Natalie Bankmann is a reporter with the Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

Most days of the week, Jess Colby, a land steward, can be spotted in the woods of Vermont on state-owned land with a team on her side, pruners in hand, and a ladder. Colby pulls seed pods directly off of trees, collecting as many seeds as she can in a day’s work. 

“This spring, we collected 960 grams of seeds. That was mostly fluffy seeds, so that’s millions and millions of seeds,” said Colby, the Riparian Lands Program Coordinator at NorthWoods Stewardship Center, a nonprofit based on land conservation in northern Vermont and New Hampshire. 

Colby’s team is collecting seeds to replant along the shores of waterways, creating ecosystems that are resistant to floods. Large masses of land surrounding Vermont waterways have historically been turned into agricultural lands, reducing biodiversity, said Colby. This land, she added, is often dominated by invasive species like reed canary grass.  

When waterways overflow onto land with a lack of biodiversity, the water moves through the landscape quickly, damaging communities on the outskirts, said Joshua Morse, spokesperson at Vermont Fish and Wildlife. 

Wetlands rich in biodiversity along Otter Creek in Middlebury protected the town from more than $1.8 million dollars of flood damage during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, according to research by the University of Vermont. People who visited the floodplains at Otter Creek after the storm would have seen tons of water being held there, Morse said. 

With a grant from the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, Colby’s team has worked to create more lands like Otter Creek to decrease flood damage as the risk increases with climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels. 

The project started in 2021 when Peter Emerson, a fisheries biologist at Vermont Fish and Wildlife, requested seeds from NorthWoods while he worked on a program re-establishing floodplain forests in agricultural lands called the Cornfield Replication Project. 

“Pete was like ‘Hey, can you grab us some seeds?’ So, we began collecting a lot,” Colby said. “We put them down, and then a flood would happen and would wash them all away, and we’d start over again.” 

The project picked up in 2023 when Brooke Fleischman was hired as the Statewide Seed Coordinator at the Intervale Center, a nonprofit in Burlington that works to enhance agricultural viability. The Intervale hosts a conservation nursery where plants are grown and sold to be planted along floodplains, eventually bolstering Vermont waterways. 

The Intervale and NorthWoods began a partnership in 2023 called the Riparian Lands Native Seeds Partnership in which Fleischman coordinates seed collection carried out by NorthWoods. This partnership allowed the nursery to grow native plants. 

“We are making this effort to collect locally adapted native seeds so that they are more adapted to our area and not from a bunch of random places across the Midwest,” Fleischman said. 

This season, Fleischman requested the collection of Silver Maple, Aspen, Black willow and Cottonwood, species that are all native to the area and support flood mitigation. 

“Our biggest collection has been Silver Maple. We were able to go out to sites all over the Northeast Kingdom and keep collecting for days,” Colby said. “Right now, we are struggling trying to get serviceberry. They aren’t ripening up as much as past years.” 

Fleischman said they are always looking to work with more organizations across Vermont and to grow their collections and planting sites.

“The dream is for it to continue and keep expanding,” Fleischman said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Experts collect seeds to create diverse, flood-resistant forests.

Milky skies were carrying smoke and haze from Canadian wildfires across northern and central Vermont on Tuesday — prompting state officials to issue a one-day air quality alert across the state. 

Smoke and haze rolled in early Tuesday morning and are expected to linger through the afternoon and night, according to Tyler Danzig, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Burlington. 

Officials warned that sensitive groups should take breaks and monitor their conditions when spending time outdoors. 

Individuals with heart or lung issues, older adults, children, people who work outside and those experiencing homelessness are especially at risk, according to state health officials. Sensitive groups can spend time outside but should take more breaks than usual, according to officials. 

People with asthma are recommended to keep medication handy. Those with heart disease should watch out for palpitations, fatigue and shortness of breath. 

Sensitive groups could continue to feel the effects of exposure up to 24 hours after the haze has passed, according to Danzig. 

The alert spans across Grand Isle, Franklin, Orleans, Essex, Chittenden, Lamoille, Caledonia, Washington, Addison and Orange counties. 

Officials recommend Vermonters sign up for air quality alerts, limit their exposure and keep an eye on forecasts. 

The smoke and haze are coming from wildfires in the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Danzig said. Many of those fires have been ablaze for weeks and caused similar conditions in Vermont earlier this summer.

Skies may tinge orange this evening, but the air should clear overnight, Danzig said. The alert stands all day Tuesday and will not likely be extended for another day, according to Bennet Leon, who monitors air quality for the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the length of the alert.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Officials issue air quality warning for northern and central Vermont .

The Ethan Allen lumber plant in Canaan was back operating in a limited capacity Tuesday after a major fire broke out the previous day, the company and Vermont officials said. The fire caused damage to the factory — which employs almost 100 people in the village of Beecher Falls — and required firefighting teams from two countries to tame the blaze. 

The fire erupted around 10:30 a.m. Monday after a compressor failed at the furniture maker’s Essex County plant, sparking an eight-hour blaze that emergency crews from Vermont, New Hampshire and Quebec finally subdued in the early evening.  

Vermont teams from Beecher Falls and Brighton were assisted by emergency responders from several other towns, including Dalton, New Hampshire; Colebrook, New Hampshire; Saint-Isidore-de-Clifton, Quebec; and Coaticook, Quebec, among others.

“We want to thank the brave fire crews that helped to put out this blaze and ensure the safety of all our associates as well as the safety of those who live around the plant,” Farooq Kathwari, president and CEO of Ethan Allen, said in a statement. 

“We are pleased to report that no one was injured,” Kathwari’s statement continued, “and although the damage caused will require some repair, we have restored power to a good portion of the plant and don’t anticipate significant delays in production.”

Lindsay Kurrle, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development, said in a written statement that the blaze required the factory to halt operations Monday but the damaged plant was up and running “in a limited capacity” the following day.

Named for the eponymous Vermont Revolutionary War hero, Ethan Allen Interiors was founded in 1932 and opened its Beecher Falls plant in 1936. The factory handles sawmill and machining operations and has about 95 employees, making it one of the largest employers in Essex County. 

The company also has a furniture manufacturing plant in Orleans, which employs about 250 people, as well as facilities in North Carolina, Mexico and Honduras.

Kurrle said the company had already scheduled a “routine, one-week shutdown” for the Beecher Falls plant this month and now plans to use the time to repair damage caused by the fire and expects to be fully operational after the brief closure. 

“Ethan Allen officials tell us the fire could have been much worse,” Kurrle said. “They say they are grateful to firefighters for knocking it down and to community members who supported first responders by showing up with food and water as they battled the blaze that took more than eight hours to extinguish.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Ethan Allen expects no ‘significant delays in production’ following major blaze.

The Essex County courthouse — a part-time operation in Vermont’s least-populated county — is set to undergo an almost $3.7 million state-funded renovation starting this summer.

Supporters say the project will bring the courthouse in Guildhall into the 21st century, connecting it to a neighboring building also owned by the county. The work will increase meeting space and add a holding cell and bathroom, among other changes. 

Laura Wilson, the county’s contracted public defender, has been skeptical of the project’s scope and cost, particularly given that there are no plans to expand the court’s limited operations. And now, the construction is forcing her to leave her longtime office in the neighboring county building by the end of the month.

Officers delivered a notice to Wilson to vacate her office by June 30 following a decision made by the local assistant judges. In a June 2 letter to the assistant judges’ lawyer, she urged the county leaders to reconsider.

“The abrupt termination of this modest Guildhall office, without consultation or exploration of alternatives, sends an unfortunate message about the importance and value of access to counsel in our criminal justice system,” Wilson wrote. 

Assistant judges, sometimes called side judges, oversee a county’s budget. In Essex County, the building next to the courthouse provides office space, including for Wilson and the county sheriff’s department.

Evan Hammond and Ken Stransky, Essex County’s assistant judges, declined a request for comment through their attorney Michael Tarrant. Instead, Tarrant wrote in an email that “there is no public defender tenancy with the county.”

“Attorney Laura Wilson, in her private capacity, was provided notice that her private tenancy in the complex is being terminated because the County requires the space for judicial employees,” he wrote, adding that defense attorneys would still have access to space for meeting with clients. 

Essex County Probate Judge and Orleans County Deputy State’s Attorney Sam Swope is also leaving the office he rents privately in the county building as a result of the renovations, according to Wilson and Essex County State’s Attorney Vince Illuzzi.  

During construction — scheduled to begin this summer — hearings will be held at one of the county buildings next door to the courthouse.

Wilson’s frustration resonated with fellow Northeast Kingdom defense attorney Trudy Miller, who called it “ironic” that the renovation would lead to the removal of the public defender’s office, which serves as a “tangible symbol of justice, due process and hope.”

While maintaining a private practice, Wilson has worked as the county’s contracted public defender for about six years and maintained a Guildhall law office for 13. She said she has used the county-owned space for extended meetings with clients and their families, expungement clinics, competency evaluations and trial preparation. Without it, she said clients would have to drive 45 minutes to her office in Lyndonville. 

In her letter, Wilson wrote that she was surprised officers served her the notice to vacate at home instead of the assistant judges, who she sees regularly, telling her in person. 

Wilson has questioned the renovation’s utility. Jury draws at the courthouse occur roughly every other month, she said in an interview, and one day per month is devoted to criminal hearings like arraignments and sentencings. The county shares a judge with nearby Caledonia County. 

Wilson would like to see the expensive renovation also come with an expansion of court time. “It becomes very difficult in one day a month to get everything in,” she said. 

The limited judge time allocated to the county is indicative of ongoing outsourcing of services in Essex County, she said, noting that local officials have had to repeatedly fend off attempts to shut down the courthouse entirely. 

Illuzzi, the county’s prosecutor who also served decades as the area’s state senator, has helped defeat those closure attempts. In an interview, he disagreed with Wilson’s characterizations of the renovation. He argued the update is necessary to bring the courthouse out of “the dark ages,” and given the county’s small court docket, doesn’t think an expansion of court time makes sense. 

He also said asking the local public defender to move out was just a necessity, not an indication of an attack on due process.  

“Given the scope of the renovations,” he said, “folks have to go somewhere.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to specify that both offices being vacated in the Essex County building due to courthouse renovations are rented privately.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Essex County public defender, judge must vacate offices amid courthouse renovations.

In a reversal, the Vermont Department of Corrections announced Friday it would not release a notorious repeat offender to the remote Essex County town of Canaan.

Instead, Harley Breer, 55, who has spent 40 years in and out of jail following arrests for crimes including sexual assault and kidnapping, was ordered to remain in prison, Corrections Commissioner Nick Deml said in a press release.

“This decision was based on three primary factors,” Deml said, “the significant risk he poses to public and victim safety, his history of repeated noncompliance with community supervision, and his high likelihood of fleeing from the jurisdiction of the Department of Corrections and the Vermont criminal justice system.”

Breer’s scheduled release was first reported this week, but the Department of Corrections postponed the decision after the news broke, saying it needed “time to meet with relevant law enforcement officials in Essex County to discuss the public safety concerns in this case.”

Essex County State’s Attorney Vince Illuzzi said Vermont’s most rural region lacked the law enforcement oversight necessary to handle Breer. 

“The rural Northeast Kingdom, the town of Canaan, is not an appropriate placement for someone with Mr. Breer’s history,” he told WCAX. 

Canaan residents quickly began circulating a petition asking for Breer to be released elsewhere, and for the state to increase local law enforcement resources. 

In his Friday statement, Deml said the reversal reflected his department’s “unwavering commitment to public safety,” adding that the department would “conduct a thorough review of policies and make necessary changes to improve the Department’s furlough review process.”

Furlough allows a person serving a prison sentence to be released into the community while still technically under the supervision of the Department of Corrections. Furlough violations often result in a return to prison. 

Breer is a repeat offender with a history of violence toward women who has faced more than 20 felony charges in his lifetime. In 2018, he was accused of assaulting and kidnapping his girlfriend about a year after he was released from prison on probation from a previous domestic violence conviction. 

Decisions to release an incarcerated person on furlough are made during weekly ‘case staffing’ meetings of corrections staff, and determinations are made based on an individual’s current convictions.

“The Commissioner was not aware of the initial furlough recommendation,” Haley Sommer, a department spokesperson, said in an email. “When he became aware of the referral, he ordered a comprehensive review of the case, which resulted in the furlough denial.”

Breer is currently being held at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport. His maximum release date is 2030.

Read the story on VTDigger here: In reversal, Vermont Department of Corrections will not release notorious repeat offender.

Charlotte Oliver is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

SOUTH HERO — Ethan Wagner has been fishing as long as he can remember, mostly as a hobby. So when the Essex High School senior injured his knee playing football, he joined the school’s varsity bass fishing team. And among his teammates, who all call him Wags, he’s found a new bond. “When you’re on the boat together all day, you find something in common,” he said. 

Wagner competed on one of 19 varsity high school teams at the Vermont Principals’ Association’s seventh annual Open Classic tournament last Saturday, hosted at the John Guilmette Access Area in South Hero. The tournament was the most competitive yet, said Jeff Goodrich, chair of the association’s fishing committee — with more “‘full bags’ and competitive weights” than ever before.

It’s part of a trend in a new co-ed sport that’s only seen growth since it was trialed in Vermont in 2018, inspired by New Hampshire high schools, and made official in 2019. 

Kids go out on the water in the early morning, then parade back mid-afternoon. Boats are pulled out of the water and teams go up to weigh in the six best bass, smallmouth or large, they caught that day.

On Saturday, 34 boats went out on Lake Champlain, with 19 varsity and 15 junior varsity teams making up two divisions. Each school can have one team in each division, four kids to a team. The teens took shifts, allowing two in the boat at a time while a coach or volunteer captain maneuvered it. 

Milton High School came out on top that day, weighing six bass at 24.33 total pounds. Burlington High came in second with a weight of 20.97 pounds, and Champlain Valley Union High came in third with 18.28 pounds. 

The teams spent the day fishing on the Inland Sea of Lake Champlain, a stretch protected from wind and weather by the Champlain Islands and the causeway between Milton and South Hero. 

In Vermont varsity fishing, anglers must weigh in live fish — so all boats are required to have live wells that maintain temperature and oxygen levels to sustain the bass while on board. Teams get point deductions for any dead fish. 

At every tourney, employees from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife collect the fish in larger live tanks to release them after they’re weighed. The state workers make sure the fish are healthy and redistribute them, said Paige Blaker, one of three state employees working last weekend’s event. That afternoon, the crew released fish across three to four locations along the Inland Sea, Blaker said.

Part of the sport is “being a steward of the environment and taking care of the water,” Goodrich said, hence the partnership with the fish and wildlife department, which doesn’t exist in adult tournament leagues. 

Anglers master a tactic called culling: They weigh their fish as they go, dumping the lightest overboard and constantly replacing the ones in their on-board well until they’re left with the biggest six they can find. 

“You can control a lot of things — but the one thing you can’t control is if the fish is gonna bite,” said Scott Green, the coach at Harwood Union High School. The team at Harwood, last year’s state champs, has 18 anglers, the most ever. 

How do they prepare for tournaments? 

“We make sure there’s no frays in our line,” said team captain Nathanael Conyers. 

At the Duxbury school’s last practice ahead of the Open Classic, Green set up cornhole boards and cut-up recycling bins on the lawn in front of the school — targets for the athletes to try to land their hooks on. The team was working on their line-casting skills in preparation for the tournament in a few days. 

The rod is an “extension of your hand,” and “your wrist dictates where it goes,” Green said. 

The team gets in two practices on the lawn during the week — due to the long drive to the lake — and one on the water every weekend. Like all school teams in the state, Harwood Union relies on local anglers and coaches to volunteer personal boats, paying for insurance and fuel. 

Other schools far from the lake, like Middlebury Union High School, practice on the water only a couple times a year, said John Fitzgerald, that team’s coach. Other than with those sporadic sessions, he helps his anglers by directing them to YouTube and online resources to learn about “different setups,” he said. 

Although the sport is co-ed in Vermont schools, girls are far outnumbered. Hailey Isham, a sophomore at Mount Abraham Union High School in Bristol, said she’s the only girl on her school’s team. She’s been doing the sport since she was a freshman and plans to participate all four years. 

The Harwood team has only had a few girls over the years, Green said. The Middlebury team had a girl on the team last year, though none this year, Fitzgerald said.

But Green said he’s happy to have girls on the team, and leaders in the sport emphasize it’s for everyone.

“It gets students an opportunity to be a part of their school community, wear the uniform and represent their school in a nontraditional fashion,” Goodrich said. 

Wagner from Essex High said he’s excited for the VPA State Championship on Oct. 5 and hopes his team will do better there than at the South Hero tournament.

“I don’t do anything in my life to lose,” he said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont high schools hooked on a new sport: bass fishing.

BRIGHTON — On Tuesday morning, Lisa and Bill Moore returned home from their summer camp on Lake Willoughby after Bill’s mother, Maggie Morgan, who is in her 90s, called to say she couldn’t get out of her house, located next door to their own. 

“We could tell she was panicking,” Lisa said. “We said, ‘we’ll be right there.’ And she says, ‘Well, you can’t get through the road.’”

The Moores navigated their way home through a neighboring lumber yard. Bill Moore used a boat to rescue his mother from her home.

“That’s my house,” Lisa said, gesturing to a yellow home a few feet away, which was surrounded by water. “It’s ruined.”

Water had ripped off their front porch, remnants of which lay across the flooded road. A potted plant lay sideways by her front door. When Lisa entered the house for the first time Tuesday morning, water came up to her mid-thigh, she said.

“Everything’s floating around in the house right now,” she said. “We’re still kind of in shock.”

Flash flooding hit several towns in the Northeast Kingdom on Monday night. According to the National Weather Service, St. Johnsbury received more than 8 inches of rain, and more than 7 inches fell on Brighton, which includes the village of Island Pond.

One meteorologist with the service called the event “off the charts.” The storm marks the fourth major flooding event Vermont has experienced since July of 2023. 

In some areas of Brighton, small brooks became rivers with powerful currents. In others, including at the Moores’ property, water pooled and rose to damaging heights. 

Noah Bond, the town manager, said it’s hard to know how many homes the storm damaged. He warily eyed the forecast on his phone — the National Weather Service has issued a flood watch for much of central and northern Vermont, effective from Wednesday afternoon through Wednesday evening — and wondered whether additional rain would compound the damage. 

Brighton experienced flood damage several weeks ago, when another extreme rain event caused widespread flooding. 

That time, “we had enough contractors and staff to get things turned around in about 24 hours. Okay, so it was pretty quick,” Bond said. “This time was worse.”

He got a call from his road foreman, Andy Martin, at 3 a.m. Tuesday, he said. Floodwaters covered multiple roads until mid-afternoon, when the water began to recede. It destroyed one bridge, completely carved away some sections of road, visibly damaged driveways and covered lawns in mud. 

The bridge is “going to be a very expensive fix,” Bond said, and at least a two-and-a-half week job on its own. 

“I worry, with some of these floods, that some of this work is going to take an immense amount of time,” Bond said. “And I just don’t have an immense amount of staff. I have three road workers.”

Contractors who live in town have also offered to lend their services, he said, which helps, but the work is “nonstop.”

Selectboard members Heather McElroy and Jeanne Jervais guided traffic around closed roads near the Island Pond access area. Nearby, a resident, who declined to share her name with VTDigger, took stock of damage around her home, where a small brook that had morphed into a raging river the night before had carved deep grooves in her driveway. 

“This is nothing compared to what other people — I mean, people have lost their homes this time around. Again,” she said. “It’s awful.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brighton residents contend with damaged homes and roads after latest storm brought 7 inches of rain.

NORTON— For nearly a week, David T. Leidy’s Lake View Store went without deliveries.

July’s storm, which dropped 4.5 inches of water in Leidy’s rain gauge, knocked out Route 114 on either side of him, Norton to the west and Averill to the east.

A quick fix, he said, allowed cars — but not trucks — to resume travel along the state highway, which parallels the Canadian border in Essex County.

 “There’s a lot of people that rely on me for their staples,” Leidy said, “I was really low on a lot of stuff.”

Norton has a full-time population of about 150, practically a metropolis compared to Averill’s roughly 20 permanent residents. Both communities swell in the summertime, with vacationers and camp owners flocking to Great Averill Pond and Lake Wallace, attracted to the isolation and serenity of Vermont’s most rural corner. 

Essex County is the least populated, most rural and poorest county in the state. 

And all of those attributes pose challenges to flood recovery, according to Terri Lavely, who works in training, development and advancement for Northeast Kingdom Human Services. 

“This is the ruralest part of Vermont, and they don’t know to call 211, they don’t know where to reach out for resources,” she said. “It’s Vermont pride, too. You know, we kind of suck it up, do it ourselves. We’re not really good at asking for help.”

After last summer’s flooding, Essex County didn’t make the cut to qualify for the federal government’s individual assistance disaster declarations, which Lavely attributed to under-reporting of damage. 

While Essex County communities haven’t garnered the attention for flood damage of some other hard hit communities farther south, the destruction was considerable.

Lavely said that Wednesday, she traveled to Lunenburg to check in on several households. While there, she met an elderly couple whose home flooded last week.  

“This couple spent two nights in a hotel right after the floods because their house is uninhabitable right now. And then they couldn’t afford that, so they decided to stay in their car for an evening. We’re talking about an 82-year-old gentleman and his 79-year-old wife,” Lavely said. “The next day they were driving home and he fell asleep behind the wheel and totaled his car.

“So when I arrived at the home last night, he was like ‘screw it, we’re just gonna stay in the house,’ and three-quarters of their home is off the foundation. So, if we get one good rain, that house is gone.”

Lavely fears Essex County will once again miss out on assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency due to under-reporting of damage, even though communities like Lunenburg, Concord and Gilman were significantly impacted. 

Houses and other property elsewhere in the county also sustained damage. Homes along Railroad Street in Island Pond near the Pherrins River took on water last week, according to Trevor Colby, Essex County’s sheriff, who also noted washouts in Maidstone and crop damage to corn and hay fields around the county. 

On Wednesday, a week after the intense rains, a couple in Canaan who still had water in their basement was working to dry out, their driveway and yard ravaged by flooding. Three feet of water entered the home the week prior, and the basement smelled dank with mildew. Along Route 114 from Brighton to Norton and into Averill, driveways were washed out, roadsides eroded, and debris lie strewn beneath bridges and culverts, swept there by rushing water. 

One silver lining, according to Lavely, is that local organizations are far more prepared than last year to respond to disaster. Groups such as Kingdom United Resilience and Recovery Effort, Northeast Kingdom Organizing, and a web of volunteers rushed into action, taking on “muck and gut” projects, as Lavely called them, or knocking on doors to check in on neighbors. 

“We’re seeing a lot of folks who lost everything signing up to help others,” Lavely said. “It’s a pretty robust community effort, and it’s not really owned by anyone. It’s kind of managed by everyone, if that makes sense. It is absolutely amazing to see the difference between this year’s flood and last year’s flood.”

Still, it’s an uphill battle. Kari White helps lead the local long-term disaster recovery group, Kingdom United Resilience and Recovery Effort, and works to support health equity in the Northeast Kingdom. The group was engaged in canvassing across the region, and had received damage reports from Essex County but was worried about possible gaps.

“We are concerned about towns, smaller towns in Essex and Orleans, that don’t have the visibility and don’t have maybe the neighbor-to-neighbor networks or the sort of civic infrastructure to have kind of a coordinated, unified response,” White said. “I think we have learned that part of the challenge is, in fact, the huge land area of the Northeast Kingdom. It’s 55 different towns and municipalities.”

Many of the same characteristics that concern area service providers about successful flood response in Essex County appeal to its residents. 

Leidy, who took over the Lake View Store eight years ago and now lives there, fell in love with the area’s isolated location and trusting community. People rely on him to make sure their camps are still standing after weather like last week, and they bring him their bucks to weigh during deer season and show him the lake trout they pull from the pond across the street in the summer. He knows the hunters, snowmobilers, and border patrol agents who frequent the store, and celebrates the never-lock-your-doors nature of the place.

“I don’t think anything should change up here,” he said, as two German Shepherds — Luna and Averill — played in front of his chair. “I don’t leave this area. I hardly ever leave this building.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Locals worry flood assistance won’t reach rural and remote Essex County.

The Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Essex County Sheriff’s Department in a dispute over public records related to the department’s compliance with Vermont’s fair and impartial policing policy.

In the lawsuit filed Monday in Washington County Superior civil court, the ACLU of Vermont alleged that the sheriff’s department won’t electronically send the organization documents it is seeking. The department instead wants the ACLU to “inspect” the records in person.

The organization filed the public records request, it stated in the lawsuit, “to better understand the (sheriff’s department’s) practices with respect to sharing information with federal immigration authorities.”

Nothing in the state’s Public Records Act permits the custodian of a public record to “dictate” that someone seeking a public record must “inspect” it first, Lia Ernst, the ACLU of Vermont’s legal director, wrote in an email to Essex County Sheriff Trevor Colby before ultimately filing the lawsuit. 

“And for good reason,” Ernst added. 

“Perhaps,” Ernst wrote, “a requestor does not wish to or is not able to incur the time and expense of traveling long distances to inspect records (especially because requestors need not be Vermont or even U.S. residents), or perhaps a requestor who believes they were subjected to official misconduct would not wish to review records about that incident in the very place where the officer works.”

The ACLU of Vermont, according to the lawsuit, submitted a public records request in January 2024, following the publication of a December 2023 news story by the Community News Service, a University of Vermont-based student journalism organization. 

In that story, Colby described his concerns with expanding the state’s fair and impartial policing policy.

“He emphasized that his priority is to keep residents within his jurisdiction safe, and people in his relatively remote part of the state get shaken up when they see unfamiliar folks,” the Community News Service wrote. “Up there, he said, everyone basically knows everyone.”

“Colby said he would likely call immigration authorities after a traffic stop if he thought the people in the car were undocumented,” CNS reported.

Should Colby make such a call, according to the ACLU, it “would likely violate” the fair and impartial policing policy that prohibits local, state and county law enforcement contacts with federal immigration authorities except under certain circumstances.

In its records request, the ACLU sought documents related to a number of federal agencies — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Protection — since January 2022.

Colby told VTDigger on Tuesday that he couldn’t say much until he had a chance to consult with legal counsel.

“If you review their filing, we made the records available to them at the office for inspection and copying at our office,” Colby said, “and they refused to come.”

Asked why he was not willing to send the information electronically, Colby replied, “That’s part of what I didn’t want to get into a lot of, but initially there were redactions that were made and there has to be explanation about those redactions for what they’re there for.” 

Since then, according to Colby, the situation has changed. 

“One of the federal partners sent me an email and told me they didn’t think I could disclose any of my documents with their information,” Colby said. Asked which federal entity made such a request, Colby replied, “I’m not giving that out at this time.”

In a series of emails documented in the lawsuit, Colby made clear that the nearly 50 pages of responsive documents were available for in-person review, while the ACLU argued that they ought to be sent electronically. 

Ernst said Tuesday that before filing the lawsuit she had sent Colby an email laying out her organization’s legal argument.

“It’s based on a sort of combination of provisions of the Public Records Act as well as case law,” Ernst said. 

In the email she sent to Colby, Ernst wrote, “The Public Records Act treats requests to inspect records held by an agency and requests for copies of those records distinctly — and gives requestors, not records custodians, the choice of which avenue to pursue.” 

Lauren Hibbert, Vermont’s deputy secretary of state, said Tuesday that she couldn’t comment directly on an active lawsuit. 

“I will tell you that the law as written says that you can inspect or copy records,” Hibbert said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont ACLU takes Essex County Sheriff’s Department to court in public records dispute.

For $1.1 million, a state park in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom just got bigger. 

Vermont’s Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, along with the Vermont Land Trust, announced Wednesday that they had raised the funds to add the 15-acre island in Island Pond Lake, as well as a 3-acre stretch of lakeshore, to the adjacent Brighton State Park. 

The purchase brings the island under state management, guaranteeing public access and protecting its natural resources. The lakeshore parcel will be used by staff to get to and from the property.

“This is a really unique expansion. We don’t offer many islands in our parks, ” said Gannon Osborn, who manages land conservation projects for the Forests, Parks and Recreation department. 

The island, a forested shoe print shape in the northeast corner of the lake, is an integral part of the Brighton community, according to Osborn. In the summer, kayakers paddle out to picnic on its sandy beach. Ice skaters glide across to it when the lake freezes in the winter. 

The island is also home to an ecologically important red pine forest and serves as a nesting and breeding habitat for bald eagles and loons.

“This is not something you see in many areas, so it’s significant for us to protect it,” Osborn said. 

A family trust owned the island for years, allowing visitors and leaving the forest untouched. In 2021, however, the island went up for sale on the open market. Had it been bought by a private individual or corporation, the new owner would have had the right to raze trees, erect buildings, and restrict the public’s access. 

The Vermont Land Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving land, approached the Forests, Parks and Recreation department to propose a partnership. According to Osborn, the state had long been interested in incorporating the land into Brighton State Park. 

“I was looking through some project files and we had been looking at this island back in 1993,” Osborn said. 

By May 2023, the department had secured a contract for the property. Grants from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund raised over $1 million, about 93% of the total goal. Community members and area businesses donated the approximately $76,000 still remaining. 

“Projects like this require a mix of partners. The community really stepped up,” said Abby White, Vice President for Engagement at the Vermont Land Trust. 

One of the conditions of the grant given by the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board was that a conservation easement be placed on the island. This is a legally binding agreement that permanently protects land from development, regardless of whether it changes hands in the future. 

Noah Bond, the town manager for Brighton, was ecstatic when he heard the news of the purchase. He said he hoped the expansion of the state park would draw new visitors to town. 

“We want to capitalize on that bit of the tourist economy,” said Bond. 

The island is a landmark in Brighton, dominating the view from downtown in Island Pond village. Bond is thankful that it will remain uninhabited for the foreseeable future. After all, the best view of all is from his office in the town hall.  

“There’s this bald eagle that comes through every year like clockwork,” Bond said. “We’re blessed that this is being protected.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Island purchase expands state park in the Northeast Kingdom .

Amid a rise in people living without shelter, one Northeast Kingdom town is proposing to ban people from sleeping anywhere on municipal property — a move the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union says is likely unconstitutional.

An ordinance unanimously adopted by the Canaan Selectboard on Aug. 21 would prohibit anyone from sitting, standing or loitering “in or about any municipally owned or municipally maintained land, park, building, or parking lot between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.” unless authorized by a town official. 

The measure would also ban anyone from sitting, standing or loitering on any “street, sidewalk, municipal land, building, or any other public space in town” if an “owner, tenant, or custodian thereof” asks them to leave. 

The ordinance notes that “persons who have a legitimate purpose for sitting or standing in such public places” can do so, but does not specify what a “legitimate purpose” could be.

Lia Ernst, legal director for the Vermont ACLU, said the measure “raises a number of constitutional concerns.”

“It violates the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause to criminalize sleeping in public spaces when there’s nowhere else to go,” she said. And she added that anti-loitering ordinances are usually found to be unconstitutional.

Indeed, unhoused individuals in Canaan, an Essex County town of fewer than a thousand people, have scant available options. Vermont has one of the highest per-capita rates of homelessness in the nation, and not enough shelter beds to meet the need. But in the Northeast Kingdom, one of Vermont’s poorest regions, the problem is not that shelters are full. It’s that they do not exist.

There are no overnight shelters for the general population operating anywhere within Essex, Orleans or Caledonia counties, according to Martin Hahn, the executive director for the Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness. (Some specialized beds are operated by Northeast Kingdom Community Action, an anti-poverty nonprofit, and Northeast Kingdom Human Services, the region’s mental health agency, he noted.)

Canaan selectboard chair Mark Bullard declined to discuss the new ordinance with a reporter, saying that he wanted to consult with the rest of the selectboard first.

“I don’t want to … have the town being sued for something that I said (that) was misconstrued,” he said. “So I’d rather just get with the other board members, get something concrete, and let you know.” He declined to offer a time at which he might be ready for an interview.

The ordinance is not yet in effect, as Canaan residents could still petition the town to hold a special town meeting to vote on the matter. But unless 5% of the town’s voters sign on to such a petition or the selectboard repeals the ordinance, it will go into effect Oct. 20, according to Canaan town clerk Zachary Brown. 

Canaan’s ordinance comes as Vermont’s homelessness crisis has grown more visible — particularly at the local level. On June 1, hundreds of people were evicted as the state wound down a pandemic-era program that had allowed unhoused individuals to shelter in motels. 

The Vermont ACLU released an open letter at the time urging municipalities to take a “humane and flexible approach” to people experiencing homelessness sheltering on local public land. 

It noted that while municipalities can legally prohibit encampments at certain locations, they cannot ban people from sheltering on all public land, as Canaan’s ordinance appears to attempt to do.

Ernst said the ACLU was anticipating an ordinance much like Canaan’s when it released that letter. She argued that while it remains incumbent on towns and cities to act constitutionally and with compassion, her organization is “not unsympathetic to municipalities” who are “being asked to bear the burden of this statewide failure.”

“This is a fairly predictable and foreseeable example of what everyone said was going to happen when the Legislature and the governor evicted hundreds of households from the hotel voucher program,” she said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Lia Ernst’s role for the Vermont ACLU.

Read the story on VTDigger here: As homelessness rises, one town may ban sleeping, standing or sitting on public land.

NEK Broadband is receiving $17.5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to connect the most remote parts of the Northeast Kingdom to fiber optic broadband internet service, the communications union district and Vermont’s congressional delegation announced Wednesday.

The grant will cover most of a $23.5 million project in the most rural part of the Northeast Kingdom, said Christa Shute, executive director of NEK Broadband, in testimony before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry on Wednesday.

She was one of two Vermonters who gave testimony in Washington, D.C. 

NEK Broadband is one of 10 communications union districts in Vermont. It is made up of 56 municipalities in the Northeast Kingdom. Vermont’s model for rolling out fiber optic service to every address in the state relies on communities banding together into districts so that they can better negotiate with internet service providers. 

Appearing before the Subcommittee on Rural Development and Energy, Shute said the funding will enable NEK Broadband to build out 321 miles of high-speed fiber optic broadband across 22 of the most rural and underserved towns in the Northeast Kingdom. 

Also Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., in his first hearing as chair of the subcommittee, reintroduced the Reconnecting Rural America Act, a bill to reauthorize a U.S. Department of Agriculture program to fund high-speed broadband for rural communities. 

“One of the big challenges in rural America is access to high-speed high-quality broadband,” Welch said in his opening remarks. 

Witnesses in the hearing differed over whether the Department of Agriculture should favor fiber optic cable over other technologies in rural areas. To some extent, the disagreement reflected regional differences among parts of the country where large farms predominate and others, such as Vermont, that are trying to develop rural businesses that rely on the ability to upload and download at high speeds.

Justin Forde, a lobbyist for Midco, an internet service provider in Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin, argued that the Department of Agriculture should be neutral on whether broadband should be made available through fiber optic or through fixed wireless broadband. He said farmers need to be able to get broadband in the field as agricultural technology becomes increasingly connected, and laying down fiber optic cable would be impractical on large farms. 

Forde argued that download speeds are more important than upload speeds in his part of the country, and he pushed for connecting people who have no broadband before upgrading service where there is already slower broadband service.

The two Vermonters testifying, Shute and Roger Nishi, vice president of industry relations at Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom, disagreed with Forde.

“When you live in rural areas with mountains, that wireless service does not always exist,” Shute said.

Nishi said a designer working in a rural area might need as much upload speed as download speed. He pushed for a federal standard of 100 megabytes upload and download. That is the standard that Vermont is aiming for as it works toward providing fiber optic broadband to every address. 

“Any money spent on broadband deployment should go to future-proof technologies like fiber that achieve speeds of at least 100/100 Mbps,” said Rob Fish, deputy director of the Vermont Community Broadband Board, in an email to VTDigger.

In his closing remarks before the subcommittee, Welch argued against giving “second-class service to rural America,” indicating his support for fast download and upload speeds. 

“We’re trying to get folks to come into rural America,” he said. “Those people will not come unless they’re confident they have reliable high speed internet.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: NEK Broadband to receive $17.5 million from feds to connect most remote parts of region.

For years, public federal dollars have paid for staff, materials and programs at private schools across the country.

Through a process known as “equitable services,” public schools that receive federal funds are usually required to set some of that money aside to spend on local private schools. 

Now, administrators in one Vermont supervisory union are raising concerns that those funds could be subsidizing discrimination. 

In an email to Vermont Secretary of Education Dan French last month, North Country Supervisory Union superintendent Elaine Collins said she had “some serious reservations” about providing those federally funded resources to United Christian Academy, a private religious K-12 school in Newport.

“Not only does this not feel right ethically, but it seems that we are out of compliance with our own (supervisory union) Equity, Transgender Student, and Non-Discrimination policies, as well as breaking state and federal law,” Collins wrote in a Feb. 27 email obtained by VTDigger through a public records request.

Those concerns stem from comments United Christian Academy made earlier this year, in which the school hinted to state officials that it might not comply with Vermont’s prohibitions on discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. 

Vermont’s anti-discrimination laws are supposed to apply to all schools, not just public ones. If private schools — often called independent schools — want to receive public tuition money, they are required to go one step further, by signing a statement affirming that they will follow those laws.

In its bid to be eligible for tuition money, however, United Christian Academy added an extra statement to its application. 

“As a Christian-based school we have a statutory and constitutional right to make decisions based on our religious beliefs, including those pertaining to marriage and sexuality,” the school wrote to the State Board of Education in January. 

As of 2022, United Christian’s handbook “reserves the right to admit students and families on the basis of academic performance, religious commitment, lifestyle choices, and personal qualifications,” according to a state report on the school. 

At North Country, which serves roughly 2,600 students in Orleans and Essex counties, administrators worried that, by spending federal dollars on the school, they could inadvertently support discrimination.

“It’s a double standard, and it places us in a hard spot,” Collins said in an interview. 

In Vermont, the prospect of public dollars in private religious schools has long been a source of consternation. The controversy typically centers on state tuition money, which has been the subject of much scrutiny and discussion at the Statehouse.

But the equitable services process is a separate program, with separate federal money. 

When public schools receive money through federal programs — such as Title I, a school anti-poverty program, and Title IV, which is intended to enhance students’ academic performance — administrators are usually required to set some aside for local private schools through a process called equitable services. 

Private schools do not receive cash directly. Instead, public school administrators consult with local independent school administrators, then use the funds to hire staff and pay for materials for them. 

Vermont has 107 private schools that are eligible for equitable services, according to a list published by the Vermont Agency of Education. Many are religiously affiliated, and some have not been approved to receive state tuition money.

It’s not clear, however, how many of those schools are actually receiving services. 

Since 2020, United Christian has received nearly $145,000 worth of services through three federal programs, according to Jessica Applegate, North Country Supervisory Union’s director of learning design. That money has helped pay for part-time reading and math interventionists, as well as a music program, at the religious school.

“We advertise the positions, we do the interviewing, we do all the contracts for their contracted services if they hire (people) for professional development, we order all their materials and supplies (and) books,” Applegate said. 

Because that money is technically not in their possession, private schools that benefit from it are not subject to the federal anti-discrimination laws that apply to public schools, according to federal documents explaining the program. Instead, the public schools are tasked with following anti-discrimination laws.

But administrators at North Country have remained concerned. By working with United Christian Academy to buy materials and hire staff for them, they worried, could they be supporting discrimination with public money?

In her email to the state last month, Collins noted that North Country employs LGBTQ+ staffers. 

“Assuredly, it’s not a matter of the money involved, but more importantly that our (supervisory union) … would continue to be required to support, through ample time and effort, a school that does not follow anti-discrimination laws and practices,” she said.

Kimberlee Strepka, United Christian Academy’s head of school, declined an interview request from VTDigger. 

In an emailed statement, Strepka thanked North Country, saying it had been “very supportive of United Christian Academy for many years.”

“Possible changes to future services are currently in discussion, so we … would prefer to not comment on specifics,” she wrote. “We hope that we are able to continue this amicable relationship into the future, as helping students flourish is a goal we both share.”

Applegate shared an email exchange between her and state education officials, in which she asked whether the supervisory union should continue to spend public money on United Christian. 

“The short and maybe not so helpful response is, yes, the (public school district) does need to continue to support services through (equitable services) of federal funds to the kiddoes attending any recognized and approved independent school,” Deborah Bloom, an Agency of Education employee, wrote to Applegate in a Feb. 21 email.

But in conversations, Applegate said, state officials also suggested that North Country no longer use the federal dollars to pay for staff at United Christian — and use it instead for materials or programs. 

Asked about their guidance on the matter, state education officials declined to provide specific advice on how public schools should handle that money.

“The U.S. Department of Education has been clear in its guidance that equitable services must be provided to all eligible students attending private schools that are non-profits,” Lindsey Hedges, an Agency of Education spokesperson, said in an email.

Ethan Weinstein contributed reporting.

Read the story on VTDigger here: In North Country Supervisory Union, officials fear that federal money will subsidize discrimination.

In their first bill introduced as Vermont’s new congressional delegation, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., are taking the first legislative step in seeking wild and scenic designation for the Northeast Kingdom’s Nulhegan River and Paul Stream.

“We’ve heard from a lot of the folks up there that the wild and scenic designation is flexible in its meaning, but at its core it’s about designating a river that has special, unspoiled environmental qualities,” Welch told VTDigger Wednesday. “And it’s intended to preserve that and continue to allow for the public use for recreation, scenic beauty and preservation.”

Commissioning a congressional study is most commonly the first step in what can be a yearslong process to achieve the designation, according to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, which operates under the federal Bureau of Land Management, National Parks Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service agencies. Dating back to 1968, the system seeks to “preserve certain rivers with outstanding natural, cultural, and recreational values in a free-flowing condition for the enjoyment of present and future generations.”

Vermont has been through the designation process once before. Just over 46 miles of the Upper Missisquoi and Trout Rivers achieved the designation in 2014, nearly six years after a study was first commissioned.

Welch said he hasn’t yet taken his kayak out on the Nulhegan or the Paul himself, but he did paddle the Missisquoi during the region’s “big long community effort” to achieve the designation. Backing this week’s bill on the Nulhegan and the Paul is a laundry list of nearby municipalities, conservation groups and regional organizations, including the Abenaki Nation.

One such group in support of the bill is the Vermont River Conservancy. Noah Pollock, a representative of the conservation group, said in a statement Wednesday that “the Nulhegan is one of Vermont’s most wild rivers” and celebrated the potential for a study “to better understand the river’s values and to explore community interest in Wild and Scenic River designation.”

The bill is the first that Vermont’s newly sworn-in congressional delegation has introduced in tandem. It’s also the first that Welch has introduced as a member of the U.S. Senate and Balint as a member of the House. Welch said he sees it as “a reaffirmation of the commitment that Vermonters have to the protection and preservation of the beauty of Vermont. And this bill is an indication of our desire to be very, very supportive of that.”

What’s “really wonderful about being a part of the delegation here for Vermont,” Welch said, is that “Bernie, Becca and I are all doing this together and are totally excited about doing something that’s good for the environment and allows us to preserve and protect this wonderful stream and do it together. So I think it’s a clear statement of our continued interest in doing all we can to protect Vermont’s environment.”

Sanders said in a written statement Wednesday that Vermont’s rivers “are some of our most precious natural resources, and we must do everything we can to protect them for future generations.” Balint said in a statement that for her first piece of federal legislation, she was ”proud to work with Senators Welch and Sanders to prioritize preserving our state’s natural resources.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: In 1st bill as a new delegation, Sanders, Welch and Balint seek to explore ‘wild’ designation for 2 NEK waterways.

The former police chief of the Brighton and Canaan police departments is accused of sexually assaulting an underage girl while on duty more than five years ago, according to Vermont State Police. 

Jeffrey Noyes, 54, of Bloomfield, was issued a citation Monday afternoon on a charge of sexual assault, according to a state police news release. 

The charge follows a yearlong investigation of the incident that was reported to police in February 2022, according to the release. A detective from outside the area was assigned to investigate, the release stated, with assistance from the Technology and Investigative Unit.

Noyes knew the alleged victim, according to state police, and had taken her on multiple ride-alongs in his cruiser. 

According to the release, Noyes drove the victim, who was under the age of consent, to a remote area and sexually assaulted her. He was in uniform and on duty at that time, the release noted. 

Additional information was not immediately available Monday, though more details are expected to be released when the police affidavit in support of the charge becomes public following his arraignment Feb. 21.

A working phone number for Noyes was not immediately available Monday evening.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story used an incorrect photo.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Former Northeast Kingdom police chief faces charge of sexual assault on underage girl.

Details remain sketchy about an apparent shooting that hospital officials reported early Tuesday morning in Newport.

Eddie De Los Torres, 37, who police said has no fixed address, arrived at North Country Hospital in Newport for treatment of non-life-threatening gunshot wounds to his extremities Tuesday at about 2 a.m., and hospital officials called in the Vermont State Police.

Police said De Los Torres provided only limited information about the shooting and declined to provide details to detectives assigned to investigate the incident. Police said the shooting is believed to have occurred somewhere in the Northeast Kingdom.

Police are continuing to investigate.

Read the story on VTDigger here: State police investigate Northeast Kingdom shooting.

The latest state data shows that from January to September, 168 Vermonters fatally overdosed — nine more than in the first nine months of last year. If the numbers stay on that upward trajectory, Vermont could surpass the record it set for resident opioid deaths in 2021.

The details show the continued pervasiveness of fentanyl. The synthetic opioid, which has fueled fatal overdoses among Vermonters since 2016, was involved in 93% of deaths so far this year.

Authorities say the drug, which is a hundred times stronger than morphine, is not only potent but relatively inexpensive to produce and widely available. Those factors have led illicit drug manufacturers to mix fentanyl with other substances, often without the knowledge of users.

Three people died of fatal overdoses in Essex County in the first nine months of this year. With fewer than 6,000 residents, Essex is the state’s least populated county. Three deaths equates to a rate of 48.7 deaths per 100,000 residents. Windham County is right behind, with a rate of 45.

An emergent drug in 2021 also gained a foothold this year. The animal tranquilizer xylazine, which caught the Vermont Health Department’s attention only last year, has figured in nearly a third of overdose deaths in 2022. That amounts to 48 deaths.

Because xylazine is not an opioid, it does not respond to naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal drug commonly sold as Narcan. Xylazine-laced opioids can pose a higher risk of death, particularly since there’s no quick way to test for the drug’s presence, unlike fentanyl.

“Xylazine has certainly complicated overdose prevention because there is no test strip or current antidote for it,” Nicole Rau Mitiguy, the state health department’s substance misuse prevention manager, earlier told VTDigger.

Rau Mitiguy said Friday that many factors affect the overdose fatality rate among Vermonters, such as the rapidly changing drug supply and the lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

“The impacts of the pandemic, and the experience of Vermonters during that time — such as stress, isolation, more limited services — will likely have longer-term repercussions related to substance use and accidental overdoses that will extend beyond the height of the pandemic itself,” she said.

The department said it continues to improve its overdose mitigation programs. Meanwhile, it’s encouraging people to reach out to VTHelplink, the state’s drug and alcohol support center, to learn more about available treatment and recovery services.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Opioid overdose deaths among Vermonters remain on upward trajectory.

A Brighton man appeared in court Wednesday after he allegedly attempted to blow up his neighbors’ home and vehicles.

Scott Buchman, 64, pleaded not guilty to a charge of domestic terrorism, for which he faces up to 20 years in prison, as well as other charges including aggravated assault and assault on law enforcement, related to a Monday night encounter.

Vermont Superior Court Judge Justin Jiron ordered Buchman held without bail. Buchman, who attended the hearing via video from Northern State Correctional Facility, will also receive a competency and sanity evaluation.

According to an affidavit written by state police trooper Aaron Leonard, Buchman pulled his Honda pickup truck into his neighbors’ driveway on Gideon Mill Road in Brighton around 11:30 p.m. on Monday. The neighbors — Robin Caldera Smith and Janet Rick — saw Buchman and a fire in their driveway, and Caldera Smith fired two warning shots toward Buchman. 

“A burnt red plastic gas can was found at the base of the steps to the porch,” Leonard wrote in the affidavit. The can was a foot from one of the neighbors’ cars, 10 feet from a large propane tank, and near another of the neighbors’ vehicles. Rick extinguished the fire with water and a bag of mulch, Leonard wrote.

“Caldera stated she believed Buchman was attempting to kill her and Rick by setting the fire and she lived in constant fear of Buchman because of his use of fireworks, explosives, and possession of firearms,” Leonard wrote. 

State police later followed Buchman, who had returned in his truck, back to his residence. Once there, Buchman appeared naked on his porch, shouting obscenities, police said. Police attempted to deescalate the situation by establishing communication, according to the court document. 

Police said Buchman aimed a .22 caliber rifle at his head, threatening to shoot himself if the police did not shoot him first. Later, he “lit two explosive devices and threw them off his porch” toward state police, according to the affidavit. Buchman resisted arrest, police said.

Essex County State’s Attorney Vince Illuzzi said Buchman’s home and that of his neighbors are the only two permanent residences on the dead end street. Their driveways, roughly 100 feet apart, made preventing contact difficult, he said. 

According to Illuzzi, an ongoing investigation indicated that a nearby camp had its windows blown out and suffered significant damage after explosives were set off nearby. 

“There appears to be explosive devices used consistent with explosive devices found at Mr. Buchman’s residence,” Illuzzi said, adding that the neighborhood has been “essentially terrorized.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brighton man faces domestic terrorism charge for allegedly attempting to blow up neighbors’ house.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

“Children of sect seized in Vermont,” blared the headline on the front page of the New York Times on June 23, 1984. 

The newspaper reported, “About 140 state police officers and social service workers raided 20 homes near (Island Pond, Vermont) early this morning and took into custody 112 children of the Northeast Kingdom Community Church because members had refused to answer complaints about child abuse and neglect.” 

The case sparked national outrage and was quickly thrown out by a judge.

Dean Pineles was legal counsel to former Gov. Richard Snelling at the time of the raid. He insists that the raid at Island Pond was justified. Pineles went on to a distinguished career as a Vermont trial judge and later presided over war crimes tribunals in Kosovo. He says that Kosovo provided a precedent that Russian President Vladimir Putin used to justify his invasion of Ukraine. He reflects on his globetrotting legal career in a new memoir, “A Judge’s Odyssey: From Vermont to Russia, Kazakhstan, and Georgia, Then on to War Crimes and Organ Trafficking in Kosovo.”

Pineles has traveled the world to issue justice, but he continues to grapple with the issues surrounding the infamous Island Pond case that he confronted as a young attorney in Vermont.

“I would sit here with a heavy conscience if we had done nothing and had been faced with a dead child,” Pineles declared shortly after the Island Pond raid.

Four decades later, Pineles stands by that decision. 

“I would rather be here defending what we did,” he said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Delivering justice from Island Pond to Kosovo.

A New Hampshire woman is facing a slew of criminal charges after police said she set a car on fire and threw a rock through the window of a house in Concord, Vermont, on Tuesday night. 

Nikki Lucas of Lyman, New Hampshire, pleaded not guilty at an arraignment Wednesday in Essex County Superior criminal court to eight charges, including one count of third-degree arson, four counts of reckless endangerment, two counts of unlawful mischief and one of unlawfully trespassing at an occupied residence. 

According to an affidavit of probable cause filed with the court, police got a call at about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday that someone, later determined to be Lucas, had broken into a house at 669 Leonard Hill Road through the window. About 10 minutes later, police said they received a call about a car on fire at the house next door, which is No. 605.

Vermont State Police troopers found Lucas outside of 669 Leonard Hill Road, according to court documents, and she appeared to be intoxicated. Lucas denied using alcohol or drugs, and told police she had been riding in a van with her ex-boyfriend when the two “had an incident,” and he kicked her out of the vehicle “on an unknown road.”

Lucas said she ran for eight miles and screamed for two hours, according to court documents, eventually coming between the two houses on Leonard Hill Road and screaming for someone to call the police. When no one came to help her, Lucas said, she went and sat in a car in the driveway at 605 Leonard Road.

“I clarified if it was the car that was currently on fire, and she said yes,” state police Trooper Elisabeth Plympton wrote in the affidavit filed Wednesday.

A person living at 669 Leonard Hill Road later told police that Lucas tried to break into the house through a side door and broke the door’s screen, before picking up a large rock from the house’s garden and throwing it through a window. 

Leonard told police she started the fire by accident while attempting to hotwire the car so that she could drive it to New Hampshire. But police disputed that account, saying Lucas smelled strongly of gasoline and that they found a fuel canister on the driveway among her other belongings. They noted she also took a jacket from the car.

Lucas told police the smell of gasoline came from a “tiki light,” according to the affidavit.

“A vehicle would be more likely to quickly engulf in flames from a gas can than a lighter,” Plympton wrote in the affidavit. “Additionally, Nikki has no burns on her, while if she was inside the vehicle at the time of the fire caused by the lighter as described, she would have sustained injury.”

Police said the car was completely damaged in the fire, which also damaged two nearby vehicles, a camper and the corner of the house at 605 Leonard Hill Road. 

A family of four was in the house at the time, police said, though no injuries were reported in court documents. 

Police said Lucas gave them the phone number of her ex-boyfriend, but he did not respond to a call and text. 

Lucas was arrested and transported to state police’s St. Johnsbury barracks for processing, they said. While there, Plympton said Lucas smelled so strongly of gasoline that “my eyes were burning.” 

Following a nearly hour-long hearing Wednesday, Judge Daniel Richardson opted to release the 37-year-old — who was being held at Northeast Correctional Complex in St. Johnsbury — into the custody of Fred Dusik. 

Lucas’ attorney, Laura Wilson, described Dusik as a father-like figure to Lucas, and said the two have lived together in Lyman, New Hampshire for the better part of the past several years. Dusik told the court by phone that he has known Lucas for two decades and considers her to be family. He said he is retired and rarely leaves his home, which means he’d be able to keep an eye on Lucas as her court-appointed custodian.

Essex County State’s Attorney Vince Illuzzi argued that with Lucas released, it could be difficult to enforce any court-ordered conditions since she would be living in another state. He added that Lucas had failed to appear in court once before in a different case. 

Wilson contended that there is “a lot of cross-border activity” in between communities in Essex County and those in neighboring New Hampshire, and it wasn’t fair to hold that against her client.

Wilson also told the court that Lucas is not employed and did not have the ability to raise the $5,000 cash bail sought by the state. Richardson agreed to waive bail. 

As a condition of her release, Lucas must check in once a week, every other week at the St. Johnsbury Police Department, which is about a half-hour drive from Lyman.

Lucas is due back in court July 19.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Police: New Hampshire woman lit car on fire, threw a rock into a house in Vermont.

Shane Gobeil threatened to “show up and kill somebody” at the Canaan Schools if his child — a student in the district — was approached by a transgender person or drag queen at school, according to a police affidavit.

Gobeil made the threat Monday at a New Hampshire store in the presence of two Canaan Schools students, ages 16 and 17, and later repeated it to Vermont State Police officers, according to police. 

“Don’t take what I said as a threat, take it as a promise,” Gobeil later told a responding Vermont State Police trooper, according to court documents.

The Canaan Schools, which include two separate buildings — an elementary school and a high school that share a campus —  serve about 180 students. Both schools were closed Tuesday and Wednesday in response to the alleged threat. 

Charged with harassment on Tuesday, Gobeil was released on conditions Wednesday following his arraignment in a New Hampshire court. In Vermont, Essex County State’s Attorney Vince Illuzzi sought and was granted an Extreme Risk Protection Order, which prohibits Gobeil from purchasing or possessing dangerous weapons for at least six months.

Though police searched Gobeil’s residence and found no weapons, he told officers he “intended to exercise his right to own firearms” and stated that he wished to purchase an AK-47 assault rifle at some point, according to court documents.

The documents state that Gobeil was previously convicted of a felony charge for second-degree assault in March 2015. Gobeil was also cited for trespassing on Canaan Schools’ property within the last week after he allegedly harassed students, parents and staff regarding mask recommendations, according to the documents.

The threats allegedly occurred Monday at Solomon’s Store, a grocery store located in Stewartstown, New Hampshire. According to court documents that cite visual and audio footage of the interaction, Gobeil was speaking with two students in the store about the school’s dress code.

“The school’s changing,” Gobeil said, according to a Vermont State Police affidavit. “Before you know it, there’s going to be a drag queen show and, you know what, I’m probably going to show up and kill somebody. A lot of body’s (sic).”

“You understand?” he said. “If you guys ever do that to Canaan and my daughter’s in that school, be ready for God’s wrath.”

A store employee reported the threat to the store manager. Just after 5 p.m. on Monday, Principal Ryan Charles Patterson reported the threat to Vermont State Police, forwarding footage of the interaction.

According to court documents, both students subsequently stated that they were alarmed by Gobeil’s statement. One of the students said that they were afraid to go to school the next day.

When Vermont State Police made contact with Gobeil, he allegedly reiterated, “if they’re going to ever have a transgender and drag queens … and bring it right here in my daughter’s face, I am going to have a big problem with that. … If anybody comes near my daughter with a fucking dick and fucking panty hose, I’ll kill ‘em.”

Vermont State Police troopers said in their report that they advised Gobeil “multiple times” that his statements were concerning to the students, teachers and parents of children who attend the school.

“Gobeil advised that he did not care, and he would say whatever he wants as it was his own right to do so,” the affidavit states.

Following the threat, Canaan Schools shut down their high school and elementary school Tuesday and Wednesday, which would have been the final two days of the school year.

According to the New Hampshire State Police arrest warrant, the school had previously served Gobeil two separate Notice Against Trespass forms.

In December 2021, Gobeil allegedly showed up at the school and yelled at the administrative assistant for wearing a mask. 

Following that incident and a warning, Gobeil allegedly confronted a mother and two students for wearing masks on two separate occasions. He was subsequently served a Notice Against Trespass form.

On June 7, 2022, he was served another Notice Against Trespass form by the Essex County Sheriff’s Department. According to court documents, Superintendent Conroy said the order stemmed from Gobeil upsetting students, parents and staff over wearing face masks.

According to court records, Gobeil was released on personal recognizance, with conditions, in the New Hampshire court Wednesday afternoon.

In addition to the standard terms of release, he is prohibited from having contact with Patterson and the two students from Solomon’s Store. He is also prohibited from possessing firearms or other dangerous weapons.

Gobeil’s trial has been scheduled for Aug. 11 at 1st Circuit District Court in Colebrook, New Hampshire. He is being charged with harassment, a misdemeanor that carries a possible jail sentence of less than one year and a fine of $2,000 or less.

Illuzzi told VTDigger on Wednesday that the state of Vermont was unable to charge Gobeil because the threat was made in New Hampshire.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Canaan parent cited transgender people in threat against school, court documents show.

Updated at 8:01 p.m.

Canaan Schools closed Tuesday and Wednesday following a threat allegedly made by a student’s parent.

In an email sent to parents early Tuesday morning, superintendent Karen Conroy wrote that the school district learned of the threat to the school Monday afternoon shortly before 5 p.m.

On Tuesday just before 3 p.m., New Hampshire State Police announced they had arrested Shane Gobeil, of Canaan, in connection with the threat. Gobeil, 36, is being charged with harassment and being held on preventative detention, according to a police press release.

The New Hampshire State Police said the threat had been made “against members of the Canaan Vermont public school.” Neither police nor the school described the nature of the threat.

Earlier Tuesday, the Vermont State Police said in a separate press release that it had “initiated a response that involved coordinating with school officials and community resources and identifying and speaking to the individual involved.” The agency said that New Hampshire authorities were also investigating because the parent reportedly made the threat while in that state.

According to New Hampshire State Police, a trooper was assigned to an elementary school in neighboring Stewartstown, New Hampshire, on Tuesday as a precaution, while the investigation continued.

Police added that they were working with staff from SAU #7, which serves several northern New Hampshire communities, to ensure the safety of all students and staff.

In Conroy’s email to parents, the superintendent said that the school would “continue to work in partnership with the local authorities but feel it would be safer to cancel school all together today.”

An update posted to Canaan Schools’ website on Tuesday evening stated that “due to the current safety situation,” school is also canceled for Wednesday, June 14. According to the district’s calendar, Wednesday is the final day of the school year.

The update added that school officials are working on a plan to organize the retrieval of personal belongings.

The Canaan district includes a high school and elementary school on the same campus. 

Neither Conroy nor principal Chuck Patterson responded to requests for additional details on Tuesday.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Canaan man arrested after alleged threat closes schools; school canceled Wednesday.

State officials want to increase the number of moose-hunting permits in the Northeast Kingdom for the second year in a row as a way to combat the spread of winter ticks. 

The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department’s 2021 moose harvest recommendation calls for awarding 100 permits in the state’s northeasternmost wildlife management unit, which is made up mostly of Essex County.

Sixty of those permits would allow hunters to bag either gender of moose, and 40 would allow only antlerless moose, according to the document. The regular season begins Oct. 3 and runs for six days. The archery season has yet to be scheduled.

State Fish and Wildlife Board members gave officials the green light to continue with their plan after a presentation Feb. 17. The public comment period ended this week, and the board will vote on the proposal next Wednesday.

The most dense populations of moose in Vermont are found in the Essex County area, which is split into two subdivisions. In the northern subdivision, covering places such Canaan, the state estimates a population density of 2.19 moose per square mile. The figure for the southern subdivision sits at 1.71 moose per square mile. No other region of the state comes close. 

Last year, officials recommended issuing 55 either-sex permits, a significant shift from 2019, when the department proposed no permits at all.

The recommendations over the past two years come after research showed a link between declining moose health in the region and an increasing number of winter ticks. Officials believe the ticks have caused lower birth and calf-survival rates.

The state has been grappling with that trend in recent years.

In a state study from 2017 to 2019, researchers fitted GPS collars to 126 moose in the area — 36 adult cows and 90 calves. Field tests attributed almost three-quarters of deaths in that study population to winter ticks. 

In all three winters, most of the adults survived. But in the winters of 2017 and 2018, at least half of the monitored calves died. Nearly all of them showed signs of winter tick infestation or brain worm infection, another ailment affecting the species, according to a January 2019 video from the department.

The state’s theory is that reducing the density of moose in the area will make it harder for the ticks to spread.

“Research has shown that lower moose densities, like in the rest of Vermont, support relatively few winter ticks that do not impact moose populations,” Nick Fortin, head of the state department’s moose project, said in a February statement. “Reducing moose density decreases the number of available hosts, which in turn decreases the number of winter ticks on the landscape.”

With the 2021 proposal, officials expect between 51 and 66 moose to be killed this season.

At the Feb. 17 state board meeting, Fortin said that tick impacts during the winter of 2020 seem to have been less intense than previous winters. 

The same conclusion was drawn in the 2021 proposal, though it was based on anecdotal evidence. Summer calf recruitment among collared cows — the number of calves that have lived long enough to join the population — was the highest since collaring began four years ago, according to the report. 

The 13 board members present Feb. 17 unanimously approved moving forward with the proposal, but it hasn’t come without criticism.

Brenna Galdenzi, president of Protect Our Wildlife, said her group is concerned with how the moose study was funded and how data has been collected.

From 2018 to 2020, the Fish and Wildlife Department received $120,800 from a group called Safari Club International, which has been criticized by animal protection advocates for promoting big-game trophy hunting.

The organization says its funding has supported “in major part” the state’s moose research.

“If you’re going to accept that kind of money … it creates a level of skepticism over the end result,” Galdenzi said.

She said her group would like the state to address the tick problem by looking at alternatives to killing moose. She said research is being done on the impact of tick-killing fungi that might help.

“What if killing moose to save moose is wrong?” Galdenzi asked. “That’s a really, really big decision that they’re making. I would like to see something less aggressive.”

The lottery for this year’s moose permits is slated to open April 9, provided the Fish and Wildlife Board approves the plan.

Read the story on VTDigger here: In an anti-tick effort, officials call for more moose-hunting permits in NEK.

The encounter with the moose cow and calf, appearing out of nowhere on a snowy back road, late on a winter’s night, could have ended badly. But the consequences were minor — a skid, resulting from the over-application of brakes, followed by a brief standoff.

The staring contest (moose versus headlights) concluded, the moose continued across the road. High-stepping in the deep snow with their long legs and odd, gangling grace, they disappeared into the forest.

Moose-motor vehicle encounters are a fact of life in Vermont, not always with such peaceable results. They’ve served as a rough, and counterintuitive, guide to the health of the state’s moose population. The more collisions, the more moose — therefore, the healthier the population. The state keeps track of both fatal collisions and those involving injuries — to the moose.

In 1981, for example, when moose numbers were low, there were two fatalities involving cars. In 2004, when the population had peaked at nearly 5,000, there were 182 fatalities. (Collisions with moose have claimed the lives of 19 humans in the last 20 years.)

So the news that the numbers are down — last year there were only 30 fatal car-moose collisions — while good for those directly involved, has been a source not of relief but of concern.

Freefalling moose numbers is why the state’s fish and wildlife agency has called for cutting, to 14, the number of permits that will be given to moose hunters this fall. Last year, 40 permits were issued.

At a series of meetings conducted by the Department of Fish and Wildlife following the release of the numbers for the autumn hunt, it was clear that while deer have issues, too, their numbers and health are relatively stable. It is the state’s largest mammal — icon of the northern forests — that continues to be of greatest concern.

After being hunted into near-extinction in the 19th and early 20th centuries — in the 1960s the numbers had dwindled to as few as 25 — Vermont’s moose made what can only be described as a spectacular comeback, only to be struggling again — their numbers more than halved from the high 15 years ago.

The initial reduction in the state’s moose population was deliberate. In the early 2000s, it was clear that moose were becoming victims of their own success. There were simply too many — 3,000 in the wildlife management areas in Essex County alone. They were making fast work of their own forest habitat by over-browsing, damaging the vast tracts of commercial forestland in northern Vermont, and they were becoming a nuisance to sugaring and farming operations, walking through fences, trailing strands of sap-tubing.

To reduce the population to a more sustainable level, the state’s biologists called for a substantial increase in the number of hunting permits issued annually. By 2011, they felt the population was where it needed to be, just below the ecological carrying capacity of the state’s wildlife management areas of 1.75 moose per square mile.

But then the numbers kept falling. The blame in northern Vermont has fallen on a new kind of colonizer, this one eight-legged. The winter tick, Dermacentor albipictus — an arachnid — has been the beneficiary both of increased moose population densities and shorter, milder northern winters resulting from climate change.

In southern Vermont the culprit is another parasite — brainworm, a parasite carried by deer. Deer have evolved to live with brainworm, and the parasite’s host suffer no ill effects. For moose, brainworm is fatal. As deer numbers have grown, and deer have moved into habitat once solely occupied by moose — and as summers have become hotter and rainier, causing a rise in the population of the secondary brainworm host, a snail — brainworm has become more of a problem.

In northern Vermont, where deer densities are low, and moose densities are high, it is the winter tick — not to be confused with the deer tick, or the dog tick, which are problematic in their own way — that is taking over.

“It’s not uncommon, when you have higher moose densities, for the ticks to increase dramatically in number, for the simple reason there are more moose to feed on,” said Cedric Alexander, a wildlife biologist with the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, and head of the state’s moose project.

From late autumn through spring, the moose is the winter ticks’ involuntary, and unhappy, host. As many as 50,000 or more ticks will overwinter on a single moose.

The cycle — for the moose — starts with the ticks in larval form. The larvae collect in clusters of hundreds, clinging to one another and to a branch or a bit of underbrush, and wait — a tactic known as “questing.” When a moose passes by, the larvae clamber on, and then latch on. They feed, molt into nymphs, feed again, and then, as fully grown adult ticks, they feed once more before dropping off in April.

These days no moose emerges unscathed from the onslaught of tens of thousands of the “blood sucking parasites” but while bulls may look terrible — mostly from attempting to scratch the ticks off — they are likely to survive, Alexander said.

Cows have a harder time. They are not only 20 percent smaller than bulls, but they also are carrying offspring, in the spring cows are in their third trimester — ticks have been blamed for an increase in aborted and still-born moose.

“But it’s the calves that are the ones really at risk,” Alexander said. Ticks are equal opportunity parasites; they cluster in equal numbers whether it is on a bull, a cow, or a calf. And because the calves are so much smaller, they lose proportionally more blood.

Recent autopsies on calves that have died for one reason or another, have found anemia, from loss of blood, to be a constant, underlying factor.

Moose are in poor condition in the spring, anyway; they’ve relied on their fat reserves to get through the winter, and by the time spring comes, they’re in a state of near malnutrition. “All moose, and deer for that matter, come April, they’re in a negative energy balance,” Alexander said. “The winter browse only helps slow the rate of fat depletion. The energy and protein in the winter browse is very poor.”

Among the most frequently asked questions at the meetings is can’t something be done? Is there nothing to stop the ticks? The answer, so far, is not much.

One factor that cannot be changed, biologists say, is the changing climate. The early autumn cold snaps, which once killed off larvae before they could attach to their hosts, happen less and less. As for the adult ticks dropping off in the spring — they’d die if they happened to drop into snow, but that also happens less and less.

There is a naturally occurring soil fungus known to be fatal to ticks, and research is underway to see whether there is a way to exploit it — but it’s a long way from practical application. “It would be a tremendous effort and a huge expense,” Alexander said, and even then it would hardly be a sure bet.

What biologists do know is that one way of controlling tick numbers is to control the density of the hosts — the moose. So it is ironic that the key to the herd’s survival may be the decline in moose numbers that is happening now. Just as a tick population explosion followed the increase in the numbers of their moose hosts, biologists are hoping that decreasing the population will hit a similar threshold, only in a downward trend.

The department’s proposed new target population density is 1 moose per square mile, instead of the previous target of 1.75 moose per square mile.

It is the reason the state is issuing permits for a limited moose hunt in the fall only in Essex County, where moose densities remain higher than the one moose per square mile target. It’s also the answer to the other frequently asked question, if moose numbers are falling, why hunt at all?

Fewer ticks will mean fewer health risks to moose. Given space, and time, the hope is, the moose will come back.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Moose numbers in decline due to overhunting — by ticks.

Editor’s note: This story first appeared in the Barton Chronicle. Paul Lefebvre is a staff writer for the Orleans County weekly.

MONTPELIER — A legislative end run to give Plum Creek, the single largest landowner in the country, a financial break for violating terms of its current use contract on 56,000 acres in northern Essex County is running into opposition from the program’s regulators.

The Senate Committee on Agriculture has attached an amendment to a jobs development bill that would change the program’s penalties for large landowners and, at the same time, save Plum Creek thousands of dollars in property taxes.

For Plum Creek, the expulsion of 56,000 acres from current use would cost the company roughly $167,000 more in property taxes a year. Over five years it would pay an additional $837,000 in taxes. Under the law, Plum Creek could reapply for admission into the program at the end of five years.

In the amendment proposed by the Senate Committee on Agriculture, penalties would be imposed on an escalating scale. A first violation would remove three times the acreage involved in an illegal cut; a second violation would remove 50 percent of a landowner’s entire parcel enrolled in the program; and a third would result in a 100 percent expulsion.

If the bill passes with the amendment intact, the new scale of penalties would be applied retroactively — much to the disapproval of those who administer the program.

“It’s a very bad message,” said Chris Recchia, deputy secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources during a meeting Tuesday, two business days after the committee had already passed the amendment.

The proposal is coming at a time when Plum Creek is facing a five-year expulsion from the program — which allows participants to pay property taxes on the basis of use rather than development potential — for violating terms of its forest management plan during a cut on a 140-acre parcel in Lemington.

The company is fighting the expulsion on two fronts. In court it is seeking to overturn the violation, while at the same time asking the Legislature to change the law regarding penalties, arguing it is unfair and unreasonable to expel 56,000 acres for an illegal cut on 140 acres.

As a longstanding program to protect the state’s working landscape, current use presently reduces property taxes by roughly 88 percent for 14,000 participating landowners, according to John Meyer, a consulting forester and a co-chairman to a citizens’ coalition committee on current use.

If what designates a parcel were redefined to constitute those acres within a town line, Mr. Meyer suggested, then a penalty could be struck that would remove only the parcel where the illegal cut occurred.”

Meyer and Commissioner Michael Snyder of Forests, Parks and Recreation told the committee that any changes to the program should be publicly vetted and reviewed before passing into law.

But Sen. Bobby Starr, D-North Troy, defended the committee’s decision last Friday to put its amendment into play without taking more testimony or calling on a study committee to review the issue.

“People send us here to make decisions,” said Starr, who argued that legislation was time sensitive. “If we’re wrong, throw us out of office.”

Snyder argued that the effects of making a mistake in the way current use is administrated would be more important than any politician’s career. A former legislator could go on with his life, “but the rest of the program suffers and we have to live with it,” he said.

Action on the bill is expected to be delayed so two other committees can take a look at it before the measure is taken up by the full senate.

During two days of testimony before the committee, there was widespread agreement that the penalty component of the program needs to be changed.

The stickler was whether the new penalty scale would be applied retroactively to violations over the last year — which is to say Plum Creek. If so, the company would see about 1,400 acres removed as the illegal cut on the 140 acres occurred on a 470-acre tract earmarked for harvest.

Plum Creek is one of four landowners in Essex County that own more than 5,000 acres. And it’s the first landowner enrolled in current use to bring the issue of penalties to the attention of the Legislature, according to Starr, who said he has been involved in the program since day one.

As a program, current use was implemented essentially to help small landowners facing development pressure qualify for a tax break as long as they continued to work the land. It was not a program intended for large timber companies like Plum Creek. But changes in the property tax to fund education, noted Commissioner Snyder, prompted more and more large landowners to enroll in the program. And their participation, he said, has changed the way county foresters administer the program on the ground.

Required by the rules to submit a harvest plan, large timber companies were permitted to operate within a certain leeway, said Commissioner Snyder. A flexible working relationship with regulators, he added, allowed them to submit amendments to their cutting plans, according to the needs of the market.

Over the years, the commissioner said, the relationship between the county foresters and large landowners has worked pretty well.

But it was not set in statute.

And out of this give-and-take relationship, the state alleges that Plum Creek stepped over the line, despite repeated warnings.

Matt Langlais, county forester for Caledonia and Essex, was the inspector who cited Plum Creek with a heavy cut violation. His boss, Snyder, told the committee that the forester had previously found ways to help the company meet its production goals and still stay within the program’s rules.

But the relationship may have become too one-sided.

Mr. Langlais told the committee he had repeatedly given Plum Creek chances to come into compliance.

“It was strike three,” he said, speaking of the cited violation. “The 143 acres was where the line was drawn.”

Sen. Philip Baruth, a first-time legislator representing Chittenden County, said he wanted an escalating penalty system that would keep bad actors in line by increasing the consequences for repeat offenders. But he added he was uncomfortable with a penalty that would treat a large landowner unfairly who erred.

He was not alone.

Fears the expulsion facing Plum Creek would give current use a black eye prompted Mr. Meyer to question what constitutes a parcel in the program. Presently, a parcel is land with 25 or more contiguous acres that might cross town lines. Plum Creek’s 56,000 acres, for example, is designated a single parcel that crosses eight town lines. And under the present law, any violation and the entire parcel is out.

If what designates a parcel were redefined to constitute those acres within a town line, Mr. Meyer suggested, then a penalty could be struck that would remove only the parcel where the illegal cut occurred. In Plum Creek’s case that would be the 9,000 acres it holds in the town of Lemington.

The company has repeatedly argued that the penalty it is facing is way out of proportion to the violation. Starr sought to take that one step further Tuesday when he asked how much the company made off the illegal cut.

“I bet they were not all $600 logs,” he said.

A “back of the envelope” estimate by Mr. Meyer on the harvest report that Plum Creek is required to file suggested an earning of less than $100,000 from the cut.

Commissioner Snyder took exception to that estimate, saying that not knowing the market variables at the time the wood was sold made it impossible to come up with a reliable figure.

“It was not the back forty,” he said, characterizing the cut as heavy, adding later that Plum Creek’s earnings for the second quarter of 2010 came in at $258-million.

Still unknown is the impact the violation and penalty could have on the management of land that was formerly part of the Champion Lands and is presently encumbered with a public access easement and a working forest easement held by the Vermont Land Trust.

Those easements, noted Mr. Recchia, also give Plum Creek a break on the taxes it pays.

More testimony is expected on the amendment when the jobs bill goes before the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Committee on Appropriation during the next several days.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Rough waters ahead for Plum Creek.