ST. ALBANS TOWN — Earlier this month, Janet Cote brought a pastor to her half-rebuilt store in St. Albans Town, where work halted in 2017. Inside the building’s bare bones, they prayed that after being closed for more than a dozen years, she could bring the store back to what it was.
A freak accident involving a neighbor’s tractor initially caused the store to close for repairs in 2012. But soil contamination from underground oil tanks, which were found after the accident, started an extended limbo and legal battle over who should foot the whopping bill for remediation: Cote or the state.
In late July, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled on the lawsuit against the state Agency of Natural Resources. Cote, who is 83, still hopes that after six years in the court system, winning the suit would put her on a path to reopening the store.
“My mission and my purpose is to restore the business,” Cote said.
There were gas pumps in front of Maquam Shore Market when Cote took over the one-acre property from her parents in 1982. She leased out the store, an apartment upstairs, a trailer hookup outside and two white houses closer to the lake. The store itself hosted a creemee window and a deli inside on the left as you walked in. Back then, the spot was mostly surrounded by cornfields.
“It’s the only store within five miles in every direction, almost,” Cote said.
In 2000, Cote decided to get rid of the gas pumps.
So she paid to dig up her pumps along with three underground oil and gas tanks, she said. After digging up the tanks, the state paid a contractor to monitor the soil. The department, which is part of the agency, pays for projects like Cote’s through fees on gas and oil sales and regulations designed to follow federal regulations to protect the environment and public health.
The contractor “told me that the levels of hazardous whatever were below what (was) needed to continue,” Cote said.
In hindsight, that’s when the trouble began. But she didn’t know it until 2012, when her neighbor accidentally rammed into the building while driving a large tractor along Maquam Shore Road. The crash caused so much damage, it forced her to close the store.
In the process of getting a permit to rebuild, she learned her soil was in fact contaminated, she said.
To clean up the spill, she had to dig up a large section of her property — meaning her repairs went far beyond recovering from the crash. She would have to dig up the store’s foundation, wastewater system and electrical wiring and then rebuild the structure completely. In the process, contractors who Cote found through the department discovered, and dug out, more gas tanks from more than a decade before.
The price tag on the additional work is more than she can cover herself, she said – and she thinks the department should pay for it all. In her eyes, the store is closed because she had to remediate the soil, so the state should pay the full price for restoring the infrastructure the store depends on.
But it hasn’t been decided whether the state will pick up the tab.
After years of back and forth, the agency agreed to pay for only some parts of restoring the property. So she took the agency to court back in 2019.
On July 25, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled unanimously to send the case back to the environmental division, asking for additional factual findings from that court about why the department would cover some costs and not others.
“We understand the Supreme Court’s decision to remand the case back to the Environmental Court for more specific findings, and we will continue to represent the Agency of Natural Resources in this matter. We are confident that the Agency correctly determined the covered costs,” said the Vermont Attorney General’s office, which is representing the agency, in an emailed statement.
For now, Cote is celebrating what she sees as a win, though she still awaits the day the legal battle can be over.
As a retired person, she spends a huge portion of her time and energy on the lawsuit, she said.
Her iPad holds about 5,000 pictures of the store’s site over the years and the vanity plate on her car reads “MAQUAM.”
Back to environmental court
Emails from state officials obtained by Cote through a public records request and reviewed by VTDigger show that, throughout the years, department officials knew her soil was contaminated. However, she said, they never alerted her.
In one email from March 2013, Matt Moran, who still manages the petroleum cleanup fund for the department, wrote that Cote was “uncooperative about doing the necessary follow-up work.” He later wrote, “the owner is older and likely will be needing to sell or transfer the property soon.”
Cote called the emails derogatory and denies that she was ever uncooperative. She thinks the state is drawing things out because of her age, she said.
Through a spokesperson, the Agency of Natural Resources denied Cote’s allegations of age discrimination by its staff.
“Thus far, these claims have been determined to be without merit,” said agency spokesperson Stephanie Brackin. “Should Ms. Cote present any credible new evidence of misconduct by a state employee, we will review the information.”
The work has been expensive. By 2018, the state had spent more than $485,000 on her property from the state’s petroleum cleanup fund, according to court documents. After going back and forth, department officials asked Cote to send over a list of the remaining repairs.
In 2019, they declined to cover many of those requested repairs, including on the wastewater system, work on the electrical system, concrete work and the price of hiring a general contractor. So Cote sued, arguing her costs should be covered in full.
The case was tossed around and then put on pause for years during the pandemic.
Then, in 2024, Environmental Court Judge Thomas Durkin reversed some of the agency’s decisions in favor of Cote. Durkin ruled that the state had to pay for concrete, wastewater and electrical work. But he allowed the agency to reject a range of other costs, some significant and others less so, from hiring a general contractor to repairing a flagpole.
Those costs added up to at least tens of thousands of dollars that Cote did not have, she said, so she appealed the court decision.
This summer, she said she got what she was hoping for.
All five justices reversed the part of the lower court ruling that accepted the department’s argument that the petroleum cleanup fund was not responsible for the additional costs, and passed the case back.
In the ruling, justices reasoned that the lower court ruling did not include findings about the agency’s justification for why they would cover some costs and not others. Justices also found the lower court failed to thoroughly define what was considered a reasonable expense or how they interpreted the law.
The language used in the lower court’s decision “forces us to speculate about whether and how each item is ineligible according to the agency,” justices wrote in the decision.
Now, the case must be passed back down to the environmental court where judges will revisit it and will issue new or additional findings, bearing in mind the legal interpretation offered by the Vermont Supreme Court.
While Cote said she is grateful for the ruling, she’s dismayed by how long the whole process has taken. “I am not grateful that I have to keep litigating because of things that were not correct,” Cote said.
On an August afternoon, only the skeleton of the prospective store stood in the old one’s footprint. Its red siding covered half the building. Cote stood out front and looked up at the building’s side as it cast a shadow over her.
Corrections: An earlier version of this story misstated who paid for the removal of the gas pumps and mischaracterized what Cote wanted the state to pay for in one instance. A photo caption also mischaracterized Cote’s ownership of the store.
