights, a proposed development on high ground in flood-scarred Barre, where Barre Area Development’s Josh Jerome and the administration both estimate the looser rules would raise the buildable count from 90 homes to 120, cutting about $25,000 from the cost of each. Scott tied the project to the 30 to 40 families he said were displaced from Barre’s flood-prone North End, who he said could be rehoused “high and dry” if the rule cleared the way. “These are the kind of policy changes we need to move the needle on the housing crisis,” he said — ones that allow more homes “with little sacrifice.”
Proceeding would carry a cost the governor did not dwell on. The Vermont Natural Resources Council has said it will go to court if the administration adopts the rule over LCAR’s objection. “If they move forward with it, I don’t see a scenario where we wouldn’t challenge the rule in court,” the group’s policy and water program director, Jon Groveman, told Vermont Public. Attorney General Charity Clark had warned in November that the administration could not shrink the buffer this way by executive order alone, and that relying on the change “carries legal risk” for the builders and homeowners who would depend on it. Under Vermont’s rulemaking law, the administration may respond to the committee and then adopt the rule over its objection; as of the June 18 press conference it had not done so, and the rule had not taken effect.
What the rule actually does
The rule, 25-P040, is the housing piece of Executive Order 06-25, which Scott issued in September 2025. In designated growth areas — downtowns, village centers, and zones served by municipal water and sewer — it would let housing proceed without a wetland permit in unmapped Class II wetlands, and halve the protected buffer around mapped Class II wetlands from 50 feet to 25 — keeping the 25 feet nearest the wetland off-limits while opening the outer half. The changes were written as temporary, set to expire around 2030. Those growth areas cover about 3 percent of Vermont; the mapped wetlands inside them, about 0.18 percent of the state. Compass walked through the rule and the three legal objections to it when the committee acted in May.
A party-line vote, and a fight over what it was
The Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules objected on May 21 — and how it objected is now part of the fight. The objection ran along party lines, the committee’s Democrats objecting and its Republicans opposed. After housing advocates cast the decision as a policy choice dressed up as a legal one, the committee and conservation groups pushed back that the objection was “grounded precisely in law.” A party-line split is hard to cast as purely either: the objection rests on detailed statutory arguments, and it broke cleanly along party affiliation.
Sen. Scott Beck, the Caledonia Republican who serves as Senate minority leader, sits on LCAR, whose Republicans — Beck among them — opposed the objection. He appeared beside Scott at the June 18 press conference, where — speaking about Act 181 — he said Vermont does not “need special interest groups and enviro groups to tell us how to manage land.” His committee vote and his presser remarks point the same way.
Alex Farrell, the housing commissioner, put the choice on the committee: “What do we value more: protecting every inch of unmapped wetlands in the two to three percent of Vermont designated for housing development... or putting more Vermonters into desperately needed homes...? LCAR chose the status quo. But the status quo is crushing Vermont families.”
Moore: a misunderstanding at the center of it
At the press conference, Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore pushed back on what she called a misunderstanding driving much of the opposition. Critics, she said, were folding together two separate things: a proposal to let development rely on the state’s wetland maps, and the reduction of the buffer width. The fear that the change would put homes “on top of wetlands” mistakes the buffer for the wetland itself, she said — “I don’t think that anybody was arguing that building in that outer 25 foot ring of the buffer would be actually building in a wetland.”
Her larger point was that the maps are improving. Vermont’s wetland maps were built on data from the late 1970s and early 1980s; under the 2024 Flood Safety Act, the state is rebuilding them basin by basin. A June 9 DEC release announced the latest batch — draft updates across more than 100 towns in nine counties, produced by Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota’s GeoSpatial Services and spot-checked in the field, with public meetings in Arlington and Morrisville in mid-June. Moore said a fresh look at southwestern Vermont had added roughly 15,000 acres of previously unmapped wetlands while removing about 5,000 acres the old maps had shown in error.
But better maps answer only one of the committee’s objections. LCAR’s third ground was that the rule leaned on maps the state’s own rules call approximate and not a basis for fixing precise boundaries — a problem improving maps could ease. Its first two objections were statutory: that an agency cannot trade wetland protection for housing on its own authority, and that halving the buffer across an entire class of areas exceeds what the law allows. Neither turns on map quality. And the new maps remain drafts of “approximate” wetland locations; under Vermont’s rules, only a field delineation by a qualified scientist sets a legal boundary — the very step the rule was meant to let builders skip.
That field step is where the housing argument bites. Moore said delineations can be done only in certain seasons, so a developer who encounters an unmapped wetland late can lose a full construction season waiting. Better maps, she said, would let builders lay out a subdivision “with confidence” without waiting for a seasonal field visit, and landowners who think a mapped wetland is drawn too broadly can petition to have it corrected.
Analysis
There is an irony the administration’s framing leaves out. The same flooding that displaced the Barre families Scott invokes is part of why the buffers are now harder to touch. The 2024 Flood Safety Act — the Legislature’s response to the catastrophic 2023 and 2024 floods — strengthened wetland protection in part because wetlands absorb floodwater, setting the state’s goal as a net gain of wetland acreage. Reducing wetland buffers to house flood victims runs up against a protection the floods themselves produced.
Underneath the housing-versus-wetlands argument is a quieter question about who decides. LCAR’s position is that the Legislature already weighed housing against wetland protection when it wrote the net-gain policy into statute, and that an agency cannot re-weigh it by rule. The administration’s position is that the trade is modest, temporary, and confined to a sliver of the state. Both can be true at once. What the law does not settle is whether the trade is worth making — and if Scott adopts the rule over the objection, the Natural Resources Council has promised to carry that question from the Statehouse into a courtroom.
For a Barre family still out of a home after the floods, the administration says the rule could be the difference between a unit at Prospect Heights and a longer wait. For a town downstream, the buffer is part of what slows the next flood. For a builder, the maps decide whether a project pencils out or stalls a season. The rule tried to resolve all three at once. The committee said an agency cannot.
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