The Vermont National Guard broke ground Wednesday afternoon on a new Family Readiness and Support Center at Camp Johnson in Colchester, with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Peter Welch and Adjutant General Henry Harder Jr. on hand.
The building is meant to put services for service members, veterans and their families in one place — financial counseling, legal assistance, suicide prevention and retirement services, under one roof.
Here is the part that matters most to a Vermonter who has never set foot on a military base: when WCAX reported on the project in 2023, the plan put the roughly 12,000-square-foot building outside the security gate. The Guard’s Family Programs office already counts veterans and their families among the people it serves, so a site outside the checkpoint would take one practical obstacle out of the way of reaching it. The announcements do not specify what identification is required at the door, or which services a given person qualifies for.
The money came in two rounds, four years apart
The financing came through Congressionally Directed Spending — the process most people still call earmarks, in which a senator asks for money for a specific named project and Congress decides whether to approve it.
Sanders requested the Camp Johnson family programs building in the fiscal 2022 round, and Senate appropriators approved $4.66 million for it in August 2021. The delegation now rounds that to $4.6 million.
Four years later, Sanders and Welch added $2 million in the fiscal 2026 bill — an amount equal to about 43 percent of the original award — which the delegation says fully funds the project. Their announcement calls that no cost to Vermonters. More precisely, it is federally funded; Vermonters pay federal taxes too.
What the public record does not explain is why a second round was needed. Construction inflation, a change in the building’s scope, a shortfall in the original award, or some mix of the three would all look the same from outside.
Staffing shortages shape construction decisions
The instinct is to read a groundbreaking as a sign of permanence — that the Guard is digging in, whatever anyone thinks about it. What the record shows is a Guard consolidating a scatter of aging buildings into fewer, newer ones, with staffing one of the pressures on where those buildings go.
In April 2023, the Vermont Army National Guard cancelled a new readiness center in Bennington — a readiness center being the modern name for an armory, the building where a unit drills, trains and stores its equipment. The Bennington project had been approved in 2016, and the town’s Development Review Board had already signed off.
Then-Adjutant General Greg Knight said it would not have been a financially responsible decision to keep building, given how few soldiers were assigned to Bennington. Col. Tracey Poirier, the Guard’s director of the joint staff, put the rule plainly: “It’s all tied to how many Service members are assigned to the unit.” Poirier also warned that without more soldiers and airmen, Vermont could lose future construction projects and the federal dollars that come with maintaining those buildings.
The staffing picture explains the pressure. In a January 2025 briefing to the House Government Operations Committee, the Guard reported 2,722 members assigned against 3,638 authorized — a gap of 916, or about one in four. That figure covers the whole Guard, soldiers and airmen together, and it is a January 2025 snapshot rather than a current count.
Knight framed the stakes for the state in dollars in 2023: the Guard had brought in about $145 million in federal payroll the previous year, plus $60 million in operations and maintenance. Fewer members does not automatically mean fewer buildings, but Guard leadership has described it as a risk to future federal investment in the state.
Age is the other driver, and the Guard has said so directly. Capt. Mike Arcovitch, a Guard spokesman, told VTDigger in 2023 that armories are consolidating because a lot of the facilities are getting older.
The map is being redrawn town by town
Bennington. New center cancelled. The town also lost a negotiated swap that would have handed it the downtown armory on Franklin Lane in exchange for a 22.9-acre building site. The Guard said it would continue operating the existing armory, with no near-term plans to deactivate it.
Newport. Alpha Troop, 1st Squadron, 172nd Cavalry is the intended occupant of the new Lyndon center, moving from Newport. The Newport facility is to be sold, though the current relocation and disposal schedule is not publicly confirmed.
Lyndon. The Northeast Regional Readiness Center, on land bought from Vermont State University-Lyndon, built for about 100 soldiers with room to grow past 200. The Guard put the cost at $16.9 million in 2023; later reporting has placed it higher.
St. Albans and Swanton. Two Franklin County facilities consolidating into one 40-acre site near I-89 in Swanton. The St. Albans armory dates to 1914 and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Winooski. The Guard has planned to demolish the Winooski armory and sell the property, citing contamination and a building that is outdated and too small — a reminder that headcount is not the only thing driving these decisions.
Officials gave different figures for the Swanton project in 2024 and no final number has been made public. Deputy Adjutant General Kenneth Gragg described it to Senate Appropriations in January 2024 as “a brand new $30 million armory”; the Guard’s construction and facilities officer, Col. Jacob Roy, told the Swanton Selectboard the following month it could run to $39 million for a building of 50,000 to 75,000 square feet. Roy said then that it could be seven to ten years before the money is available.
What happens to the buildings left behind is not automatic. State capital planning contemplates selling existing armories at fair market value once a replacement is finished, but 20 V.S.A. § 542 puts the state’s Guard property in the hands of a Board of Armory Commissioners — the governor, the adjutant general and the senior commander of the Vermont Army National Guard — which has to act before anything is disposed of. Other uses get floated: administration officials pitched the Waterbury armory to Senate Appropriations in January 2024 as a 40- to 50-bed emergency shelter.
Lyndon shows how long this takes
The Lyndon center is furthest along, and its timeline is the honest preview of what Swanton is in for.
August 2023 — the Guard announces plans to buy roughly 35 to 36 acres from Vermont State University-Lyndon. Accounts differ slightly on the acreage. The sale is not final; surveys and environmental testing come first.
September 2023 — Lyndon’s Development Review Board grants preliminary subdivision approval so the parcel can be carved out, according to the Caledonian Record.
November 2024 — the Act 250 application is filed and accepted as complete eight days later.
January 2025 — the response deadline passes. No hearing is scheduled.
July 2025 — the permit issues, per the state’s Act 250 database.
January 2027 — the contractor’s current scheduled completion.
The Guard’s own application had projected finishing in spring 2026, which puts the current schedule roughly eight to ten months later than planned. The record does not say what caused the change, and a permit that drew no hearing is not by itself evidence of what took the time.
Announcement to scheduled completion: about three and a half years, and that is a completion date, not a confirmed move-in.
Both projects needed a second appropriation
The fiscal 2026 package carried $4 million jointly secured for Vermont Army National Guard facilities. Half is the Camp Johnson top-up marked Wednesday. The other half goes to Lyndon — Sanders’ disclosure describes it as a readiness center in Caledonia County, and Welch’s names the town outright.
So the pattern is not one building getting a second round of money. It is two.
Add the $4.75 million Welch secured in fiscal 2024 for a readiness center addition, and the $2.6 million he requested — requested, not awarded — in fiscal 2025 to begin design work on the Franklin County facility, and the shape is clear. The Guard’s building program is assembled a few million dollars at a time, over several fiscal years, in disclosure documents that surface once a year.
For the family center specifically, one connection is worth holding onto. Compass reported last week that a Welch spokesperson said in August that the immediate pay and benefits problems facing members of the 158th Fighter Wing had been resolved, while work on their records continued.
A building at Camp Johnson offering financial counseling under one roof does not fix a records problem at the Pentagon. But it is the kind of place Guard families end up when something in the federal machinery goes wrong.