This story by Briana Brady was first published in The Citizen on Aug. 28, 2025.

Hinesburg will be ending its shared police agreement with Richmond on Sept. 8.

Although the towns have not ruled out the possibility of working together on policing in the future, the current breakdown reveals just how complicated it may be for communities to move toward regional systems for services.

The decision by the Hinesburg Selectboard on Aug. 20 to end the inter-municipal contracts for shared policing services and a shared chief came as both towns are negotiating contracts with their individual police unions and after months of slow-moving police governance meetings between members of the selectboards from each town.

According to Hinesburg Town Manager Todd Odit, the catalyst for ending the agreements was two-fold.

Back in the spring, Odit was approached by Hinesburg police officers about receiving reciprocal coverage from Richmond. At that time, Hinesburg was responsible for covering police services in Richmond whenever the Richmond officer was off duty or unavailable. Although both departments were understaffed, Richmond was not responsible for providing services in Hinesburg.

While the towns last week came to an agreement for reciprocal coverage — since July 1 the Richmond officer has been providing policing services in Hinesburg when there are no officers from the Hinesburg department — the Richmond selectboard agreed to start paying its only officer, Matthew Cohen, time-and-a-half when providing those services.

Although Hinesburg has been paying its officers a $500 monthly stipend for covering Richmond, the increase to Cohen’s pay when working in Hinesburg may have created new inequity between the two towns.

The issues with moving forward with shared policing go beyond the potential for pay inequities, however, not least of which is that the towns have been unable to land on what kind of system they want.

The police governance committee first convened in April after the contract for shared chief services fell apart with the departure of the former Hinesburg police chief, Anthony Cambridge. Cambridge resigned as chief in January, seeking employment with Richmond, which effectively ended the agreement — Richmond opted not to hire Cambridge, who has since found employment as a police chief in Wolf Point, Montana, according to the Northern Plains Independent.

The initial goal of the committee, which has met every other week, was to hammer out a new policing contract for the foreseeable future, but also to discuss long-term planning for how the departments may function in the years to come, including the possibility of a unified police district, a separate municipal entity that would receive oversight from members of both towns similar to how a school district operates.

“If we can get to an inter-municipal district at some point, that would be great, and yes, that certainly would have to go to the voters,” Mike Loner, selectboard member from Hinesburg, said at the governance meeting on Monday August 25. “But we keep having this conversation every time we come together, and we’re just spinning our wheels.”

Over the last few months, the committee has been focused on finding an interim shared chief who could help guide the process, whether the goal was a unified district, continued reciprocity, or the folding of one department into the other. It is unclear whether any viable candidates were ever brought forward.

Even without a shared chief or a long-term goal, in the back-and-forth conversations over the current contract and a future system, union negotiations were one of the largest sticking points.

“I think in reality, one town providing police coverage to another town isn’t going to be possible until both towns get through their collective bargaining process,” Odit said at the recent governance meeting.

While both towns are in contract negotiations, they’re starting from different places. Hinesburg only recently unionized and entered bargaining; Richmond is renegotiating its last union contract. Cohen was able to leverage that current contract to start receiving time and a half in Hinesburg — it contains a clause for extra pay for “contracted work.”

However, in negotiations, Hinesburg officers do not currently have that power.

“With the discrepancies between the two unions on pay, I don’t know where we can go into short term unless we solve that somehow,” Josh Arneson, the town manager in Richmond, said.

In part, the concern is that the negotiations will move out of sync with each other. The towns could end up with contracts that maintain or worsen current inequities between the departments, making it more difficult should the departments ever consolidate.

“One of the things we’re dealing with now is that the employees currently know where they work, what they’re doing, what the rules are, anything other than that is an unknown. And you know, most people don’t like unknowns” Odit said, suggesting that, should the towns decide on a long-term goal, each town might have to outline the process in their collective bargaining agreements.

Unless both unions agree to a certain amount of information sharing between the officers and the towns in the bargaining process, the differences will likely continue, and the roadblocks may remain.

For now, the governance committee has suspended meetings until the towns themselves decide whether a unified district is the goal.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hinesburg ends its police contract with Richmond.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published in The Citizen on July 24.

For Charlotte residents Shawn Dumont and his two kids, peace signs are more than just a symbol. Each one, they’ve found, also tells a unique story.

So, the Dumonts started documenting them. But quickly, the journey shifted from a pastime summer hobby — finding peace signs and photographing them — to discovering the essence of Vermont, and an ethos grounded in community, culture and the enduring spirit of the back-to-the-land movement. The exhibition, “Peace Signs of Vermont: The Visual Legacy of the Back-to-the-Land Movement,” runs at the Karma Bird House at 47 Maple Street in Burlington Monday-Saturday, through the end of August.

“We are peace people,” reads a mural hand-painted on the gallery wall by Dumont’s kids, Zoë and Jasper, ages 9 and 4. That’s what the family is known for around those parts as of lately. However, Dumont has an even deeper connection to the Burlington art scene, much of which is rooted in the same building where the exhibition is located; he also was the art director for Burton Snowboards for ten years.

His latest creative endeavor: crisscrossing the entire state of Vermont with his kids in search of peace signs. And it turns out, once you start seeing them, they are almost inescapable.

“I was just like, what makes this piece so special?” Dumont said, his kids sitting next to him, sipping on chocolate milk. “What makes it so incredible? The peace sign just became this symbol of that. It was so obvious.”

But the journey didn’t just involve stopping to take a passing picture of any given peace sign — usually located on someone’s house, barn or even mowed into the grass. It also involved a conversation with the owner about the symbol and what it means to them.

“I have this deep understanding of graphics and design symbols, and I sort of had a tertiary respect for the peace sign, but then you meet the people who put them on their house, and then you’re just like, this really is significant,” Dumont said.

The interaction usually stood in stark contrast to how people nowadays communicate. Rather than sending a direct message over social media or a quick text through a cell phone, the family would knock on strangers’ doors and strike up a conversation.

And people, the Dumonts discovered, were always up for a chat.

“There’s this cool tension (initially), but then every single time we would meet these people, there was just beautiful kindness,’ Dumont said.

A lot of the people the Dumonts found were in their 70s, many of whom came to the state as part of the back-to-the-land movement. Others were younger people who came to Vermont more recently in search of that same lifestyle.

He noted people like April Cornell, the designer, and Robin Lloyd, Burlington activist and philanthropist who co-founded the Peace & Justice Center, as some prominent names whose peace signs have found themselves on the exhibition wall.

But among some of the more well-known peace sign carriers are the people who have laid the foundation for the state in a quieter way.

“Like the people who moved up here and then started running the library. I get goosebumps,” he said. “Because maybe they’re not living these big lives, but they’re super important. They’re raising kids here who understand how important it is to take care of your environment and how important food systems are and how important it is to take care of our waterfront and make sure that it’s for everybody.

“We’re living in such a unique, wonderful place because of the foundation that they laid for us.”

Part of his mission now, through this art display, has been to tell those stories.

But while the family has been retelling these stories through photographs, they have also been writing their own story. As Dumont puts it, the summer months in Vermont aren’t for screen time and staying in the house; they’re about family time and setting off in any given direction with no plan in mind, just seeing what adventure might be before them.

“My wife was like, the fact that you found something you get to do with your kids that fills your creative cup is really the biggest gift,” he said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘Peace Signs of Vermont’ tells a story of many familiar symbols.

This story by Briana Brady was first published in The Citizen on June 5.

Howard Russell — Howdy, to his family — hasn’t rung the bell at the top of his Hinesburg house in years. The rope rotted at some point in the last decade, but Russell said that, soon, someone is coming to trim the maple tree beside the house, and they’re going to replace the rope.

The bell may ring again.

Russell, 71, and his six siblings grew up in the house, which, as of this year, is 200 years old and sits on Route 116 directly across the street from the town hall. It has been in his family, he estimated, for seven or eight generations.

Although he hasn’t rung it for a while, he remembers the bell — perched at the apex of the roof, right next to the chimney — ringing all the time when he was a kid.

“When you heard that bell ring, you came home. That was the rule, that no matter where you are. If you’re on the hill, if you’re down the street playing with your friends, you hear the bell, you come home,” Russell said. “It was what made my parents confident that we could go away and that when they needed us back, we would come back.”

That may not be too far off from its original intention. Russell’s family hasn’t just owned the house since the 19th century, they’ve also been farming the land behind it. While for much of that time, it was dairy farm, most recently, it’s been known as Trillium Hill Farm, an organic vegetable farm owned by Russell’s nephew and his wife, James and Sara Donegan.

According to Devin Colman, the director of the historic preservation program at the University of Vermont, bells on farms served a similar purpose to those we might find in a church belfry or a schoolhouse: communication.

“It’s this mechanism of letting people know the time when people didn’t have wrist watches and smartphones and all of our modern conveniences,” Colman said.

The bell, the house, the farm — Colman, who previously worked as Vermont’s State Architectural Historian for 18 years, said that these objects and spaces that we associate with Vermont’s farming history are often inextricable from family history.

“There is a lot of pride of ownership and multi-generational occupancy of the homestead or the land or in the community,” he said.

For Russell, multi-generational occupancy hasn’t just meant holding on to the house and the farm through the years, it’s also meant bringing together different generations of the family under one roof.

Russell’s grandmother lived upstairs when he was growing up. Then, when he bought the home from his mother decades ago, he renovated the upstairs, making it more of a separate apartment. Now, he and his partner, Paul, live upstairs, while the Donegans, whom Russell has since sold the house to, live downstairs with their daughter.

“It’s always been an upstairs-downstairs house, you know? And when she was really little, her parents knew that if they had to go somewhere, they would just check with us,” Russell said. “It was just easy and natural. It was delightful for me. I don’t have any grandkids, so having a grandniece was like having a grandkid.”

Many of the longstanding family farms in Vermont, like Trillium Hill, are still operational, and people still live in the houses. Because of that, historic preservation often looks a little different than preserving a building or an object for a museum.

“There’s always this sort of push and pull of honoring the history, but also updating for 21st-century life, which is inherent to any historic property, not just farmsteads. And usually, it’s just a matter of thinking carefully about it and finding the right balance,” Colman said.

In renovating the house, Russell said maintaining historic elements of the interior was not front of mind — the floors weren’t in great shape and the walls needed to be insulated. However, upstairs, he uncovered the wooden beams holding up the house. They had been hidden behind plaster and, when revealed, provided a glimpse of the past in an updated, livable space.

“You can see more of the bones of the house now than you could before we started,” he said

When it comes to maintaining the land, Russell said his entire family has been intentional. His mother, before she died, gave the land to him and his siblings, and they’ve conserved most of it with Vermont Land Trust. Some of it also went to the next generation — Russell said it depended on who was interested in stewarding the land. The Donegans bought the part they’ve been farming.

“We all love this land. We know every part of it, and the next generation in our family knows every part of it. They know the nooks and crannies,” Russell said. “The bottom line is, it’s more important to us that this land stay open and in agricultural use than whether the next generation gets equal, divvied up amounts.”

There are other things they’ve maintained, less tangible things like community. Russell said that, during maple sugaring season, the family still gets together to collect sap traditionally, with a horse drawn cart and tin buckets. He said there are people in town who aren’t related who still come to help with the sugaring every year.

It’s not so different from the way he depicts the house as a hub for kids in town during his childhood. He describes his parents as having had an open-door policy — everybody used to come and hang out at the house. Nobody knocked. And like the Russell kids, they knew that when they heard the bell, they needed to head home too.

Coleman said, for him, uncovering these family histories and the stories of the land often starts with observing the world around and asking why. Why, for example, is there a bell on the top of that house in the middle of town?

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hinesburg house really rings a bell.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published in The Citizen on May 29.

Some Charlotters might recognize Jim Carpenter as a regular on the pickleball courts, but now all of America knows him as a champion on the beloved television show “Jeopardy,” after winning last Friday’s nail-biter of an episode.

The six-year Charlotte resident — born and raised in Burlington — is now one of 53 Vermonters since 1995 who have competed on the show. But according to Alison Shapiro Cooke, the TV show’s executive director of publicity and communications, Carpenter is the only Charlotter to make an appearance in the show’s history.

The show itself has garnered a cult following over the years and many people associate watching the show with their growing-up years. For Carpenter, his experience was similar. He said he grew up watching the show with his dad.

“Even after I was grown up and gone and would come back and visit, he and I would watch it together and try to beat each other out,” he said.

He had been taking the online 50-question “anytime tests” — an entry point for anyone who wants to compete on “Jeopardy” — for a few years but had never actually anticipated being on the big screen. But one day, out of the blue, he got an email asking him to do a monitored test over zoom.

“I mean, there are so many people who take those tests, I never really expected much to come of it,” he said.

He continued through a few more Zoom tests, making it to the final mock test round before he was placed in a pool of applicants eligible to be on the show, but still the odds of actually getting called aren’t guaranteed.

In February, he got the phone call and luckily his wife was around to suggest he answer the random California number that he thought was spam.

“My cell phone rings, and I looked at it and it was a California number that I didn’t recognize,” Carpenter recalled. “And my wife, I said, ‘Oh, who’s calling your cell phone?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s California. It’s probably spam.’ She said, ‘Well, no, wait a minute, that might be ‘‘Jeopardy.’’ So, I answered it, and it was.”

He flew to Los Angeles in February for two days of filming with nearly 10 other contestants. When it came time for his turn, Carpenter was up against some stiff competition, the prior three-day champion, Brendan Liaw, a recent college graduate from Vancouver.

“He was looking pretty hot and pretty confident going into the game,” Carpenter said. “I got off to a little bit of a slow start.”

One of the most challenging parts of the game, he said, was learning the timing of the buzzer. Contestants are only allowed to buzz once the entire question has been asked.

“You don’t see this on TV, but there are blue lights on either side of the big game board, and those blue lights flash on when the buzzers are actually enabled to answer the question,” he said. “When it comes on, you start clicking away to see if you can actually beat everybody else to the buzzer.”

Carpenter, a retired music professor, doesn’t tout himself as some sort of trivia buff. The knowledge that it takes in a multitude of different topics to compete on the show came from being both well-read and well-versed, he said. Teaching music at different colleges and being immersed in the university realm also helped him to engage in a slew of different subjects and conversations.

And, of course, he is an avid New York Times crossword buff.

“There’s a lot of funny and obscure little bits and pieces that come out of that sort of thing,” he said. “I’ve always just had kind of a sticky memory where I will remember all kinds of odd little bits of information that somehow get stuck in my head.”

Carpenter won $25,601 during his first game and ultimately brought home the gold in Final Jeopardy. The question in the category of “Time” was: “Eponymously named and in use for more than 1,600 years, it was based in part on concepts from the Greek mathematician Sosigenes.”

Carpenter, the only contestant to answer correctly and wager enough money to give him a leg up, wrote down “What is the Julian calendar?”

“Where I knew that from, I have no idea at this point, but it came into my head,” he said, letting out a laugh.

While he didn’t secure a win Monday night in his follow-up appearance, competing for that long as a fan — and securing a win as a contestant — was enough for him. Not many people can add ‘winning Jeopardy’ to their list of accolades, after all.

“My whole thought was, whether I win or whether I lose, this is an experience that not very many people get to have,” he said. “I was a little nervous going out and certainly hoping that I would not do something to look really dumb in front of a national audience, but my whole mindset was just to go out and enjoy the experience.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: What is: Winning an episode of ‘Jeopardy’?.

This story by Ian Kreinsen was first published in The Citizen on May 1.

Marianna Holzer leafed through a carefully bound photo book that tells her family’s story.

On one side of her family, her Swiss grandfather passed the bookbinding tradition on to his son, who passed it on to her. On the other side, her German mother’s family resisted Hitler’s regime.

Today, Holzer and her husband, Rik Palieri, run the Holzer Book Bindery from their basement in Hinesburg. For Holzer, bookbinding is more than just a business — it’s a bridge to the past and a way to safeguard a legacy of activism.

“Preserving books means preserving our history, so it all ties together,” she said.

Her Swiss grandfather, Ulrich Holzer, learned the trade in Italy. But during his time there, a wave of disease and anti-foreigner scapegoating forced him to flee.

Ulrich fled on a boat bound for the Holy Land, but when disease broke out onboard, he was cast ashore along with the dead in Gibraltar. A passerby heard him crying for water, and he wound up on a different ship bound for Boston.

Without speaking English or having any documentation, he gravitated toward a community of Italian speakers, who helped him establish a book bindery in Hyde Park. His son, Albert Holzer, later took over the business. Marianna Holzer spent her early childhood in the shop.

When the bindery closed in the 1960s, the family ended up in Putney. Then, Albert Holzer died when Marianna was just 11.

Still, her mother understood the craft and helped pass it on to her daughter.

“She started in a walkout basement, like this, binding books for friends,” she said. “She taught me some basic things.”

Her mother, Christel Holzer, came from a family of Nazi resisters in Germany. At one point, soldiers burned her grandfather’s books on his lawn. She believes that her aunt — a fierce anti-Nazi — was murdered for helping her husband escape from a concentration camp.

During that regime, Christel Holzer learned bookbinding as an act of resistance.

“She decided to go into something that maybe Hitler couldn’t twist around. So, she studied arts and crafts,” Marianna said. “While she was doing that, she learned bookbinding.”

After immigrating to America, Christel Holzer was hired by Albert Holzer’s bindery. The two later married.

Like Christel Holzer, musician Rik Palieri also got swept up in the Holzer family business.

When he and Marianna Holzer started dating, Palieri spent most of his spare time with her at the Brown River Bindery, where she worked before going independent.

“I realized I not only needed to be a musician, but I also had to help out to make this relationship work,” he said.

Today, Palieri is fully integrated into the bindery. Holzer handles the technical work — taking precise measurements and making repairs — while Palieri gravitates toward the artistic side of the trade.

Holzer converted her basement into a shop in 2008 and opened the binding business in 2010. Fifteen years later, tarnished tools, sheets of gold leaf, and strips of leather clutter the workspace where she breathes new life into time-worn books.

Yet, her shop is not just a curious relic from the previous century. Business is booming.

“I don’t advertise,” she said. “But people keep finding me.”

Customers particularly gravitated toward her during the pandemic.

“People were going into their attics, finding old books, and thinking, ‘We should do something with this.’ They’d call me up, and I’d meet them outside, even in the winter,” she said.

Holzer receives anything from used Bibles to cookbooks to beloved Harry Potter books. Often, they have notes scribbled in the margin, bits of food, and wine stains.

“One of the weirder books I did was a mechanics manual from the sixties,” Palieri said. “It was all greasy, but it reminded him of working on cars with his father.”

“Most of the books I work on are not valuable,” Holzer said. “We’re more about sentimental value.”

Sentimentality extends beyond Holzer’s customers. Above her studio, she keeps a collection of professional books from her family and childhood, including a Brothers Grimm volume her father used to read to her as a child.

Next to her bookcase, she keeps a sign reading “resist.” Inspired by her mother, Holzer often attends protests and voices her opinions about the current administration.

For Holzer, the bind between books, memory, resistance and human connection is clear.

“Books hold our history, hold information and enable people to imagine and see themselves as others when they feel isolated and alone,” she said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Family’s bookbinding business a page turning story of resistance, resilience.

This story by Briana Brady was first published in The Citizen on April 17.

Bageshree Blasius and Christina Daudelin, staff members at Champlain Valley School District, only recently had their titles changed.

While they might be currently known as student and community engagement learning facilitators, for the last few years, the pair have been diversity equity and inclusion coaches. However, although their titles might be changing, according to the two women, the work will largely stay the same — work they say a lot of people misunderstand.

“We’re basically making sure that every student feels safe and like they belong, they feel included, they feel safe, and that their achievements are not limited by any identity” said Blasius, who is also the Title IX coordinator for the district. “That goes for disability, it goes for race, it goes for socio-economic status. It’s every kid, and that’s what I think people don’t understand about DEI.”

On Monday, after having initially asked superintendents throughout the state to sign on to letters certifying compliance with President Trump’s April 3 order to remove DEI programs in order to receive federal funding in K-12 schools, Secretary of Education Zoie Saunders instead sent a letter to the federal Department of Education that offered a rebuttal.

“No federal or state law prohibits diversity, equity, or inclusion. The Request references ‘certain DEI practices’ and ‘illegal DEI,’ but neither term is defined in the Request, and no definition has been provided,” the letter read. “In Vermont, diversity, equity and inclusion practices are supportive of all students, and aim to create and sustain positive, welcoming learning environments.”

The work

According to Blasius and Daudelin, every day in their job is a little different. They run professional development for faculty and help shape inclusive curriculum. They also spend quite a bit of their time supporting faculty, staff, and students through restorative justice practices.

“Bageshree and I see every terrible thing that happens in our schools,” Daudelin said.

For example, if a child uses a slur at school, even if they don’t know what it means, Daudelin, Blasius or another coordinator is involved in resolving the issue, and helping the kids learn and heal from the situation.

“One of our things that we always say to students is it is never our job to get you in trouble, and so if you are saying these things because you have heard them, but you really don’t know what they mean, you can ask us. You can ask us the most ridiculous, inappropriate questions, because it’s our job to help you figure it out, not to punish you,” Daudelin said.

Blasius, as the Title IX coordinator, is also involved in mediating sexual harassment issues or cases of gender discrimination that arise.

According to the pair, at the core of what they do, however, is connecting with students. Every week at Shelburne Community School, Daudelin takes a group of boys who are struggling to connect in the classroom, and who are marginalized in some way, out to play basketball together. She said it’s helping them know that there’s an adult they can trust in the building.

“And I’m getting really, really good at schooling middle school boys in H-O-R-S-E and P-I-G,” she said.

The students

Hailley Hem, a Champlain Valley Union High School sophomore, said when she first moved to Vermont from California in the second grade, the school put her in programming through its Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Center, which provides classes and support for students who speak another language. Hem’s parents are Chinese Cambodian, and she speaks Khmer at home.

Hem said the transition from California to Vermont was hard. She had previously been in a classroom full of Asian, Black and Latino students. Now, there was hardly anyone else that looked like her.

“I see why they thought this program would benefit me, and it really did, since I got to be in a group with a lot of multicultural students and I’m pretty sure that would be under that category of DEI,” she said.

Now, Hem is a member of the high school’s Racial Alliance Committee. Both she and another member, Olivia Cieri, said they see how diversity and inclusion inform some of the things they’re learning in class, such as reading discussions of “The Color Purple” or “The Underground Railroad.”

“Having the space to talk about the history of America, and then also connect it to some of the things we see today, and some of the systemic issues that come from that, is important,” Cieri said.

Hem agreed, adding that talking about painful parts of history and the fiction that explores it teaches them how to have difficult discussions with each other – something she said is often missing from political conversations today.

“When we have stuff like this in our curriculum, it teaches us how to do it, and it helps encourage more open conversations in the future and hopefully helps us actually have open conversations with each other,” she said.

The district

According to superintendent Adam Bunting, the reason the school district is dropping the term “DEI” from its titles is not because it plans to change its values or programming. Instead, he said, it’s a necessary broadening of scope. Due to budget constraints this year, the district is cutting their director of student wellness. Asma Abunaib, who has been the director of diversity and inclusion, is going to take on those duties as well, and become Director of Student and Community Engagement.

Additionally, DEI, he said, has become such a politicized term that no one knows what it means anymore. He prefers engagement.

“When I talk about student engagement, I am talking about inclusion, I’m talking about diversity, we’re talking about equity. It’s all of those things. How do we make our curriculum more accessible? How do people see themselves in the curricula?” Bunting said.

Although the district may be supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion programming, according to Daudelin, there’s still room for improvement. Daudelin emphasized that the greatest diversity in the district comes from differences in socio-economic backgrounds among its students and communities, and that comes with built in inequities across the schools.

While some community schools’ PTOs can fundraise tens of thousands of dollars, she said, others can’t, which makes a difference when it comes to what teachers might be able to buy for their classrooms or the kinds of field trips students can take.

Hinesburg Community School, she said, doesn’t have an accessible playground, meaning that paraeducators are often shoveling snow away from the tennis courts because it’s the only place for students with wheelchairs to go.

“You talk about getting rid of DEI, you’re not allowed to talk about DEI, you can’t be elevating anyone over another group. I think we would say no one is elevating anyone over anyone. We’re struggling to even level playing fields,” she said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Defining DEI in Champlain Valley School District.

This story by Briana Brady was first published in The Citizen on Feb. 27

For the last few years, a family of beavers has made a home in Geprags Community Park in Hinesburg, and they’ve been renovating.

A pond has sprung up behind their dam. Plant life has flourished. Fish have returned. And, according to Bob Hyams, a Hinesburg resident and owner of Riverscape Ecology, the surrounding wetland is now abating phosphorus at a rate higher than some human interventions.

The positive impact of the beavers at Geprags that Hyams has observed complements growing scientific knowledge about how beavers can help reconnect floodplains, abate phosphoruus and ultimately revitalize the ecology of struggling wetlands.

During a presentation to Vermont legislators this month, Hyams put forth a proposition: the state should start paying landowners to manage beavers on their land.

Vermont has known about the excess phosphorus in the Lake Champlain watershed for years. As a necessary nutrient for plants, phosphorus is common in agricultural fertilizer. In an agricultural state like Vermont, that has meant phosphorus runoff from agricultural operations into the water system. However, although it helps plant growth, when in excess in waterways, phosphorus can cause water quality issues related to algae.

The state has been trying to address the phosphorus levels for years. Back in 2002, they established a plan to try to reduce the levels. However, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assessed Vermont’s plans in 2011, they mandated that the state take even greater measures, setting a timeline for the state to start in 2016.

“And the U.S. EPA says, Vermont, you got clean up Lake Champlain, right? They give you a bunch of money to do it, but we need to see results. So that was really the impetus for coming up with this functioning floodplain initiative,” Hyams said.

The functioning floodplain initiative aims to fund wetland and floodplain restoration. In measuring phosphorus abatement, Hyams said, the state uses floodplain reconnection as a proxy. That’s because floodplains and wetlands have been shown to act as phosphorus sinks, the plants that thrive in those environments absorb phosphorus from the water as it floods and settles into the ground.

When the beavers moved into Geprags a few years ago, Hyams saw an opportunity to observe the kind of impact beavers can have on phosphorus absorption as they interact with the landscape. According to Hyams, a lot of streams in Vermont suffer from incision, a process in which the streams straighten out and carve vertically down into the ground rather than curving through the landscape. This causes the velocity of the streams to increase, curbing the amount of water that gets absorbed into the ground. Beavers, in building their dams, fight that process.

In the presentation he gave to the legislature, Hyams pulled up a map of Geprags from 2018. The stream moves through a brown landscape in a fairly straight line. Hyams then overlaid an image that was taken with a drone after three years of beaver activity. A pond flows out over the plain, plant life spreads out from the waterway.

“There’s habitat for everything,” Hyams said. Using the same methodology the state uses to measure floodplain reconnection, Hyams assessed that the beavers had precipitated 25-30 kilograms of phosphorus absorption, more than has been measured at manmade phosphorus absorption projects in the county. Hyams has estimated, using the information Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission has about its own projects, that the beaver’s work was worth about $750,00. The beavers did it for free.

Beavers have other ecological benefits beyond phosphorus absorption. In reconnecting floodplains, they also help with flood management. It might seem counterintuitive that the minor flooding in wetlands helps prevent issues from major floods, but the ways in which wetlands provide winding streams slows water down, spreads it out, and helps it absorb into the ground.

Some of the projects in the state that seek to do floodplain reconnection use beavers as inspiration. Allaire Diamond with the Vermont Land Trust has looked at how beaver analogs — essentially, dams built by people — can help revitalize wetlands. She said finding space for actual beavers to do their work is something the state should explore.

“If we can just give them space to do their work and support them in whatever ways they need, then that feels like a really good use of our resources,” she said.

Diamond said there are plenty of places in the Vermont landscape where beavers could be managed without getting too close to human settlements.

For Hyams, it makes perfect sense to use some of the money the state has allocated for floodplain restoration to landowners managing beavers. The state already provides analogous funding for things like river corridor easements or carbon credits. And, right now, there isn’t much incentive for landowners to keep beavers on their land — after all, they’ve long been understood as nuisances.

“I think the majority of people that take out beaver dams think they’re doing it as a public service,” Hyams said. “I just want the state once, one time, to pay landowners for the phosphorus reduction values that beavers created.”

Should the Legislature take on Hyams’ idea, the cost of doing that might start to look pretty attractive, and maybe, just maybe, landowners will start sending out invitations to beavers.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled phosphorus.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Busy beavers play outsize role in cleaning up waterways in Hinesburg and Vermont.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published by The Citizen on Feb. 20. 

The signs were clear — the hay wagon signs that New York business owner and entrepreneur Raymond Rice put along Route 7 in Charlotte and other neighboring towns a few months ago, that is.

They were so clear, it prompted some Charlotte residents and others in neighboring towns to call their local legislator and the Vermont Agency of Transportation to investigate whether the banners placed on hay wagons along the major highway violated the state’s 57-year-old billboard law.

Now, the drive along Route 7 to the New York border is void of the temporary fixtures, which one Charlotte resident called an “eyesore.” But still, a hay wagon sporting a “Rice Farm and Tires” banner is likely to be the first thing you see upon crossing the border into the Empire State.

The whole debacle is shedding some light on one of Vermont’s most unique and antiquated state laws. What if the sign is on wheels? What if it’s not technically a billboard? What if it’s a banner zip tied to a hay wagon?

For the unofficial sign guy in Vermont, John Kessler — general counsel for the Agency of Commerce and Community Development — the answer, in this situation, was black and white.

Kessler explained it’s not uncommon for the agency to get complaints about signs, but they are usually situations that can be sorted out at the district office level. It’s not every day the complaints make their way up to Kessler, who has over 35 years of institutional knowledge about all things signs in Vermont. He’s also chair of the seven-member Travel Information Council.

“A sign for a business that’s not located there, that’s black and white, it’s not allowable,” he said.

But Rice, the New York business owner and frequent Vermont visitor — he lives roughly 20 miles from the border — argues that his business provides services across Lake Champlain, with a majority of his clients from Vermont.

Although Rice took the signs down last Thursday in the middle of a small snowstorm, he said the idea started brewing as a creative and cost-effective way to advertise his tire business. While the signs on the side of the road — which cost him roughly $300 per wagon — were a clever way to make travelers aware of the services he offers, they were all placed on private property, owned mostly by his farmer friends, strategically in areas where many of his clients would need him.

Not only are most of his clients from Vermont, but his tire service offers on-site help, meaning he technically is providing the service a lot of the time right here in Vermont.

“I don’t have the money for radio. I don’t have money for television,” he said at his shop in Westport, New York, which doubles as his house. “I’m doing everything I can do as Rice Farm and Tires on Facebook, but they always want you to boost your ads and all this stuff, and that costs money. So how do you advertise? And so, I was like, ‘Well, you know, this seems like a good way of advertising.’”

A farmer by blood and trade, Rice turned to the tire business roughly nine months ago after a shop in Vermont quoted him $1,800 for a tire that needed to be replaced on one of his farm rigs. When he learned from a friend that he could buy the same tire for roughly $400 cheaper elsewhere, the wheels in his mind started turning.

While he’s had his hand in farm operations since his youth, his most recent hay business was stalling and the tire business, in more ways than one, just landed in his lap.

The signs, he said, were a way to keep the business coming and with that, also the money.

“I don’t want to be the resident a–hole,” he said. “But I can tell you right now, I’m scared to death that I can’t meet payroll. I mean, we’re only eight or nine months into this thing. It takes a lot to get this started, and this is scary.”

He said his mind was blown receiving emails from residents who were angry, not just about the disruption to scenic views, but that he wasn’t a Vermont business.

For one Charlotte resident, Scott Wilson — who declined to be interviewed — the signs were enough of an annoyance to email Rice and request he remove them, adding that the “billboard on wheels” has caused several people on social media to encourage business elsewhere.

And according to Rep. Chea Waters Evans, D-Charlotte, the outcry from her constituents was enough to bring her to the Charlotte Selectboard meeting earlier this month to notify the town’s government about the signs.

“Put in your phone and see how far it is to Charlotte,” Rice said, pointing to Camel’s Hump peak poking out of the clouds in perfect view from his shop “Vermont’s out my front window. We have a natural barrier, but really, we’re in the Champlain Valley.”

A notice of law violations sent to Rice from a Agency of Transportation project manager, David Hosking, earlier this month told Rice he needed to remove the signs within 14 days from receiving the letter. According to Kessler, statute says that violations could cost $100.

For Rice, who loves his scenic views just as much as the next person, living in a rural area without much commerce requires him to get creative when it comes to gathering clients, especially since the dirt road he lives on nearly washed out during flooding this summer forcing customers to drive even greater distances to reach his shop. And even more so, since there’s only roughly three dairy farmers left in his county.

Sometimes, the only way to look is across the pond, he said.

With the signs down, and with some new attention coming his way, Rice was already cooking up ideas for new business.

“Did you like our hay wagons? Did you dislike them? Either way, mention it and save 20 dollars off an alignment for any alignment scheduled from now until the end of March,” reads a Facebook post from the company.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Wagon signs in Charlotte spur billboard scrutiny.

This story by Patrick Bilow was first published in The Citizen on Dec. 12

Hinesburg is a small rural town with rolling hills, a few remaining dairy farms and longtime neighbors, but despite the community feel, crime has been steadily rising over the last three years and one infraction stands out among the rest.

“It seems like every week there’s a stolen car or a car recovered or something going on that hasn’t traditionally gone on,” Hinesburg police chief Anthony Cambridge said.

Over the weekend, five stolen cars were recovered in Hinesburg, including three at one location on Tyler Bridge Road, and three people were arrested for trespassing and stealing them.

Last month, someone stole a 2006 Jayco RV from a driveway on Ledgewood Lane when the owner was home. That person was eventually arrested after the vehicle was found on North Road, and police discovered another stolen vehicle related to the original crime.

In some cases, frustrated vehicle owners have set out on their own to recover their property before calling the police. One incident in November resulted in a vehicle pursuit and another ended with a brief standoff after police finally caught up to the carjacker.

There have been 51 cases of vehicles stolen or recovered in Hinesburg this year, according to Cambridge. Last year there were 12; in 2022 there were four and in 2021 there was only 1.

Overall, crime rates in Hinesburg are also increasing. Officers have responded to 2,433 cases so far this year. There were 2,106 cases in 2023 and 1,566 cases in 2022.

Cambridge said cases are not only rising but also becoming more severe.

Gone are the days of proactive community policing, like helping with car lockouts or car seat installations.

“Instead, we’re dealing with car thefts or, you know, we go to make a traffic stop and the car flees,” Cambridge said. “The cases are just becoming more intense.”

During his 12 years with the Hinesburg Police Department, Cambridge has noticed spikes in crime, but it was always easy enough to get to the root of what was going on because the incidents were often related.

In most cases, there would be a repeat offender or a notorious individual causing trouble, so the police would arrest that person, or they’d move on, and that crime spike would even out.

“But we have no idea who these people are anymore,” said Cambridge. “There are so many different people involved, and these cases don’t seem to be related. I’ve seen things escalate over the last five years, but the last year, especially the last six months, have gotten tremendously worse.”

Some of the individuals arrested over the past six months are from Hinesburg, but most are from nearby towns, according to police incident reports from the last few months.

Cambridge said most of the stolen cars recovered in Hinesburg were used to get from one place to another, then abandoned.

While some vehicles were stolen and found in Hinesburg, most were stolen elsewhere and recovered in Hinesburg. Of the three cars recovered on Tyler Bridge Road over the weekend, two were from Montpelier and one was from Williston. The individual arrested, Joshua Jerger, is from Starksboro.

In some cases, the stolen cars were also used to commit other crimes like theft. There is a corner at the Hinesburg Police Department for stolen items that were recovered from stolen vehicles. Cambridge said officers have no idea where the items came from or if the owners even know the items are missing.

The recent spike is straining an already-lean police force in Hinesburg. Complicated cases require days of investigation, hours of paperwork and stressful moments in the field, and recent budget issues for the town could make the situation worse as the selectboard considers making personnel cuts in the department.

Two years ago, Hinesburg entered into an agreement to offer police services in Richmond, a town that at the time was struggling to staff a full department. Under the agreement, Cambridge became the acting chief for both towns, reporting to two selectboards and overseeing roughly 80 square miles of police coverage.

Despite this arrangement, Richmond intended on eventually hiring more officers and rebuilding its department, but Cambridge, a resident of Richmond with more than a decade of service in Hinesburg, would remain chief for both towns.

The agreement was advantageous for both towns. Richmond had its first steady police presence in years and Hinesburg was pulling in around $400,000 a year from Richmond for policing in the town, according to Cambridge.

Hinesburg, which currently has six officers, came to rely on that reimbursement, but that money was always earmarked for more officers in Richmond, and starting next year, it will start flowing back to Richmond for recruiting.

The chief hopes to hire four officers in Richmond starting next year, but that means less revenue for Hinesburg, which is struggling with other budget shortfalls after two major flooding events this summer.

Now, as Richmond rebuilds, Hinesburg is considering cutting at least one of its officers, according to selectboard chair Merrily Lovell, depending on Richmond’s recruiting efforts and the status of its contract with Hinesburg. Budget talks are still ongoing, and no decisions have been made.

“I think it’s unfortunate for the police department and the town,” said Cambridge, who added that he also recently lost an important administrative role at the department due to budget cuts. “Nobody wants to see a department go backwards.”

Cambridge hopes the situation will rebound. His vision for policing in Hinesburg and Richmond is to have eight officers and an administrative person for both towns.

But in the meantime, he’s been working to keep up with a rise in crime in both places.

A big part of that effort is communicating criminal activity to the community, which he’s starting to do through Facebook. Last week, he posted a message highlighting the car thefts and reminded people to bring their keys inside with them at night, dispelling rumors that the cars were hotwired.

“We don’t want to scare people,” Cambridge said. “Hinesburg is changing but it’s still a great community. I think transparency is important during a time like this and, you know, I’d advise a little more diligence when it comes to things like car keys.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Crime steadily rises, stolen vehicles spike in Hinesburg.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published in The Citizen on July 11, 2024.

Way out on a hill off Route 7 sits a sprawling property iconically marked by red-roofed barns that strikingly contrast with the Green Mountain landscape around them.

Inching closer to Charlotte, the noise of a bustling city begins to fade as chirps from the insects, crickets, and other wildlife fill the air. Those barns are more commonly known as Nordic Farm, a standing testament to what was once a booming dairy industry in Vermont.

Now, as two new owners close on the latest sale of the property, there is no extravagant plan in the works — not quite yet. Instead, the New York natives plan to do something much more grandiose: “Keep it simple.”

Benjamin Dobson and Kaspar Meier, a prominent farmer and a builder from Columbia County in New York, closed on the sale of the conserved property of just under 600 acres on July 2 after it spent more than a year on the market without any serious interest.

But according to Meier, the duo has taken up the challenge, “hook, line, and sinker.” They bought the property for $2.2 million, significantly less than the grand list value of $3.2 million.

A long history

The property has seen a frequent shift in ownership and ideas over the last decade, but at one point it was home to one of the state’s most prolific dairy operations with nearly 300 milking heifers during its prime. In 2004, it became the first farm in New England to install robotic milking equipment under the ownership of Clark Hinsdale III.

In 2014, Hinsdale sold the dairy operation to the farm’s longtime manager, Michael LeClair, who filed for bankruptcy just three years later.

The high-profile farm went through a few different owners who offered a variety of ideas for its future. In 2018, Andrew Peterson, owner of Peterson Quality Malt, partnered with a group of investors led by Jay and Matt Canning of Hotel Vermont to buy the property.

But the most notable endeavor came just three years ago from the entrepreneurial mind of Will Raap, the visionary behind ventures like Gardeners Supply and the Intervale Center, which has acted as a launching pad and educational resource for farms across the state.

The massive undertaking was forged under the name Earthkeep Farmcommon and was poised to usher in a new era of regenerative, diversified farming that balanced nonprofit research, innovation and education all within a single hub.

But when Raap died just a year later in December 2022, the plans were halted, and the farm found itself yet again at an unforeseen crossroads.

The property was listed for sale last April by the Raap family, who began working with land broker LandVest to find its next willing proprietor.

Back to its roots

Meier said the business partners were in no way looking to take on a new adventure, but due to some good marketing on the part of LandVest, they somehow serendipitously heard about the farm way across the state border just under four hours away.

“It just had our names all over it,” Meier said, grinning, his hands covered in dirt after spending a scorching hot July day working on the expansive property. “A lot of the locals are kind of telling me, ‘You know, this place has eaten many a man.’ That kind of makes me smile because it’s a challenge. And that doesn’t bother me.”

He said he was somewhat surprised that locals hadn’t snatched up a property like this sooner, and the price point made it a no-brainer once the opportunity presented itself.

“If it had been twice that, that wouldn’t be an option,” he said.

Meier has already relocated to Vermont and has spent the better part of six weeks cleaning up the place, which has been relatively vacant for years. But he said he’s already started to experience the Vermont charm, so to speak, especially in contrast to his home in Columbia County that he says has caved to development pressures over the years.

“Dealing with Vermonters here seemed easier,” he said. “It’s a little more straightforward. You can shake people’s hands and it seems you can be confident they’re going to do what they say.”

Both Dobson and Meier have farming in their blood. For Dobson, the list is seemingly endless. From managing farming efforts in the Hudson Valley and across the globe to spearheading research into the impacts of regenerative farming practices on carbon sequestration, he has had his hands in the soil for most, if not all, of his life.

Most notable are his efforts working with Abby Rockefeller, the eldest daughter of David Rockefeller and Margaret McGrath. According to reporting by the Hill County Observer in 2020, Rockefeller took ownership of an expansive property known as Old Muck Creek Farm in 2012 and began the long process of restoring the land, which had previously been used for pesticide trials, using regenerative and organic farming methods.

Rockefeller hired Dobson to manage farm operations, and they later become leaders in the hemp industry when the two launched Hudson Hemp in 2017.

Meier and Dobson have known each other for years, mostly since both families had been pioneers in the organic farming industry in the New York area during the late 1970s into the early 1980s.

For Meier, originally from Switzerland, his family moved to the U.S. in 1975, where his father became one of the early founders of Hawthorne Valley Farm, a fully diversified farm with a working dairy, pigs, chickens and a variety of field crops and vegetables as well as a cheese-plant and bakery.

Meier later joined his father, who was leading efforts around biodynamic tropical agriculture in the Dominican Republic at his banana and mango farm.

Although Meier has spent most of the last two decades in the contracting and building business, he said the opportunity to farm on a scale like this was ultimately what drew him back to his roots.

“I’m a farmer at heart,” he said. “That’s what I’d rather do than go build fancy places all over the place that are taking over the farms. Ben and I have a big benefit and we’ve been all over the world and worked in agricultural ventures all over the world in a different variety.”

A simple vision

For now, the duo doesn’t have any massive plans, and Meier has spent most of his time at the property mowing, clearing walking trails, and working to stabilize certain parts of the antique barn that sits closest to Route 7.

While it’s premature to say exactly what will happen in the future as ideas are expected to be ever evolving, in the short time, he said, it makes most sense to grow grass and hay for grazing.

“Because Vermont produces grass better than anywhere I’ve seen in the country,” he said. “You can feed more cattle per acre here than you can in many places. So, from that perspective, if managed well, there should be a lot of opportunities here. Maybe it’ll be a whole variety of animals, but we’ll go slow at first and not come in with fixed expectations of what exactly we’re going to walk into because it’s premature.”

Meier has been the familiar face around the property, while Dobson, who lives with his family just across the Massachusetts border, goes back and forth as often as possible.

“You can’t have a farm like this and all these buildings and these things and not tend to it,” he said. “The last thing this place would need is an absentee landowner.”

But for now, they are taking things back to square one, with the hope that in the future, the infrastructure can continue to be a support system and beacon of hope for other farms in the area.

“Because we don’t really look at this farm as something that’s just ours and for ourselves, we’re just kind of temporarily here to care for it and reverse course,” he said. “Plain and simple, the farm’s been looking hard for a future here. So, here we are. Back to square one.”

Other businesses that have run out of the newer barn on the property — a seawater shrimp farm, Sweet Sound Aquaculture and the House of Fermentology, an offshoot of Foam Brewers, along with several rental properties — will remain for now, he said.

During a time when more and more farms seem to be falling prey to an increasingly difficult market, the sale of Nordic Farm will hopefully sow new seeds into the agricultural realm, even just for a moment.

It certainly won’t be a walk in the park, but as Meier puts it, farming anything is never easy, and in some ways, that’s part of the adventure.

“We’re not better at anything than anyone else, other than we might have a different perspective and different life experiences, so we might just approach many of the things differently,” Meier said. “But we don’t have any exciting news for the town of Charlotte. We’re just farmers and we want to keep it simple. That’s the story for now.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: New Nordic Farm owners say, ‘keep it simple’.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published in The Citizen on June 20.

After a turbulent budget season last year that left Charlotte divided over employee health care costs and wages, the town’s municipal employees are now looking to join a union.

According to a petition from the Vermont Labor Relations Board that was discussed in executive session at last week’s board meeting, 10 town employees — library workers, the zoning administrator and town planner, assistant town clerk, and volunteer coordinator at the Charlotte Senior Center — are eligible to be represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 93.

According to the petition, AFSCME Council 93 is requesting an election by the Vermont Labor Board in Charlotte as a majority of the town’s employees have indicated their intent to join the union.

Jim Durkin, director of legislation and political action at the council — which represents workers across New England — said that the entire process of joining a union, like anything else, typically starts with a conversation.

“They’ll hear about somebody, a friend or even an acquaintance, who is represented by a union and as a result, is doing better wage-wise,” he said. “Then the process is to have people sign cards indicating their desire to at least explore things further. Once you reach a certain threshold on those cards, you file for an election and the campaign begins.”

Town planner Larry Lewack said he was reluctant to go into any detail about the efforts at this point, mostly because the union has not been formally recognized and the town is currently working with its attorney on the matter.

“The bottom line is that some of the town employees believe that it would be in our interest to participate in the union to have more of a say in working conditions and salaries and benefits with the town,” he said. “It’s like we want to have a voice in the conversations and decisions that impact our jobs and our lives, just like employees from many other towns across Vermont and New England who have joined this particular union.”

Lewack said that as the legislative body for the town, the selectboard has been asked to recognize the union without a formal election, but the selectboard has not yet decided do that, which triggers a formal election certification process.

“I don’t really want to comment on the process because it hasn’t resolved yet,” he said. “Lawyers are involved, and it would be bad to get into the sort of details of what’s come up between the union and the selectboard because we don’t have a contract and we’re not recognized yet. It’s all up in the air at this moment.”

New statewide legislation, Act 117, passed into law this year, says that after July 1, no election process is needed should a majority of employees express a formal interest in unionizing. This process, known as, “majority authorization,” Durkin said, is often referred to as, “card check.”

“The reason card check is so important is it neutralizes that period, under the old system, between signing those cards and the election because management typically has extreme advantage in terms of being able to bring their employees into meetings and saying, ‘You don’t need a union. You don’t want a union. It’s nothing but trouble,’ that kind of thing.”

Lewack confirmed that since the majority of town employees have signed cards, they would be eligible for majority authorization.

Employee health benefits have for years been outlined in a personnel policy that is crafted and amended by the selectboard. Several questions to town administrator Nate Bareham regarding how unionization would affect the town’s personnel policy have gone unanswered.

But Lewack said he imagines the personnel policy will have to change once negotiations begin for their first contract, which will act as the ultimate governing policy for employees.

The board is still on track to cut nearly $30,000 from employee health benefits packages this year, a promise made to voters after its budget was voted down at last year’s Town Meeting Day. The issue boiled over in a contentious battle between some taxpayers upset by tax increases, mostly associated with employee costs, and workers who said they felt “blindsided” by proposed cuts to their compensation packages.

The board charged a working group, spearheaded by board member Kelly Devine, at that time to find cost savings for the town, but even members of the group were divided on where to make cuts.

Now, Devine and board member Lewis Mudge have been working with Blue Cross Blue Shield to work on a new benefit package for employees. At the meeting last week, Devine said that the duo is meeting with a representative from the company to go over potential options, which will then be brought before employees.

“We were definitely looking to reduce the number of options of plans that are offered to streamline things administratively,” she said.

But board chair Jim Faulkner reiterated that, regardless, the board has a certain amount of money to shave off.

“We’ve got to get to $30,000,” Mudge agreed. “That’s what we committed to.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Charlotte employees mobilize for a union.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published by The Citizen on April 18.

A stir over tree planting at recent Charlotte Selectboard meetings has left the town without a tree warden and two deputy tree wardens as all three resigned recently from their positions.

What began as an effort to plant trees along State Park Road has turned into a chaotic debacle over process, contracts and how exactly the funds used to plant trees should be doled out.

Typically, money used for trees planted on public lands comes from the Rutter Tree Fund, which was set up in 2006 and now contains $32,000, including $20,000 that has come from a voter-approved spending for ash tree removal.

In November, a group spearheading the tree planting initiative asked the selectboard to approve up to $10,000 from the tree fund to buy and plant nearly 50 trees along State Park Road.

After getting approval from the selectboard, Mark Dillenbeck, the town’s former appointed tree warden, entered a contract with the private property owner, Joshua Golek, since the trees were being planted on his property.

But when complaints began circulating in town about how the trees might obstruct views, the selectboard started to explore the process under which tree-planting decisions are made — especially if they happen on private property — and who should control the distribution of Rutter Tree Fund money.

“The goal of this project was to begin an initiative to plant trees along the town trails to enhance them,” former deputy tree warden Alexa Lewis said. “This particular site was checked out of the map of the viewsheds in town that are supposed to be protected. It’s not one of those. It’s not in a scenic district. The property owner had a strong desire to delineate the public trails from his private property, so we had gone through all these steps.”

Although the selectboard approved the fund allocations in November, the board ultimately nixed the State Park Road tree planting at a meeting on April 9, just days before nearly 50 trees were set to be delivered and 40 volunteers were set to begin planting, saying that after attorney review, the tree-planting contract with the private property owner was considered “null and void.”

While there was discussion about the tree-planting agreements in open session, the contract with the private property owner was discussed in secret.

“The reason this has been pushed forward is that we have a private group putting trees on private land, and we want to just to make sure the taxpayer would not be burdened by this in any way,” selectboard chair Jim Faulkner said. “We want to make sure that the taxpayer, as time goes on and the trees get bigger, that fertilization, mulching, trimming or whatever, that the town has no responsibility because these trees are being put on private land.”

Board member Lewis Mudge said that the entire problem boils down to an issue with process.

“That to me, and I’m speaking for myself, not for the board, is the crux of the matter,” Mudge said.

Just one day after that selectboard meeting Dillenbeck, Lewis and the other deputy tree warden, Susan Smith, all resigned.

Dillenbeck wrote in a letter, “I am resigning because work with the current selectboard has become arduous and unproductive. The selectboard seems to be more interested in creating barriers than in facilitating our volunteer work. Communication has been poor. Important tree warden-related items appear on the selectboard meeting agenda, and I have not been informed. This has felt disrespectful.”

Lewis, in her statement to the newspaper, outlined that over the past two decades the town has planted dozens of trees on private property with a simple tree-planting agreement outlining the cooperation of the town and the landowner.

“I am unaware of any property owner coming back to the town with maintenance demands for the trees. Given the cooperation of the community, the property owners and the town, why does the selectboard treat property owners as enemies that the town needs to be protected from,” she wrote.

Although the town is now in the works of updating its tree-planting agreement, the town’s website also outlines that roadside trees may be planted on private property, and even gives an outline of how the town should go about that.

“In these instances, the Tree Warden will consult with the property owner and enter into a tree agreement to share responsibility for planting and maintenance of the tree,” according to the town’s website.

According to Lewis, the agreement used for State Park Road was based on a template created by the previous tree warden, Larry Hamilton, and reviewed by the town attorney. It was modified for State Park Road, adding additional protections for the town, she said.

But in a later phone call, Lewis further explained that legal issues arose with the passage of Act 171 in 2020, which inserted the local legislative body into the process when a tree warden enters into an agreement with a landowner.

“To make the contract valid, the selectboard could have, at its April 9 meeting, authorized the tree warden to sign or simply co-sign the agreement; but the board chose not to,” she wrote.

Nearly 20 of the trees were able to be planted at the town garage last week, but at a special meeting on Monday night, the selectboard decided to plant the remaining trees at the Charlotte Wildlife Refuge as part of a reforestation project. The $3,000 cost will come from the $20,000 in the Rutter Tree Fund allocated by voters for ash-tree removal.

Lewis questioned if even that was legally allowed, since the board may need a vote of the taxpayers to authorize a change in the use of the funds.

Board member Kelly Devine said the board heard from multiple residents who feel they have not had the appropriate opportunity for public input on where trees go in town.

“While we all love trees, people have different opinions as to where they’d be best suited,” she said. “So, we hope to open up that opportunity going forward.”

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated which news outlet originally published this story.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tree planting divides Charlotte; 3 officials resign from volunteer board.

This story by Corey McDonald was first published by The Citizen on April 11.

An Act 250 commission denied a major housing project in Hinesburg over flooding concerns.

The project, Hinesburg Center II, has been in the works for nearly a decade, and received approval from the town’s development review board in February 2023. Plans called for creating 21 new lots in the town’s village growth area off Route 116 near Patrick Brook and would have included 73 new homes — 15 single family homes, two nine-unit buildings, one six-unit building and one 34-unit building.

Brett Grabowski, a developer with Milot Real Estate in Williston who co-owns the property with the David Lyman Revocable Trust, had proposed using fill to raise the elevation of the property above the current FEMA-based flood elevation to build structures on.

But the Vermont Natural Resources Board said there were still concerns about the project’s location on a floodplain. The project’s use of fill to elevate structures on the property “will cause an increase, and will contribute incrementally to an increase, in the horizontal extent and level of flood waters during peak flows up to and including the base flood discharge.”

“Placing the fill in the floodplain effectively cuts off the existing, lower elevation areas that provide floodwater storage and conveyance while subsequently raising the water surface elevations adjacent to the project during times of flooding,” wrote Thomas Little, the chair of the Act 250 District 4 Commission.

The project is the third iteration of continued commercial and residential development in Hinesburg’s village area. The first two phases included the Creekside Project and Hinesburg Center I, which brought Kinney Drugs, the Parkside Cafe and other housing units to town several years ago.

The Act 250 commission took specific concern with future property owners on the property tract. Little in the denial said that “the current owner is accepting increased flood risk for subsequent owners who are not part of this process, hence the whole development becomes (flood-prone) adjacent landowners.”

Grabowski, the principal developer on the project, disagreed with the ruling, and said that the specific policy by which the project was denied was arbitrary.

“They will argue that they are applying this policy to all applications, but in essence, that is kind of the problem,” he said. “A project that is potentially proposed for a floodplain, say, in the Winooski River is not the same impact as a project proposed for the floodplain of the Patrick Brook.”

He added: “It’s very much, we feel, an apples and oranges type of situation, but they are applying the same standard to all applications, and which we don’t feel is appropriate.”

Grabowski said they have not made any decisions yet on how they’ll proceed. There is a 30-day window to appeal from the March 27 denial.

While the town of Hinesburg is an interested party and could appeal the decision, Alex Weinhagen, the town’s director of planning and zoning, said there are no plans to do so.

The denial adds some concern for the town. Hinesburg’s village area, 40 square miles of land off Route 116 wedged between the LaPlatte River and Patrick Brook, has for decades been targeted by the town for new housing and commercial growth.

Those plans are quickly coming to fruition, and town officials have banked on the more than 300 units of housing development, as well as the added commercial development, to inject badly needed tax revenue into town coffers.

Only 8% of the town’s tax base comes from commercial and industrial, leaving the rest for residential taxpayers, who have been shouldering an increasing cost for services that other towns Hinesburg’s size do not have.

To try to increase tax revenue, the town has pursued a path of development in its village district. But concerns over this strategy have mounted in recent years, given the village area’s proximity to the Patrick Brook floodplain.

In a recent survey, town residents cited water and flooding issues as one of the top challenges facing the town. Those concerns have likely been influenced by the damage wrought by July’s flooding in places like Montpelier. Hinesburg was largely spared any major damage, but a portion of the town’s village area was very briefly underwater.

Grabowski said these flooding concerns may have influenced the state in their denial of the project.

“I’ll be really honest with you, yes, it is a very politically charged topic, you can’t deny that,” he said. “I think that this project is suffering because of it.”

Officials with the Natural Resources Board were not immediately available for comment but said previously in documents that the effects of climate change and more intense rainstorms may lead to greater flooding at sites that may not yet be captured in current FEMA hydraulic modeling.

“While we understand the critical need for more housing in our state, it does not seem prudent to be constructing new affordable or (any) housing in an area vulnerable to flooding, putting potentially unknowing members of the public at future risk and displacement,” Kyle Medash, a floodplain manager with Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources, said in previous documents.

Previous phases of the development, including Hinesburg Center I, were “pretty thoroughly vetted” at the time, Weinhagen said.

“The developer had some very sophisticated hydrological modeling done by a very reputable firm, that the town has used in the past as well, and the state provided feedback, but they didn’t have the same level of concern that they’ve expressed with this project,” he said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Citing flooding concerns, Act 250 commission denies Hinesburg housing project.

This article by Corey McDonald was first published in The Citizen on Dec. 14.

Williston is asking Hinesburg and Richmond for help in funding the Williston Community Justice Center, a regional group that provides restorative services to resolve civil disputes in local communities that is expected to see its workload climb as its state funding potentially drops.

In a memo to the two towns, Williston Town Manager Erik Wells asked if they could provide a fiscal year 2025 budget allocation for the justice center. Since its inception, the center has been primarily funded through grants from the Vermont Department of Corrections, with some funds provided by the town of Williston, the grantee.

The center serves the towns of Williston, Richmond, Hinesburg, Huntington, Bolton and St. George, as well as parts of Shelburne, Charlotte, Jericho and Underhill — specifically for school referrals.

But in recent years, Wells said, “the future of the grant funding from the DOC has become uncertain, and in the forthcoming legislature session changes may occur for the future of the funding model.”

Cristalee McSweeney is the executive director for the center and is currently its only full-time employee. The center also has dozens of volunteers but has three part-time staffers that work an equivalent of one 40-hour-a-week position.

One former restorative justice specialist left in November 2022, and the center has been working with a temporary staff ever since, Wells said.

With the growing number of cases, and “the growing complexities of cases that we have,” McSweeney said it became “apparent that Williston couldn’t handle the full financial responsibility and that we really were looking for some extra financial contributions from the towns that do receive quite a bit of our services.”

“This is driven by community support. I have 65 volunteers who spend their time caring for their communities, wanting to be a part of their communities and be a part of the solution, which I think is just a beautiful thing,” she said. “But we need to have funding for staff so that everything we’re doing is sustainable, and we’re not experiencing staff burnout.”

There are 18 community justice centers in Vermont, and each county in the state has access to one. Both Hinesburg and Richmond’s police departments — which are now both overseen by Hinesburg police chief Anthony Cambridge — have memorandum of understanding agreements with Williston’s justice center.

Hinesburg, town officials said, used to have its own community justice center that was grant funded, but that money stopped, so the town joined the regional entity.

“I do think the town does get a benefit out of it. We should contribute something. What that contribution is I don’t know,” Hinesburg town manager Todd Odit said at a selectboard meeting. “But over time this is going to grow. I think the state support is going to decline and it’s going to become more on the communities to fund these.”

Instead of sending minor crimes to the court system, police departments and other law enforcement agencies like prosecutors — as well as agencies like school districts and the Department of Children and Families — can send referrals to a community justice center, where victims can meet with the person who committed a crime against them.

A person caught graffitiing a public building, for example, or someone caught shoplifting, may be referred to a community justice center.

From there, staff and volunteers from the community conduct an in-depth intake and try to learn what underlying factors may have contributed to the criminal act, be it socioeconomic or social struggles. After the intake, the person will be set up in a restorative circle or restorative panel in front of staff and community members, and oftentimes come face to face with the victims of the act.

“Our role is to help set them up for success and not to fail,” McSweeney said. “We want to make sure that the people that we’re bringing into the program, number one, have a willingness to accept responsibility, and a willingness to be held accountable, and a willingness to work with people who have been impacted by their behavior.”

While the Williston Community Justice Center has seen 200 cases per year on average, according to McSweeney, that caseload is expected to grow following the Legislature’s passage of Act 11 in July, which clears the way for survivors of sexual and domestic violence to take their cases to justice centers rather than the court system.

“Our caseloads as you can imagine will grow exponentially,” McSweeney said. The job is already a lot of work that “falls to my shoulders, and with a growing caseload of direct referrals … my phone rings 24 hours a day for needs for our communities.”

Wells said in his memo that grant funding for the center will continue for the 2025 fiscal year at least but the town is expecting a $20,000 drop in grant funding from the previous year to $123,000. Williston in fiscal year 2024 contributed $52,000 as well as in-kind services.

Wells said the bottom line for funding in 2025 will be $195,000. “After backing out of the anticipated grant award it leaves $72,000 in operating revenue required for the program.”

The thought, Wells said, was to use the population of their communities as a starting point for a possible cost-share program — a method used by Colchester to help fund the Essex Community Justice Center.

In that model, Richmond could potentially contribute $15,840 annually while Hinesburg would provide $18,000, based on a $100,000 total contribution.

In discussing the proposal, Hinesburg town officials indicated that they would prefer a model based on service usage.

“They do lots of things that sound great, but they’re not all happening in Hinesburg,” selectboard member Maggie Gordon said. “So, finding a means of figuring out a percentage of what we should pay needs to be based on services we’re actually receiving.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Williston asks other towns to help fund justice center.

This story by Corey McDonald was first published in The Citizen on Dec. 14.

The Champlain Valley School District and the Hinesburg Police Department in a joint statement acknowledged the need for “better communication and collaboration” following a jumbled response to the discovery of a handgun and drugs earlier this month at the Hinesburg Community School.

In the aftermath of the incident on Dec. 1, when Hinesburg Community School students discovered a loaded handgun and, later, more than 30 grams of suspected crack cocaine outside of the school, the district and police department offered conflicting narratives of events, and some parents expressed concern that information was not relayed to them in a timely manner.

Both parties in their statement apologized to the Hinesburg community for “any distress or confusion this may have caused” and noted that they were “working toward a robust and effective partnership in the future.”

The statement, issued Friday, followed several meetings between school and town officials, including the school district Superintendent Rene Sanchez, chief operations officer Gary Marckres, Hinesburg police chief Anthony Cambridge and Hinesburg town manager Todd Odit.

Those meetings were facilitated by the Williston Community Justice Center.

“Over the last two days, we came together to build an understanding of the sequence of Friday’s event,” the letter reads. “We reached an agreement for many of Friday’s events and now recognize that misunderstandings in communications and authority impacted the response.”

Hinesburg residents Alex and Taylor Goodchild, the parents of the child who picked up the weapon and initially gave it to a teacher, said during a recent selectboard meeting that the police department was “really open with us and responded quickly and appropriately,” and added that the school contacted them immediately.

But, according to reporting from Seven Days, other parents of children among the group that found the handgun expressed frustration that the school never directly notified them of what had happened, aside from a district-wide letter sent on Dec. 3.

“We were contacted immediately, and we’re very appreciative of that,” Taylor Goodchild said. “I think that has a lot of families really concerned and worried feeling like they weren’t contacted because it didn’t — it wasn’t their child and they’re hearing that it was, and so from our perspective and what we’re feeling is we felt like we were supported in that, and that communication I think wasn’t clear with families.”

Alex Goodchild told town officials that he hoped the incident results in “a change in the order of any incident happening in a school zone.”

“It needs to be reported to the administration at the school — whether it’s a car accident, a burglary or a crime,” he said, “because in that case then they can have more time to prepare.”

At around 10 a.m. on Dec. 1, a group of students outside of the school at recess discovered a handgun near the school’s playground. One of the children brought it to a teacher, school officials said, and school employees immediately alerted the school’s co-principals, who called the police.

The investigation remains underway, but police have previously suggested the gun and drugs were tied to an incident the previous night. Just before 11 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 30, police arrested Jermaine Rushing, 26, of Brooklyn, N.Y., for driving under the influence, excessive speed, negligent operation and leaving the scene of an accident.

Rushing sped along Route 116, attracting the attention of patrolmen, and led them on a chase before crashing into a tree at the intersection of Route 116 and Silver Street near the school. Rushing fled the scene.

The school turned over the gun to the police. The two officers, Andrew Thomas and Nick Labonte, then canvassed the school’s grounds. But it wasn’t until later in the day, after the officers had left and returned to the department, that school district officials notified police they had found the drugs on school grounds as well.

The school district released its narrative of events on Sunday, but by then, social media was rife with rumors.

The police department’s narrative released that Monday then complicated matters. According to police, Thomas and Labonte, after returning to the department, told police Chief Anthony Cambridge that a school administrator wouldn’t let police search an outdoor classroom area because a class was in session.

“Officer Labonte voiced concern that the kindergarten class was still outside after a loaded firearm was found,” Cambridge wrote in his timeline of the police response. He said Labonte asked the school administrator, “Can we search where the kids are?” but “she didn’t want to disturb or scare the kindergarteners.”

Whether that issue was resolved in the meetings is unclear. Cambridge did not return messages seeking comment.

“From my perspective, there’s not a lot of good that could come out of going back and saying who was right about this thing or the other thing, that’s not going to change what happened,” Odit said during a selectboard meeting. “What it can do is impact future actions and future situations. That’s really our goal.”

Police returned to the school later that morning after Tim Trevithick, one of the co-principals at the school, told police that several small bags of drugs were found in the outdoor classroom area that hadn’t been searched, according to the police.

Cambridge asked him to bring the kids in immediately, and police returned to collect the drugs. Cambridge told The Citizen last week that he had been surprised that kids were allowed outside after the gun had been discovered.

In their statement, both parties said they are “dedicated to establishing open lines of communication.” To facilitate this, the parties agreed to several commitments, including “frequent and regular communication,” and the creation of a shared policy between the district and the town’s three public service agencies.

The Hinesburg police, the statement reads, will serve as a regular member of the Hinesburg Community School Safety and Security Committee and will attend regular safety and security meetings with the district.

The statement also said that representatives from the school and police department “were harmed by the media coverage, social media posts, and direct attacks on their reported actions” and that “other members of the community, students, caregivers, teachers, and others were also impacted.”

“For the community to believe we deserve their trust, we need to build trust among one another,” the statement reads. “To do that, we will demonstrate integrity, humility, and honesty towards each other.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: School district, police apologize for lapse in communication.

This story by Corey McDonald was first published in The Citizen on Oct. 26.

Hinesburg is probing whether to back out of its membership with the Green Mountain Transit Authority, with several selectboard members questioning whether the financial arrangement is fair for the town.

Any decision on the matter would be months away. The town will likely not dedicate any time to the issue until after its fiscal year 2025 budget has been finalized. But it highlights growing concerns around the town’s arrangement with the transit authority as Hinesburg faces a tight budget and an expected tax increase of more than 7 percent next year.

“I am all for public transportation,” selectboard member Mike Loner said. “But I’m also very worried that we’re using Hinesburg taxpayers’ dollars for a benefit that is very limited to our use.”

Hinesburg this fiscal year paid $51,000 to the transit authority, a 4 percent increase over the prior year, according to Todd Odit, Hinesburg’s town manager. Three years ago, in 2021, the town paid $45,000.

Green Mountain Transit has lines that run through every one of Chittenden County’s towns and cities and has commuter lines that run to Montpelier and parts of Lamoille, Franklin and Grand Isle counties.

But the agency relies on funding from only eight municipalities in the county: Burlington, South Burlington, Hinesburg, Shelburne, Williston, Essex, Winooski and Milton.

Other towns pay minor contributions for service to their towns, like Jericho and Underhill, but the agency does not have the same power of assessment in those towns, so it’s a much lower level of local investment. These assessment fees range as high as $2 million for Burlington to Hinesburg’s $51,000.

Hinesburg has one commuter line that runs through town. The bus line runs from Burlington through Route 116 and stops at the Hinesburg Town Hall Park and Ride before circling back.

Procedurally, the selectboard would need to vote to withdraw from authority. If the vote passed, it would take a full fiscal year after notice was given before it went into effect. If, for example, the board voted to remove itself this year, it wouldn’t take effect until fiscal year 2026, beginning June in 2025.

“We should have done it last year,” selectboard member Dennis Place said.

The hope among other town selectboard members is that the state will formulate a new funding mechanism for public transportation in the state.

“We can do that dramatic thing of taking ourselves out of membership,” selectboard chair Merrily Lovell said, “but hopefully before we come to that decision, the Green Mountain Transit will come up with a different funding fee.”

Phil Pouech, Hinesburg’s state representative and former selectboard member, sits on the House Committee on Transportation. He told selectboard members that a study looking into how to improve funding for Vermont transit is set to come before the Legislature in January.

“Nothing will happen right away,” Pouech said. “But it’s the start of understanding the equitable way to fund it.”

There’s no certainty a new model will come about. The state has been looking into new funding models for decades, and efforts to lobby the Legislature for a more equitable distribution have come and gone.

Last year, the transit authority said it would begin initiating fares again after pausing that plan during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s just hard to imagine the Legislature could act,” selectboard member Maggie Gordon said.

These questions come up as the town faces financial pressure in its fiscal year 2025 budget. Hinesburg residents are expecting an at least 7 percent municipal tax rate increase amid a consecutive year of declining non-tax revenues.

The town is also facing pressure financing capital improvement projects. Plans to renovate both the town hall and fire department were put on hold after officials received bids for the town’s wastewater treatment facility project, state mandated work that would have cost well over $15 million.

Hinesburg has pegged much of its future revenue expectations on new development coming online. More than 400 units of housing are planned for the town’s village off Route 116.

“As you’re looking at the budget, looking at that line item and saying ‘What are we getting out of it? Why do we have this?’ That’s totally understandable,” Pouech said. “I would hope to come back at some point and talk about the benefits and, looking into the future, why it’s an important part of our town development.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hinesburg questions bus service contribution.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published in The Citizen on Oct. 12.

Some Charlotte residents have expressed concern over short-term rentals — like those found on Airbnb and VRBO — and are urging the selectboard to regulate them.

After learning that a nearby house was operating as an Airbnb rental with no permanent owner living there, several neighbors brought their concerns to both the selectboard and planning commission.

They say issues arose at the location one weekend when over a dozen cars were parked at the house, which spilled over to the property next door, as well as complaints over “disruptive” traffic on the private road.

“In effect, it has become a purely commercial enterprise in a residential neighborhood. We don’t know how extensive a practice this has become in our town, but it is very disconcerting to those of us who are permanent residents,” resident and former Charlotte House representative, Mike Yantachka wrote in a letter to the selectboard signed by four of his neighbors. “Short-term rental properties are characterized by continuously changing occupants who are unfamiliar with the neighborhood and the understandings we neighbors have concerning behavior, road maintenance and protocol, and property boundaries.”

According to AirDNA data, as of August there were 53 active short-term rental listings available in Charlotte, a 7 percent decrease from that same month last year. In total, over 904 nights were booked across all properties for that same month.

For reference, data also shows that the neighboring city of South Burlington had 75 active short-term rentals in March.

“We have two points of entry into town which are very tourist-intensive,” Charlie Pughe, chair of the planning commission, said at a selectboard meeting last week. “We have the ferry that comes in multiple times a day. We also have Mount Philo, which is the single most used state park in Vermont. I think we need to figure out what that does and how we capitalize that as we move forward as a community.”

Pughe said short-term rentals are one of those things Charlotte needs to look at when talking about its future.

Currently, Charlotte has no mechanism to regulate short-term rentals.

According to town planner Larry Lewack, short-term rentals are regulated through an ordinance that starts at the selectboard level, not through land use regulations.

In towns that regulate them, the process starts with an ordinance “adopted by the legislative body of the town or municipality that sets forth the terms under which short-term rentals can operate and usually involves a registration fee and having some enforcement by the town,” he said.

Yantachka said that in addition to property concerns, neighbors fear that short-term rentals also negatively impact housing availability when properties are bought solely for commercial use.

“There are people that would like to move to Charlotte because they’re offered a job, but they just can’t find a place to buy,” he said. “These are really commercial properties, and they need to be in a special category. They’re not the same as somebody renting out a couple of rooms in their house during ski season.”

Selectboard member Kelly Devine suggested that the planning commission and selectboard work together to set up a rental registration that would allow the selectboard to gather data before considering future regulations.

“We’d have data on a variety of things, including how often they rent to someone, and we could also capture some of the short-term rentals, hopefully, that we know are not going through the state tax system now because they’re not operating through one of the online services that remits to the state,” Devine said.

No formal decisions were taken, but selectboard chair Jim Faulkner did suggest that the board revisit the issue.

“Certainly, enough interest has surfaced on short-term rental rentals that I think that we should put it on the agenda again, and come up with some kind of plan,” he said. “I think we’re at a point now that there’s enough interest to move forward.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Charlotte residents push for rental regulations.

This story by Corey McDonald was first published Sept. 21 in The Citizen.

A major housing and commercial development in the works since at least 2015 is hung up in Vermont Environmental Court over concerns the project will create an increased risk of flooding near Patrick Brook.

Hinesburg Center II would create 21 new lots in the town’s village growth area off Route 116 and would include 73 new homes — 15 single family homes, two nine-unit buildings, one six-unit building and one 34-unit building. More than 14,000 square feet of space for office and retail space is also queued up for the area.

It’s a continuation of development that brought Kinney Drugs, the Parkside Cafe and other housing units to town several years ago. But documents from the project’s Act 250 hearings that began this summer show there are concerns around its location near a floodplain, and whether that risk may increase as climate change continues to intensify.

“Our concern with the currently proposed project is that it creates an increased risk of flooding on the project property before any impacts of climate change may be considered, as well as resulting in the loss of floodplain function in the Patrick Brook and LaPlatte floodplains which impacts the floodplain’s ability to mitigate future flooding,” said Kyle Medash, a floodplain manager with Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources.

Hinesburg’s village area, 40 square miles of land off Route 116 wedged between the LaPlatte River and Patrick Brook, has for decades been targeted by the town for new housing and commercial growth.

At least 400 units of residential housing are set either for approval or construction in the area — including Haystack Crossing, the town’s largest housing development in its history, which will bring 176 housing units to the west side of Route 116 just north of Kinney Drugs.

Hinesburg’s Development Review Board in February gave the Hinesburg Center II project the green light. The 46.2-acre property to be developed is co-owned by the David Lyman Revocable Trust and Brett Grabowski, a developer based in Williston; neither could be reached for comment.

In a letter of support submitted to the Agency of Natural Resources, the Hinesburg Selectboard said that the project has been “rigorously and thoroughly reviewed by the town,” and received unanimous conditional use approval for development in a special flood hazard area, fluvial erosion hazard area and stream setback area from the town’s developmoent review board.

“Although portions of the HCII project are in a flood hazard area,” the selectboard wrote, “the town has extensively reviewed these impacts and found that … development to the north (in the Village Northwest zoning district) will have limited impacts on the Patrick Brook flood hazard area.”

In addition, the selectboard said the project would “provide critically needed affordable and reasonably priced housing” and provide road and pedestrian connections to the north to one of the town’s major planning goals.

The state held a public hearing on Aug. 23, presided over by Tom Little, chair of the District 4 Commission, which oversees Act 250. The commission on Sept. 6 asked for additional information from various parties, which are due by Oct. 6.

“Presumably the district commission will then deliberate on all this, and issue a decision,” Alex Weinhagen, Hinesburg’s planning and zoning director, said. “Not sure how long that will take.”

The state, in the wake of the devastating July floods that ravaged much of Lamoille, Washington and Windsor counties, is beginning to think of disinvestment or planned retreats from flood-prone areas, according to reporting by Seven Days.

While Hinesburg and the rest of the Champlain Valley was largely spared from the damage brought on by the flooding in July, the village did see some brief flooding in the days following the initial damage.

After heavy rain fell days after the first bout of flooding, Hinesburg’s Route 116 across North Road was left with standing water in the village. Some basements flooded and some driveways washed out, but there was no significant damage to infrastructure damage and the water receded almost as quickly as it came on.

While the Hinesburg Center II project was designed to avoid the state’s mapped river corridor, Medash said in a letter to the commission, Hinesburg’s flood standard differs from the state’s standards, and “has permitted greater floodplain impacts under this standard.”

“The effects of climate change and more intense rainstorms may lead to greater flooding at the site and are not captured in the current FEMA hydraulic modeling,” Medash said.

He said the critical need for housing in Vermont should not outweigh building housing in an area vulnerable to flooding and putting the public at future risk for displacement.

“It’s much easier and cost effective to keep people away from flooding rather than try to keep them safe and sheltered during a flood or go through the traumatic process of recovering after being flooded,” Medash wrote, recommending that the “applicant provide a consistent, comprehensive and transparent hydraulic model that accounts for the suggested higher discharges in Patrick Brook.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hinesburg housing development project under scrutiny.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published Aug. 31 in The Citizen.

The yearslong battle over noise complaints at the Laberge Shooting Range, a private, open-air shooting range located on a 287-acre family farm on Lime Kiln Road, has again resurfaced in Charlotte, this time with some members of the town selectboard considering the creation of a noise ordinance to avoid the onslaught of an “expensive legal issue” with neighboring residents.

“We understand that there have been some changes in the amount of noise and the guns that are being used, and that brings it back in front of us,” selectboard Chair Jim Faulkner said Monday. “This issue has been in front of the selectboard in the past, and it’s ramping up a little bit again. There’s a concern for a lot of the neighbors about the noise, and there might be some legal suits in process that will affect the town considerably.”

Since as far back as 1994, the shooting range, part of a large parcel of land owned by Laberge and Sons, Inc., has been the recipient of a slew of resident-led backlash over noise complaints, with the most recent court battle taking place in 2015, when a group of anonymous neighbors formed the Firing Range Neighborhood Group and filed a request with the District 4 Environmental Commission to determine whether or not the firing range is a development that should come under Act 250 jurisdiction.

The Vermont Supreme Court ruled three years later, in August 2018, that the range was not subject to Act 250 jurisdiction and therefore could continue to operate without state regulation.

But, Faulkner said at Monday’s meeting, “This group is not willing to just accept that.”

Last year, the selectboard authorized Faulkner and selectboard member Louise McCarren to facilitate a neighborhood conversation between the two groups with the hopes of mediation. However, McCarren, in a phone call, said she has not been a part of any sort of mediation efforts.

“I think the law is pretty clear that the shooting range has the right to be there,” she said. “I feel very badly for the neighbors. But the way to deal with this, in my opinion, is to get everybody together. Let’s just talk about it.”

At the meeting, board member Lewis Mudge asked Faulkner whether the town’s attorney had warned the town about the risk of a potential lawsuit. Faulkner responded, “Yes,” but was quick to add, “I shouldn’t have even said that.”

Although the town has sought resolutions in the past, Faulkner suggested that the selectboard begin to consider crafting a noise ordinance for that area in order to evade any upcoming legal issues. McCarren was the only selectboard member quick to object to any noise ordinance aimed at the range.

“Everybody says you can’t do it, but the town’s running a risk,” Faulkner said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Charlotte considers noise rules as shooting range complaints return.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published Aug. 17 in The Citizen.

“I don’t really half-ass anything and I don’t think my team does either,” Era MacDonald, owner and operator of Merrymac Farm Sanctuary, said as she leaned against a pile of hay, her warm voice and laughter lulling the nearby goats into a peaceful sleep.

The farm on Lime Kiln Road, a rural dirt road in Charlotte, is home to nearly 80 animals of all different varieties and breeds — pigs, sheep, horses, ducks, goats, chickens, donkeys and bunnies — each carrying with them their own unique story of how they reached the sanctuary.

For MacDonald, Merrymac Farm is an extension of her natural-born instinct to help animals and her sixth-sense ability to communicate with them. Wherever MacDonald goes, there is sure to be a long line of farm animals following behind her, weaving in and out of her legs, waiting for a loving pat on the head.

“I’ve always been a huge animal lover and I was always bringing animals home. I’m not really like Doctor Doolittle, but sort of,” she joked as she put out her hand toward a pig named Eli. “I really am a stray magnet.”

The mission of the animal sanctuary is to provide abandoned animals with permanent, healthy homes where they can live free of abuse or cruelty, while also providing education for the local and broader communities about the well-being of animals and to promote a culture of equity between animals, people and the planet.

“I’ve always at the heart come back to education,” she said. “The only way that I feel like we can make some change in the world is to educate, letting people see animals that they don’t usually get to see in a world where they’re not being raised for meat or being used for some purpose. They get to just live here.”

Although the farm has been running as a nonprofit sanctuary for less than a year, the group has been part of the rehabilitation process for two of the most widely recognized neglect cases seen this year.

The first situation concerned the deplorable living conditions for a group of baby goats at a farm in Charlotte last year.

“Our goats came in from the Charlotte case,” MacDonald said. “They have what’s called CAE (caprine arthritis encephalitis). These goats in the normal goat world would be put to sleep.”

The goats that Merrymac Farm received were in such severe condition with foot rot and other diseases that they were forced to regularly walk on their knees.

“You’re only going to get that if you live in such deplorable, gross conditions,” she said.

The second case happened just last month when two severely starved horses, Honey and Romeo, were rescued from Leicester, a situation MacDonald and vets on site said was the worst starvation case they had ever seen.

“The ranking of starvation goes from one to nine and basically, below one, you’re dead. Honey was a one. Realistically she probably was like a point three, but they don’t do that,” MacDonald said. “Romeo was a two and a half. They both had heart murmurs and they both were severely dehydrated.”

Even though the horses now remain in the farm’s care, the road to recovery is just as difficult and worrisome as the day they arrived on the farm.

“You can kill them by rehydrating them too quickly,” she said. “You can kill them by giving them salt. You can kill them by feeding them too quickly. So your instinct is always to help things and feed them right away, but the whole process is a very slow process.”

With the help of a vet and steady rehabilitation efforts, Honey and Romeo are both gaining weight, but MacDonald said they’re not out of the woods yet.

“The last few nights are the first nights I’ve actually almost slept through the night,” she said in an interview two weeks ago. “Yesterday morning was the first day I came out here and Honey had some shavings on her body and I think that she laid down and actually got up on her own.”

A sanctuary for everyone

The farm runs with the help of minimal staff and a whole lot of volunteers. It’s a true labor of love, not just from MacDonald, but also those who help out with everyday maintenance.

With dozens of volunteers funneling in and out every month, MacDonald said that, multiple times a week, some volunteers come in just for their own mental health.

“It’s become not only a sanctuary for animals, but it’s sort of a sanctuary for people as well,” she said. “We have a lot of volunteers in their 60s and 70s, and I’m always like, ‘Look, if you’re having an off day, or your body doesn’t feel like it, you can clean stalls, just come and bring your coffee and spend time.’”

She’s learned that, although the animals on the farm need lots of care and attention, more often than not, people come in because they need the animals, too.

“There were teenagers last year that were coming from Champlain Valley Union just to sit,” she said. “Life was telling them that they needed to come be with the goats and, of course, the goats needed them.”

State process

As far as the state process regarding animal neglect and cruelty, it is complicated, said MacDonald.

“The game wardens or the police cover it,” she said. “Basically, it comes down to calling 911.”

Some counties and towns have an animal control officer to investigate cases of neglect, but the positions are oftentimes on a volunteer basis and if they are paid, it is very minimal.

“It’s a dangerous job, honestly,” she said. “It’s not a sought-after job, because you’re literally knocking on someone’s house to, like, ‘Do you have a dog license for your dogs?’ Or, ‘Are you feeding your dogs?’ You’re not a law enforcement person; you are a volunteer or minimally paid person that we should all be grateful that anyone wants to do.”

For MacDonald, she said the first steps to implementing change is statewide education, awareness and mustering support from residents. She said she is aware of multiple grassroots projects calling upon the Legislature to make needed changes.

“The Honey case has proven that people absolutely care about the welfare and the awareness of cruelty to an animal,” she said. “People have come out of the woodwork to support her.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misattributed it to another publication. This story has also been updated to reflect that not all towns have animal control officers.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Merrymac Farm, a sanctuary for animals — and people — in Charlotte.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published by The Citizen on July 6.

From the busy streets of New York City, Jolene Kao and her family came to Vermont for a quieter life surrounded by open spaces, and turns out, that also meant becoming the new owners of The Old Brick Store in Charlotte.

Although owning a place like The Old Brick Store wasn’t originally in the plans, Kao has strong roots in the restaurant industry. Originally born in Dallas to Taiwanese immigrants, she spent most of her upbringing in her family’s generationally owned restaurant, Rural China.

“We would run around the restaurant and I would make cherry pancakes in the kitchen,” she said. “When I was older, I started bussing and hosting and working the register, placing orders, running payroll and helping my mom do that prepping in the kitchen. But the best was when I was in college, and I would come back to visit and work the line.”

In 2006 she moved to New York to pursue a career in photography but eventually burned out when she realized the pace of the life she was building was unsustainable.

“In my mind, I was kind of always feeling like maybe I wanted to open my own little food store, not a traditional restaurant, but a place where I can be face to face with people because I think that’s so much of what I loved about growing up in my parents’ restaurant,” she said. “Somebody would come in and they’d bring their baby and say, ‘This is the fourth generation of our family who has come to dine at this restaurant.’ You really develop these relationships with people.”

In 2016 she returned to the restaurant world, this time working as part of the inaugural kitchen crew for a newly opened restaurant in the city.

“It was a great experience. I learned so much and worked even harder, longer days than I had in production,” she explained. “It was hugely influential for me as a culinary experience.”

Finally, after 15 years in the Big Apple, Kao and her partner Pete Macia, along with their daughter, decided it was time for a change and by August 2022 the family officially settled in Charlotte.

“We visited Vermont a few times and our last trip was in Burlington. Each place, no matter how busy or rural it was, it just felt so good. You just really felt a sense of community around. So when we moved here, we had like this feeling that there is so much support and so much community,” she said.

Apart from the kitchen side of the business, she has additional experience as a co-founder of a woman-in-business nonprofit group based in Brooklyn. And when she found The Old Brick Store, all the puzzle pieces fell perfectly into place.

“I felt like maybe this is the place that I could do it because there is actually a need for more spaces like the one that I’ve been building in my head,” she said. “My dream space was really about bringing community together and having some food that really showcases what is available locally. When I found out that The Old Brick Store was for sale, then that was really the lightning strike of everything where I thought, OK, I think this is the one.’”

Although Kao plans to put a new spin to things, The Old Brick Store possesses its own magic and has been a staple in town for centuries. Variations of the building have come and gone, but the building that now stands was erected in1853.

“In 1840 to 1850 there were a lot of brick buildings built in town because there was a brickyard and brick oven near the Congregational Church,” said Dan Cole, a member of the historical society.

Whitney Williamson Finley, the proprietress of the store since 2015, could not be reached for comment but did post on social media last month, “Thanks for all the support over the last 8 years. Your visits, stories, and laughter have made this job so very rewarding.”

Kao said the sale isn’t finalized until July 14 and the store will remain closed until then to put some finishing touches on both the space and the menu. When asked what new additions customers can expect, Kao didn’t hesitate to say, “a proper coffee program” with specialized espresso drinks.

“Pete and I really love the idea of being a part of history and being the next stewards of this historic place.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: The Old Brick Store changes hands in Charlotte.

Editor’s Note: This story by Liberty Darr was first published by the Citizen on May 25.

The ad hoc group of residents in Charlotte spearheading the petition to switch to a town manager form of government led a special meeting Tuesday night to answer questions from the selectboard and residents.

Although the group’s petition garnered 200 votes — enough to force a town vote — it has agreed to work with the selectboard instead of filing the petition with the town clerk and forcing a vote.

But some selectboard members have felt the petition was “uncooperative” from the start, especially at a time when the selectboard was attempting to pass a budget.

“Everybody knows that the budget failed,” selectboard member Kelly Devine said. “Why take the route of the petition while we were in the midst of dealing with that significant challenge rather than coming to the selectboard before going forward with the petition?”

“What made the petition feel aggressive is because it doesn’t acknowledge the time constraints that we’re under to replace this position,” she continued.

With town administrator Dean Bloch retiring in October, the group — comprised of Jim Hyde, Charlie Russell, Peter Joslin, Alexa Lewis and Lane Morrison — has worked since March with attorneys and other town officials and selectboard members to help outline a way forward.

“I thought by getting this going, it would get a focus and that’s what has happened,” said Morrison, who had been chair of the selectboard for almost six years before calling it quits three years ago. “From our point of view, we did not want to miss the sequencing of the retirement and kick this can down the road for four months.”

According to their research, 73% of municipalities with a population of more than 2,500 have a town manager form of government and as Charlotte faces some major town-wide issues, the group stressed that this as an ideal time for the switch.

In a packet submitted by the group prior to the meeting, they list seven major areas the town will begin to consider in the coming months: lack of growth and vitality in village districts; lack of housing, particularly for moderate- and lower-income households; ongoing budgetary challenges; town garage and a future highway department; governance of Charlotte Volunteer Fire and Rescue Service; traffic calming measures in the east and west villages; and protecting areas of high public value.

The only way forward, the group says, is by “freeing the selectboard from the day-to-day town decisions by changing governance to a town manager, thereby enabling the selectboard to focus on the future.”

The switch should also expedite selectboard meetings, which often last upward of three hours.

“The selectboard has worked many hours. You had an agenda with 10 or 12 items on it at your meeting last night,” said Morrison. “You’re meeting all the time. Some of the officials I talked to, the selectboard chair of both Shelburne and Hinesburg, said there’s so much more efficiency with key points.”

A town manager acts as a chief administrative officer and has direct duties and authority laid out in state statute. A town administrator does not have the same authority and is instead governed more directly by a selectboard.

“(The selectboard) can delegate as little or as much as they want within the law, of course,” said Rick McGuire, a search consultant with Vermont League of Cities and Towns. “But the town manager’s position is spelled out very specifically under state law and that outlines all the powers and duties.”

The group argues that a town manager brings demonstrated expertise to the town, much like a CEO who reports to a board of directors. Key skills for the candidate should include communication, leadership, expertise in human resources, digital literacy, operational planning, financial management, expertise in the legal framework and cost containment.

The change would also allow those with full-time employment to serve on the selectboard more effectively because of the lower time commitment.

Some residents questioned whether this potential shift in control is exactly what members of the selectboard fear.

“It sounds like you felt a little defensive and a little threatened that this petition came along at a time when you guys had this (budget) crisis,” resident Mike Russell said. “What I heard was, ‘We have this immediate (budget) issue that we have to solve that keeps us from thinking about a long-term change in the structure of the town,’ and that’s exactly why you want to be able to delegate that stuff to somebody who is going to handle that.”

The group agreed to another public meeting with the selectboard, tentatively scheduled for June 5.

“You’re giving the impression that it’s a little bit of chaos. I think to be fair to the selectboard and Dean (Bloch), we’re not running into chaos here,” selectboard chair Jim Faulkner said. “We’re not looking for someone to come in and be a leader. That being said, a town manager could help us and that’s what we’re here to find out. But there’s no magic by calling somebody a town manager.”

To VLCT or not

With only five months left to hire a new town administrator — or town manager — the Charlotte selectboard is beginning a procurement process with some help from Vermont League of Cities and Towns but has resolved to keep most of the process in-house.

Earlier this month, the league sent Charlotte a proposal for town administrator search services totaling more than $12,000 for advertising, application screenings, interviewing candidates and conducting background and reference checks.

But following a contentious budget season that forced a slew of cuts, Faulkner reminded the board, “We have not budgeted for this. I don’t see why we can’t do a lot of this in-house.”

“It’s not a good time to be allocating five-digit contracts that we haven’t budgeted for,” member Lewis Mudge said.

Selectboard member Lousie McCarren urged the board to “maintain control of the process.”

As a solution, the selectboard is working to form an advisory search committee to oversee the process as opposed to delegating the work exclusively to the Vermont League of Cities and Towns.

“What we had come up with the other day was to take VLCT for the advertisement and possibly the background check,” Faulkner said. “Everything else we were going to do.”

“I have personally served on these types of committees for hiring of very significant positions in the city of Burlington and I found that they worked well,” Devine added.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Charlotte selectboard questions petition for manager.

Editor’s Note: This story by Corey McDonald was first published by the Citizen on May 25.

An agreement to share police services made between Hinesburg and Richmond was briefly put on hold this month after the local police union stepped in.

Originally agreed upon in April, the inter-municipal agreement allowed for Richmond to make an advance request for a Hinesburg officer to respond to calls from Richmond at a rate of $50 an hour, or to patrol the town at a rate of $70 an hour, but only when the Hinesburg department has the staffing bandwidth.

The agreement was made to assist Richmond’s police department, which at the time was functioning with only two working officers.

But after the agreement was made, a grievance was filed by the New England Police Benevolent Association.

“We did one day of coverage, but it sounds like a grievance was filed,” Hinesburg Town Manager Todd Odit said at the town’s May 3 selectboard meeting. “So, despite our best efforts, that’s on hold. But the one shift we did cover did go well.”

The union and the town of Richmond negotiated and on May 19 signed off on two agreements — one to bolster the wage scale for Richmond police, and another setting parameters around when a Hinesburg cop could get called in to Richmond — giving Richmond police first right of refusal to work overtime.

“We got it all resolved last week, but essentially they wanted to make sure that union work was being done by union employees when we have them here in Richmond,” said Josh Arneson, Richmond’s town manager. “But they also understood that our situation right now is that we’re losing employees, and we need some extra help. So, they really, I think, wanted to make sure they put in some safeguards to make sure that the union employees were getting treated fairly for their contract.”

Arneson said he understands their concern, that they “need first right of first refusal here. They also wanted to make sure that we were continuing to look long term for recruitment and propose some wages at the board.”

Richmond’s policing situation went from bad to worse in recent weeks after their interim chief, Benjamin Herrick, sent in his resignation.

“His last day will be early June, so we are currently evaluating next steps of what we need to do,” he said.

Hinesburg, meanwhile, has begun to see some stability in its department’s ranks after a tumultuous year. After getting its budget voted down in March 2022, three of its six officers left for neighboring departments.

But things have stabilized a bit. The town recently hired a fifth officer who started last weekend.

Both towns have been in communication about possibly merging their two departments into one — which would mark the first time two municipalities in Vermont created a shared department — but that has been put on hold for now.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hinesburg, Richmond police agreement hits a brief snag.

Editor’s Note: This story by Liberty Darr was first published by The Citizen on May 11.

A licensed cannabis-growing operation on a rural dirt road in Charlotte is raising the ire of surrounding neighbors — a chaotic situation the cultivator has likened to a new wave of “reefer madness.”

John Stern has been growing marijuana in Charlotte under a Tier 1 outdoor operation, Red Clover Canopies, since August. The budding business has been the recipient of a slew of resident-led backlash that started just months after cultivation got underway and at one point prompted residents to make Stern a buyout offer.

Issues arose last November when residents and town officials reached out to the state Cannabis Control Board regarding the issuance of Stern’s Tier 1 license — which, per Act 158, is exempt from local permitting since it is an outdoor grow operation of 1,000 square feet or less.

The operation, which is set on a 3-acre plot of land, is “bounded by trees on both sides of the road,” Stern said. “In the summertime, once the leaves are on, nobody can see us.”

The original concerns came because of lights emanating from a covered hoop house where the bud grows, which Stern told The Citizen was needed mostly because they began growing at an inopportune time of year, in part because “the town and (neighbors) had stood in the way and created problems for us on our licensing when we got started.”

“We wound up having a grow at a time of year we never wanted to be growing, and so it was like, ‘Look, I’m just trying to finish this thing and that requires lights. I will turn the lights off by 6 p.m.,’’’ said Stern. “We talked and everybody agreed: OK, turn them off at 6 p.m.”

Keith Oborne, the town’s former zoning administrator, emailed Stern on Nov. 2, solidifying this agreement.

“I have informed the concerned parties that the lighting associated with the operation will be extinguished at 7:30 p.m. every night moving forward and will not be turned on until 7:30 a.m. the following morning,” he wrote. “Let’s keep the lines of communication open as I suspect this will not land gently with the concerned individuals.” He ended the email wishing Stern “success with (his) operation.”

Trouble came just two days later, when Stern admits he mistakenly left the grow lights on past the mutually agreed upon time, sparking residents’ anger and the future need for arbitration between the two parties.

A nearby neighbor, Andrew Hale, told the Cannabis Control Board on Nov. 4, “There are grow lights on all night.”

“They are growing cannabis in an approximately 2,700 square foot greenhouse without any local permitting, claiming the cannabis operation is (less than) 1,000 square feet and so not subject to local regulation,” he wrote in an email obtained through a public records request. “Through the door and window of the greenhouse, easily visible from the nearby public road and adjacent properties, it is easy to see green plants throughout the (approximately) 2,700 square foot greenhouse. There is cause to believe the size of the operation is greater than the 1,000 square feet licensed, and that the operator does, in fact, need local permitting, which they don’t have.”

This email was followed up by more email complaints on Nov. 11 and Nov. 17 citing the same issues. “(The lights) were on deep into the night (and sometimes all night) up until about one week ago, now they go off in the evening between about 6:45 p.m. and 7:30 p.m,” Hale wrote, including a photo of Stern’s grow operation with lights on at 5:40 p.m. — before the time when Stern had previously agreed to have the lights off each night.

“I can tell you everybody else’s lights were still on (at 6 p.m.),” Stern said. “Nobody was asleep.”

Another neighbor, Jen Banbury, said that although she is “in favor of cannabis legalization, Vermont is blessed with an abundance of open spaces. There is no reason to have cannabis cultivation in the midst of a residential neighborhood. It would be to the benefit of residents and growers to operate in places where there will be no conflict.”

State rulings

Following the influx of complaints from neighbors and town officials, the state conducted a full investigation and site visit of Stern’s grow operation and determined the operation was complying with all necessary regulations, including lighting.

According to the state-ruled definitions, “indoor cultivation” is determined as growing cannabis using artificial lighting whereas “outdoor cultivation” describes growing cannabis in an expanse of open or cleared ground or in a structure that does not use artificial lighting and is not a greenhouse.

“Taking each of the town’s specific complaints in turn, the state found that the licensee’s light use complied with the rules because the light use did not substitute natural light to grow the plants for market use,” said the notification sent to town officials and residents, Andrew Hale, Jen Banbury and Jeff Beerworth on Nov. 16. “The state found the licensee’s operation within the 1,000-square-foot limitation, and within the 125-plant cap because the operation was beneath both standards. The state found the licensee’s hoop house complied with the rules because the hoop house does not control the complete environment for cultivation.”

The state also found the use of a hoop house structure compliant because the structure did not substitute for the plants’ natural environment and the heater inside the structure was an insufficient substitute for sunlight and only used to prevent plant death during overnight frost.

“The State found the licensee’s lighting use compliant with its rules because the lighting was insufficient to ‘flower’ their plants. Plants require a critical amount of energy before they can produce further organ structures beyond their leaves,” reads the document. “Here, the licensee has a lighting system installed that is supplemental and not a substitute for natural sunlight because there are too few lighting devices installed in their hoop house. There are too few lighting devices because a grower would need one lighting device for every two plants’ energy needs to flower.”

In response to the state’s findings, Bloch told the Cannabis Control Board that, “we do not agree with your assessment of the lighting at the site.” Bloch visited the grow site a few days later and took “two photos on Monday, Nov. 14 at about 5:30 p.m.” that show grow lights on, he wrote in the email. “It would be helpful to know if such lighting is allowed under Tier 1 licensure. It’s hard to imagine that such lighting is for anything other than to bolster the crop.”

Arbitration

The state ultimately recommended formal mediation between the two parties by an outside source, Vermont Agriculture Mediation Program. Although exact details of the mediation efforts are protected under a non-disclosure agreement, Stern said no solution was ever reached.

“Before we went and entered into arbitration when this whole thing started, I offered to move, (Hale) wanted me to move, and I said, ‘Look, I’m happy to move but you’re going to have to help me do that,’” said Stern. “And (Hale) said, ‘I’ll help you. But you’re going to have to guarantee that no other cannabis gets on that land.’ How can I do that? I don’t own the land. I can guarantee I can leave, but I can’t guarantee that no other cannabis gets on the land.”

Stern said he didn’t receive any official offer, but a resident disclosed that residents were willing to pay a large sum of money for the operation to move, but only under the agreement that future cannabis operations would not be allowed on the property.

Hale and other neighbors declined to comment regarding the mediation or his neighbor’s cannabis operation.

Existential threat

Stern said that the problems that neighbors and town officials presented to the state were nothing more than a way to mask an underlying “existential” and moral issue with cannabis cultivation.

“The issue is that we exist — just to be very clear — the issue is we exist. So, anything that is somewhat problematic has become a, ‘We’ll attack that, or we’ll attack this,’” said Stern. “It’s been everything, not just lights, but everything that we do has come under question. The state has come out and inspected us multiple times, and every time we pass because we’re following the regs.”

In addition to the lighting and nuisance issues, residents express some fear surrounding safety with pot growing on their street.

“I cannot imagine playing with my daughter in our front yard, a literal stone’s throw from a commercial-scale marijuana grow site, with her exposed to the smells. Never mind the potential for crime in the area,” Hale wrote in an email to Sen. Thomas Chittenden, D-Chittenden Southeast.

Hale, in the same email, said, “I appreciate a local (cannabis control) board cannot ban cannabis entirely within a municipality, but would these interventions be able to shut down a specific operation within the municipality if it was outside of compliance with a future such group or regulations?”

Banbury echoed some of the same concerns: “The lighting was a big issue specifically for closer neighbors. The safety element feels like an issue. It kind of does feel a bit like having a high-end liquor store with canvas sides in your neighborhood.”

“For me, it’s become an issue that is bigger than just addressing the (Red Clover Canopies) operation, but rather, can the town protect residents in general from this situation happening again in the future since the Cannabis Control Board is not in the business of being helpful to residents in any way,” Banbury said.

At a public hearing regarding the town’s adoption of cannabis-related land use regulations, both Banbury and Hale encouraged the town to implement stricter regulations, including increasing the proposed 200-foot buffer from cultivators’ property lines to a 500-foot buffer.

“I believe in the adage, ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ and, with cannabis, a fence means distance,” Banbury said. “That’s the main way to protect neighbors from odors and other negative fallout. The state, itself, requires a 500-foot buffer for schools. What about homes with school-aged children? What about residents that act as home schools? I believe that a 500-foot buffer should apply to residences.”

Hale agreed: “I certainly support the decriminalization of cannabis in the state, and I think there’s a way to do this that won’t be hugely impactful on other people.”

Stern responded, “Dude, this is legal now. It’s not just about decriminalization, you need to get on board with the fact that it’s legal.”

Stern has since decided to pull his application for a Tier 2 permit and is instead sticking solely to his permitted Tier 1 license because, with Act 158, there is a level of protection from municipal oversight.

When Stern informed the planning and zoning office of his decision to rescind his application for a Tier 2 operation, town planner Larry Lewack said, “As I think you know, the town did not agree with or accept the Cannabis Control Board’s written findings last year regarding your business’s compliance with the terms of your Tier 1 license. And we continue to have concerns about your compliance with the Charlotte (land use regulation) performance standards for odor emissions and light spills outside the property boundary, if your planned 2023 operations will continue unchanged from last year.”

In response, a state Cannabis Control Board licensing agent, Raynald Carre, told Stern in an email, “As a reminder, the Town’s feelings about our rules interpretation are irrelevant.”

Although no official land use regulations have yet been approved in Charlotte, because the town formed a local cannabis control commission last year, Lewack emphasized, “(Stern) will need an affirmative local license decision from the Local Cannabis Control Commission in order to obtain final approval for (his) Tier 1 state license renewal for 2023. It’s my understanding that the selectboard, acting as the local control commission, will not act upon (his) application without feedback from this office on (his) compliance with the underlying land use regulations standards.”

Stern said he never got into cannabis cultivation to make anybody angry.

“Running into some of these (issues), it’s helped me see the truth that if you take a look at the perspective that’s been spun around cannabis, like ‘reefer madness’ and all that stuff that started in the ’30s — a very racially motivated, non-scientific view of what cannabis does to people — and then you hear from the mouths of the of the citizens who are supposedly educated, just trolling off a bunch of fabricated nonsense, quite frankly, first you want to go, ‘Well, let me explain.’ But then there’s no intelligent conversation it’s just this constant (refrain): ‘We don’t want you here, we don’t want you here.’”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Smoldering conflict roils Charlotte cannabis operation.

This story by Corey McDonald first appeared in The Citizen on April 27.

Efforts to build community-based solar array on the town landfill have faltered after the company told the town it couldn’t garner enough membership among residents to continue to pursue the project.

The solar project will still get built out but the energy it generates will go primarily to private investors, who will still need to find buyers of the energy.

“Acorn Renewable Energy Co-op has reached a turning point with respect to its planned community solar array on the Hinesburg landfill,” Benjamin Marks, the president of Acorn, said in a letter to the town. “Unexpectedly, the biggest challenge we faced with this project has been finding enough participants in the (Vermont Electric Co-Op) territory to pay for project construction.”

Acorn, which serves residents in towns in Addison, Rutland, and Chittenden counties, offers shares in its solar projects to Vermont residents, and has completed similar projects in Bristol, Middlebury and Shoreham.

Along with Aegis Renewable Energy, the company was brought into town in 2019 to fulfill renewable energy goals laid out in Hinesburg’s master plan.

“Our vision for this when we started and brought it forth to the town was to have community solar,” Chuck Reiss, a member of the town’s energy committee, said. “A number of communities in the state have done that. It’s been successful elsewhere.”

The project hit a snag when it was discovered the landfill that the proposed solar panels would sit atop of was never procedurally capped. Several private residences near the property — including the town garage — have since had dangerous chemicals detected in their drinking water, and efforts to remediate are still underway.

But plans to buildout the 150kW solar array proceeded, nonetheless. Acorn had spent the past eight months marketing to residents to buy into its membership, who could then use the project’s net-metered credits toward their Vermont Electric Co-Op bills.

A contract with Aegis, the project’s builder, stipulated that the company sell off at least 75 percent of its shares to residents by Feb. 1 — which was then extended to April 20.

But the company fell short of its goal, selling only 60 percent of its shares. Of the people who subscribed, few were from Hinesburg, Reiss said.

“These investors were to be the ultimate owners of the project and the recipients of its electric bill credits,” Marks said in his letter to the town. “We have spent three times the budgeted advertising dollars compared to prior projects and the marketing effort has been twice as long, but we just haven’t been able to make the necessary sales, either locally in Hinesburg or in the broader, more diffuse, VEC service territory.”

Part of the agreement between Acorn and Aegis, Hinesburg Town Manager Todd Odit said, was that if Acorn were unable to complete the project, Aegis had the “right to purchase the project and do something different.”

“We are still supportive of the project,” said Michael Webb, a member of the town’s energy committee. “This is the last best chance to utilize this space.”

Nils Behn, the CEO of Aegis, said during a town selectboard meeting that they plan on building out the project but will partner with a private investor rather than sell to community members.

“It’s just not realistic for us to pivot to this model and make it work,” Behn said. “But it seemed like there was strong support for at least allowing all of this clean renewable energy to get built in Hinesburg to address climate change. I think there’s support there.”

“It’s a big disappointment that this isn’t benefiting Hinesburg residents, but it’s out of our control,” Selectboard chair Merrily Lovell said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hinesburg’s community solar project falters.

This story by Corey McDonald first appeared in The Citizen on April 20.

Hinesburg has agreed to provide on-call police services for Richmond as part of an inter-municipal agreement between the two neighboring towns to assist the Richmond department, which is struggling to provide coverage with only two cops on hand.

The agreement, approved at last week’s selectboard meeting, allows for Richmond to make an advance request for a Hinesburg officer to respond to calls from Richmond at a rate of $50 an hour, but only when the Hinesburg department has the staffing bandwidth to do so.

“We’re only going to provide coverage when we’re able to — when we have more than one officer on,” Hinesburg police chief Anthony Cambridge said. “If our numbers are too low, or we’re too busy at the time, we’re not going to provide coverage, so it’ll be on a limited basis.”

Richmond may also request that Hinesburg officer patrol the town at a rate of $70 an hour.

The department in neighboring Richmond currently only has two available officers on hand, each of whom “are basically kind of working opposite days, just to make sure that there’s someone here each day,” according to Richmond’s town manager Josh Arneson.

“What the agreement with Hinesburg is going to allow us to do is, should there be a shift where we don’t have coverage, we’ll be able to rely on Hinesburg to respond for calls during that shift,” he said. “They’re not going to necessarily be here patrolling, but if a call comes in, they’ll come respond, and they’ll be able to get here.”

The agreement marks a growing cooperative relationship between the two towns and their respective agencies for public safety services.

In November, Hinesburg finalized a three-year contract with Richmond Rescue to provide ambulance services for Hinesburg. The two towns, meanwhile, have been in discussion to merge the town’s police departments via a union municipal district.

The merger would mark the first time two municipalities in Vermont created a shared department — but the prospect is still years away from materializing. Hinesburg put the talks on hold to give time for consultants to complete a public safety strategic plan — a roadmap for the town’s overall vision for its fire, police and possible ambulance services.

“It seemed like we were treading water,” Hinesburg selectboard Chair Merrily Lovell said of the merger talks.

With the Vermont State Police stretched thin, municipalities with their own departments have been asked “to get as fully staffed as they can or try to seek agreement with other neighboring towns for coverage so that there’s less of a demand and a burden on the state police,” Arneson said.

There was some reluctance among the Hinesburg Selectboard to approve the agreement, given the Hinesburg department has itself had trouble with staffing. The department was down from six to three cops in less than four months after its police budget in March 2022 was vetoed by residents.

“I’m certainly not opposed … I just want to make sure, before we do the current strategic planning and everything, that this doesn’t turn into a request for a sixth officer to cover additional shifts,” selectboard member Mike Loner said.

Cambridge, meanwhile, continues to provide on-call overnight service.

“Long-term, I’d rather not be doing it, but it is what it is,” he said.

“I think the most pressing issues with the Hinesburg community police department … I want to figure out how to backstop Anthony on that crazy overnight coverage,” selectboard member Paul Lamberson said. “That just seems perilous to me, that we’re going to burn him out, so that’s on my mind as we consider something else, I don’t want to lose sight of — we have to figure out how to make that situation sustainable.”

However, things have stabilized a bit. The town recently hired a fifth officer who started this past weekend.

“I trust the chief and (town manager Todd Odit) to make sure nobody’s getting burned out,” selectboard member Maggie Gordon said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hinesburg, Richmond to collaborate on policing.

This story by Liberty Darr first appeared in The Citizen on April 6.

Is a town manager in Charlotte’s future?

A resident-led petition to change to a town manager form of government is gaining traction, with over 200 signatures in favor of the switch.

The idea arose at a recent meeting at the Charlotte Senior Center that Jim Faulkner, chair of the selectboard, characterized as “a very difficult meeting” where residents were “very critical of the selectboard. It was a very disappointing event for me to go through that.”

Although the petition garnered enough signatures to force a town vote, the group agreed to come before the selectboard April 17 to discuss what this could mean for the town, hear public feedback and offer details about how to implement such a change.

With town administrator Dean Bloch leaving in October, proponents of the change say it’s an ideal time to shift to a town manager.

“It’s a good opportunity to take a look at the whole question of the governance of the town before we enter into another contract with somebody else to do it for however many years. It’s an opportunity that seems to us isn’t one that should be missed,” said Jim Hyde, a proponent of the change.

A town manager acts as a chief administrative officer and has direct duties and authority laid out in statute. A town administrator does not have the same authority and is governed more directly by a selectboard.

“(The selectboard) can delegate as little or as much as they want within the law, of course,” Rick McGuire, search consultant with Vermont League of Cities and Towns, said. “But the town manager’s position is spelled out very specifically under state law and that outlines all the powers and duties.”

Hyde said the intention of the petition is not to usurp the selectboard’s power, but to bring in somebody with a background and experience in management, HR, budgeting and finance and give them the responsibility and authority for doing the legwork in service to the selectboard.

Hyde also questioned whether this could expedite meeting times that sometimes last close to four hours, and which often focus on the minutiae of routine issues rather than honing in on the big issues the town currently faces: the budget, development and updated land use regulations.

“If you look at the agenda for March 27, that agenda was full of things, that seem to me, a town manager could easily deal with,” he said. “It goes on and on for an hour and a half, and this is at a time when they had really serious things that they have to address and deal with. I think that changing the form of government might free up time for the selectboard to focus on some of the really big policy questions that the town is interested in.”

Some members of the selectboard were unhappy about the way residents have gone about promoting the petition. Instead of relying on guidance from the selectboard, residents have rallied their cause on social media and by word of mouth.

Faulkner explained that he was notified about the gathering of petitioners at the senior center only two hours prior to the meeting.

“I think this is a good discussion about going to a town manager or not,” member Louise McCarren said. “But I am very unhappy with the way it has been brought forth.”

Faulkner also stressed the need to assess costs associated with the switch, especially at a time when the town has pinched pennies to pass a budget.

“I don’t know all the ins and outs of that,” he said. “That’s something we have to research out but the important thing to me more anything else, a town manager may be the right thing, but we don’t know that, do we? I mean, this is a worse time to think about increasing costs on anything in town here. We’re really working like a dog to go the other way.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Charlotte residents weigh town manager role.

This story by Corey McDonald first appeared in The Citizen on March 23.

Hinesburg’s highway foreman of more than 30 years abruptly resigned this month, just days before a winter storm walloped much of Vermont and left roads in disarray.

Michael Anthony, the town’s highway foreman since 1992, submitted his resignation to the town the night of March 9. He had been with the town’s highway department for 40 years; the town garage was named after him when it opened in 2018.

“Mike did a great job on our roads for over 40 years, and our roads are in very good shape thanks to all of the work that Mike did,” Merrily Lovell, chair of the town’s selectboard, said. “He was a real perfectionist, and he did a really good job — nobody disputes that.”

In a lengthy, 1,700-word email to town selectboard members, Anthony said he “could no longer work under the current management team” and had “had enough of the badgering and harassment, changes (to) how and when the highway department works, and now, on-call pay cut.”

He made several claims, including that he was confronted by town manager Todd Odit about his treatment of a former employee; that the town violated a labor agreement between the town and highway employees; and that highway employees were not informed of the drinking water contamination at the town garage.

He also pointed to a conflict with town management over overtime work.

Anthony’s resignation email “contains many allegations, accusations, inaccuracies, and incomplete stories that I dispute,” Odit said in an email to The Citizen.

“Had Mike brought these to the selectboard prior to resigning I would have gladly addressed them all with the selectboard. I still will if the selectboard wants me to,” he said. “However, it would be inappropriate for me to do so in a newspaper article.”

His departure came days before a major snowstorm dumped more than 12 inches throughout the Champlain Valley, causing power outages and major traffic disruptions.

Joy Dubin Grossman, Hinesburg’s assistant town manager, reached out to several neighboring towns for assistance in the days leading up to the storm.

“We had the help of Monkton, Starksboro, Shelburne and Richmond — basically each of those towns took a road that leads into Hinesburg and continued on to Route 116 instead of stopping at town line and turning around,” Odit said. “That was a huge help.”

Anthony’s resignation leaves the highway department with two people — Dominic Musumeci and Nicholas Race. John Alexander, an assistant foreman on the wastewater department, has helped with plowing efforts when the town needs them and helped with the last week’s storm.

The town has advertisements out for both a highway foreman and an additional highway worker and has been looking for a public works manager who would oversee both the water and highway departments with the town.

As part of its fiscal year 2024 budget, the town transitioned the director of buildings and facilities position, which oversaw infrastructure and water and sewer, into a director of public works, who will now also oversee the highway and road operations.

But “obviously, when the budget was put together, it wasn’t known or expected that there’d be this change,” Odit said.

Anthony in his email thanked the town “for allowing me the opportunity of four decades of serving them. I have loved doing what I have done for the town,” he said. “Thank you to everyone that has supported me and encouraged me to continue doing all I have ever known to do.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hinesburg highway foreman abruptly resigns.

This story by Corey McDonald first appeared in The Citizen on March 16.

Melissa Ross — or “Missy” — grew up in Manchester, going to town meeting day elections as a child and watching her father, Ferdinand “Nundy” Bongartz, moderate the whole affair.

Bongartz, a Vermont public service legend, spent 26 years as Manchester’s moderator and spent years on the town’s selectboard, planning commission and school board and served on the regional planning commission and the state environmental board.

The apple, in this case, does not fall very far from the tree. This month, Ross will wrap up a career spanning almost a quarter century, ending her 22-year tenure as Hinesburg’s longtime clerk and treasurer.

She is Hinesburg’s longest serving clerk in more than a century — since at least 1900. She’s also served on the board of the Hinesburg Nursery School, on the town’s planning commission and was part of the Hinesburg Land Trust when it first got underway.

“It is with both sadness and anticipation that I move forward to the next chapter of my life,” she said. “I’ve had the distinct pleasure of holding one of the most rewarding jobs in Vermont — a job steeped in history and tradition.”

Ross has been the “face of business” in Hinesburg, selectboard chair Merrily Lovell said, “a warm and friendly face, one who treats every person with special respect and interest in a way that empowers us all.”

For 22 years, she’s greeted everybody in town seeking out dog licenses or marriage licenses, people begrudgingly going to pay their taxes or their water bills and myriad other requests.

“I’m definitely going to miss it. I’ll miss my colleagues, and I will miss just seeing everybody on a regular basis,” she said. “It will be an adjustment for sure, but I’m lucky to have a lot of good friends in the community.”

The town clerk is the official in town that, in more ways than the town’s state representative or even the selectboard, is “a face to the community,” former Vermont Rep. Bill Lippert said previously, “the person in office that most people in the community interface with.”

It’s what she’ll miss the most, Ross said.

“People have just been really wonderful to get to know and no matter how small their request or problem might have been, it was the most satisfying thing,” she said. “I really, really enjoyed that.”

A native Vermont resident, Ross grew up in Manchester and then attended Middlebury College and later the University of Vermont, eventually settling in Hinesburg. After first serving as the town’s recreation coordinator, she moved on to the town clerk and town treasurer positions in October 2001.

Since then, she’s seen a lot of change — most recently, seeing COVID-19 completely disrupt Vermont’s town meeting day tradition.

Hinesburg, since the pandemic, has opted to use Australian ballot instead of the traditional in-person voice vote during annual meeting.

Hinesburg’s informational meeting “had fairly good attendance this year, considering there wasn’t voting on anything,” she said. “But I do think it is partly an equity issue, to allow people the opportunity to vote on the budget — people who may have difficulties attending a meeting. As our population ages, I think it’s good to give those people an opportunity to vote by ballot.”

The town is set to see even more change in the coming years, as the town’s village center is expected to grow and transform as hundreds of new housing units come down the regulatory pike.

There’s some anxiety there, for sure — impacts on traffic congestion on Route 116, for example — and as a town gets larger, it gets more and more difficult to maintain those local traditions that are unique to Vermont towns, she said.

“On the positive side, it can be a good thing to infuse the town with new people who bring a new enthusiasm to volunteer committees and are looking for an opportunity to get involved.”

“People will hopefully be out and outside and be able to chat with people. I think that’s a better form of growth to have … I hope that that will help us maintain that community feeling.”

Ross will be replaced by Heather Roberts, the town’s assistant town clerk and treasurer, who ran uncontested in this year’s election.

“As I pass the torch to the next town clerk and treasurer, I want to say thank you for your years of support, goodwill and good wishes for the future,” Ross said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hinesburg town clerk retires after long career.

This story by Corey McDonald first appeared in The Citizen on March 9.

The town of Hinesburg, amid rising tension among residents, applied for a grant through the state revolving loan program last week, a small step toward remedying the increasingly disconcerting problem of contaminated drinking water emanating from the town landfill.

The selectboard approved the loan application after more than a dozen residents came out to their March 1 meeting to request continual testing for 18 residential properties to the south of the landfill — which an environmental consultant group hired by the town confirmed in a report is leaching dangerous chemicals and other harmful contaminants.

“The town is trying to do the right thing, we acknowledge that,” said Janet Francis, one of the property owners near the landfill. “(But) we need to be sure that we do more — that all of the houses in our neighborhood meet the safe water standards that have been set.”

The grant application, through Vermont’s water and wastewater revolving loan fund program, will hopefully give the town some direction as to how to address the situation: should the town purchase point-of-entry treatment, or POET, systems to treat all the contaminated houses, should it extend the town water system up to the area, or do something else entirely.

“I hope you know we’re doing everything that we possibly can to address this issue,” Merrily Lovell, the chair of the Hinesburg Selectboard, said.

High levels poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances — or PFAS — were found in the drinking water of two more residential homes last month, about two years after the town and state first discovered two wells serving a private residence and the town garage had high levels of methylene chloride and PFAS.

PFAS, referred to as “forever chemicals,” have been linked to cancer, reproductive harm, immune system damage and other serious problems. It is becoming an increasingly urgent problem across the country, as more than 2,800 communities in at least nine states have found the contaminants in their water, according to information from the Environmental Working Group in Washington D.C.

The White House last week advanced a proposal to impose new drinking water limits on specific forms of PFAS.

The story of why Hinesburg’s 38-acre landfill continues to leach these chemicals — and how it was never officially capped and sealed off — remains a mystery. The state conducted annual testing of properties nearby for some 20 years through 2009, and paperwork for the landfill’s closure certification ended up missing — both on the state and town’s end.

The property operated from 1972 until 1988, receiving solid waste from both Hinesburg and Richmond. It was eventually closed and sealed off with a permanent chemical-resistant plastic sheet in 1992 to contain any contaminants.

Residents packed in the town meeting area last week argued that the volatility of the groundwater — the fact that detection levels of PFAS and other chemicals has been changing over both a short- and long-term period — shows that the town and the environmental consultant group it hired, Stone Environmental, should be testing as many homes as they can.

One Beecher Hill Road resident, Ken Hurd, had PFAS levels below the state limit in the spring of 2022 — and had even lower limits in November 2021 — but six months later was having a POET system installed after discovering high levels in his water.

Francis said that Stone Environmental doesn’t “seem to be exactly sure of what is present where, or what the conditions of the soils and rocks are that might direct contamination in unexpected ways — contaminants that were thought to flow to the southeast show up in the west and no one can fully predict or guarantee where any of the contaminate might go in the future.”

Another property, she said, had methylene chloride under state limits in 2009, but 12 years later levels exceeded those limits and it now also has a monitoring system.

“How many years did the residents of that home drink water containing methylene chloride unknowingly?” she said.

“The testing list is not sufficient, clearly,” Hurd said.

The environmental group in its recent report acknowledged that the extent of migration has not been defined and recommended testing four new homes for contamination. If exceeding limits are found there, the perimeter of testing would be expanded further to include more adjacent properties.

Adding four more homes is a good thing, Francis said, “but it just doesn’t include the five properties that now adjoin the most recent home that exceed the PFAS limit, and these five homeowners need to know if the contamination has spread to their own water supply.”

At least one selectboard member, Phil Pouech, has said the town should expand testing no matter what the cost, and suggested using ARPA money to help fund the expense. But the mushrooming costs of treatment is already putting financial pressure on a town that is seeing falling revenue.

Expanding testing now, Lovell said, would be a “huge cost” for the town “which is why we’re following the science that stone environmental is doing.”

But Lovell noted that no decisions have been made and said that town officials need to take in information shared during the meeting before deciding.

“This is a lot to think about, it’s a very serious issue. We’ll let you know when we come to an idea of a next step,” she said. “We didn’t cause it, but it’s in our laps, and we have to deal with it — in a way that’s ethical and fair to everybody.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tensions high at Hinesburg meeting over contaminated drinking water.