GLOVER — To an outsider, Rodgers Road seems like one of hundreds of unremarkable dirt roads in Vermont. The road, which stretches for over a mile, is surrounded by towering green trees and sprawling farmland. It passes by a cemetery holding the gravestones of families that have called this small Northeast Kingdom town home for generations.

But the road is also at the center of an increasingly personal, yearslong ownership dispute between Vermont’s Lt. Gov. John Rodgers and the town of Glover’s leadership and employees. The town considers all of Rodgers Road to be a town highway — Town Highway 48, specifically. Meanwhile, Rodgers says a three-quarter mile portion along which he lives and farms is actually private and belongs to him. 

Rodgers Road — named after the lieutenant governor’s family, who have owned the property for close to two centuries — makes an almost 90 degree turn, creating a wonky square with the equally rural Andersonville Road and Daniels Pond Road. Both of those roads are Class 3, meaning that under Vermont law they must be maintained year-round. That classification continues past the intersection onto Rodgers Road for roughly one-third of a mile. The remainder of Rodgers Road is considered Class 4, which doesn’t require year-round maintenance. This is the contentious section, currently the subject of a lawsuit that Rodgers filed against the town last month.  

Rodgers says his family has always owned the road section. Glover, on the other hand, says the town has always owned the section. The legal dispute started in 2023. 

That was about a year before Rodgers announced his decision to run for the state’s second highest office and 18 months since he had last represented the region in the state Legislature. Elected in 2002 as a state representative for Glover and surrounding towns, Rodgers later also served as a state senator, in both offices as a Democrat. He changed parties before accepting the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 2024. 

On June 12, 2023, according to public records obtained by VTDigger, Rodgers emailed then-Glover Selectboard member Leanne Harple — now herself serving as the town’s state representative — requesting that no work be done on the Class 4 section of Rodgers Road, until the question of ownership is answered. 

Earlier that day, Rodgers had stopped Mike Pray, a member of the Glover road crew, from putting in a new culvert on that section of the road. 

“I would ask that until this legal issue has been resolved that No town action is taken on the class for [sic] section of the road,” Rodgers wrote in the email, obtained via the public records request.

Rodgers went on to say he was considering closing the road to through traffic once his right to do so was affirmed. “I could close the road and make the town higher [sic] a legal team to find evidence of their right of way if I decided to go that direction,” he wrote. “I would rather not.”

“My intention is that if my legal team is correct that I will eventually close the road to car and truck traffic but would leave it open to all pedestrian bicycle ATV in UTV used as a Trail,” Rodgers added.

When Harple forwarded Rodgers’ email to Pray and other Glover officials — asking if work could pause until the legal issue had been resolved — Pray shared his version of events.

“I was greeted with John [Rodgers] walking up to me in the excavator calling me a moron, and was told if I do any work on the Class 4 … that cops would be called,” Pray wrote. 

Later in the email thread, then-selectboard member David Simmons said he didn’t see a reason to give up the road. 

“Calling Mike a Fucking moron is nothing more than him being a bully,” he wrote.

The disagreement was just starting to heat up.

Town records and road crew

A few weeks later, on July 17, 2023, Rodgers found himself in front of the Glover Selectboard, arguing his case.

“I asked the town about giving [Rodger’s Road] up, they didn’t seem like they were going to negotiate,” Rodgers said at the meeting, according to audio obtained by VTDigger. “So I got a hold of a lawyer and a researcher. And from our preliminary research, there is no record of layout, no record of dedication and acceptance, two major hurdles for the town.”

In response, Nick Ecker-Racz, a former selectboard member who gained extensive knowledge about Glover roads and their history helping put together various maps for town use, disagreed, stating Rodgers’ researcher was “mistaken.” 

After some polite chatter, Rodgers brought up the conflict that had occurred between himself and Pray on June 12. Rodgers also accused Scott Pray, another member of the Glover road crew, of “coming at” him with a grader, and stated the town had made a “huge mistake” hiring the Prays to the road crew. 

The meeting then devolved into an argument between Rodgers and the road crew. 

Following the meeting, Glover Selectboard members sent Rodgers a letter stating: “Last night’s Select Board meeting was uncomfortable and upsetting … Somehow, we need to find a way to de-escalate the tension that exists now between you and our town employees.”

A key theme in the Rodgers Road dispute has been the strained relationship between Rodgers and Glover’s road crew, particularly  Scott and Mike Pray — who are father and son, respectively. Their clashes often got personal. 

Rodgers and his wife, Brenda Rodgers, both accused Glover road crew members of trying to run them off of the road multiple times according to letters written by the couple to the Glover selectboard. The letters were written following a request by Harple, who asked the couple via email on July 18 to write down their experiences with the road crew.

Brenda’s letter recounted a time she was driving home from work on July 13, 2023, and “had to almost come to a complete stop as the grader came slightly over the middle of the road onto my side,” she wrote. “I was sure he was going to hit me. I was scared for my life and hope nothing like that ever happens again. I feel unsafe driving these town roads.”

John’s letter accused the Prays of trying to run him off the road on the same day. Rodgers also accused Scott Pray of attempting to run him off the road in spring 2023 while the latter was doing maintenance on Parker Road.

“I came around the sharp corner and met Scott on the grader,” John Rodgers wrote. “At first he made a quick steer to the right to give the approaching vehicle more room but when he saw that it was me he made a quick steer back toward me and continue[d] to crowd me off the road.”

Mike and Scott Pray responded with their own letters, denying the Rodgers’ accusations.

“I have no recollection of ever swerving at anyone ever while operating the grader,” Scott Pray wrote. “As far as Brenda’s accusation I truly do not know what she drives or what she looks like.” 

Mike Pray wrote that he had “no recollection of myself, or any town employees swerving, veering or trying to run John Rodgers, Brenda Rodgers or anyone else [off the road] while maintaining and performing our duties, or for any other reason in the Town of Glover.”

On Dec. 5, 2023, after the road crew had plowed his road later than he expected following a snow storm, Rodgers wrote about the escalating frustration he felt with the road crew in an email to selectboard members Harple and Phil Young.

“My family has nearly 200 years of service to this town and a reputation for being honest, hard-working people that help everybody out,” he wrote. “I have over 20 years of public service serving this town and this area. To have these lowlifes discriminating against me, is a serious slap in the face.”

A complex controversy

Between January 2024 and April 2025, the road dispute cooled off from its prior fever pitch. During that time, Rodgers ran for lieutenant governor and won the race against a seated incumbent, a rarity in Vermont politics. He was formally sworn into that office in January 2025 after a vote by the full Legislature, required because neither candidate had won a majority in the fall race. 

But a number of actions in the spring — including a select board meeting and stories run by WCAX, one of Vermont’s local television news stations — brought the issue to the attention of Vermonters, some of them just getting to know their new lieutenant governor.

At a May 8 select board meeting, Rodgers, who joined via Zoom, again threatened legal action against the town and said he would shut the road to through traffic, according to reporting by WCAX.

“The reason I would like to be able to negotiate something that the town could support is because if we don’t, then we’re both gonna spend a ton more money on lawyers,” Rodgers said at that meeting according to audio obtained by VTDigger. “If I win, I’m going to shut the road down completely. There’ll be no access. If you win, you’re going to spend a whole bunch of money on lawyers and then have to spend money fixing up the road and maintaining it forever.”

At least one select board member sympathized with the lieutenant governor’s position. 

In a Facebook comment on the WCAX story, select board member Anne Eldridge defended Rodgers against others commenters who accused him of taking advantage of his statewide office to make a land grab against the town.

“Regardless of my position, I’m still just one voter and citizen in this town. I consider John a friend, and am absolutely sympathetic to his, and his family’s, concerns,” Eldridge wrote. 

The television segment “indeed showed a very limited view of a complex and long-standing controversy,” she said in the social media post. “I don’t personally agree with the comments saying this is any kind of abuse of power – he has every right to make his case as a resident, and we have an obligation to hear out and address the concerns of our constituents.”

At the May 8 meeting, select board members discussed getting input from others living on Rodgers Road. In response, some Glover residents began organizing a petition to keep all of Rodgers Road a town highway.

Twelve Glover residents, most of whom live or own property on or near the road, signed the petition. Two notable names on the list were Jim and Nancy Rodgers — John Rodgers’ uncle and aunt, who lived in Rodgers’ current home for decades until they sold it to him in 2019. The couple still live on the road, in a home nearby. Prior to the sale, Rodgers lived on a road next to Rodgers Road.

In a May 19 letter to the Glover Select Board, resident Elizabeth Nelson argued that if the Class 4 section of the road “ceases to be a public through highway, it will make access for agricultural or residential use impossible to my property. It will also significantly affect my property value.”

Nella and James Coe, two longtime Glover residents who run an architecture firm and whose property touches Rodgers Road, were lead circulators of the petition.

“Currently, a corner of our property adjoins Rodgers Road. If it was all privatized, we’d lose access,” James Coe told VTDigger.

The petition was presented at a May 22 select board meeting, attended by over 40 people.

Jim Rodgers, John Rodgers’ uncle, came to the meeting to voice his opposition at the idea of his nephew owning the road.

“We’re against it. We’re living on a Class 4 road, and we would be land-locked if that was shut off,” Jim Rodgers said. “To put it bluntly, it’s silly. It’s plain stupid. That’s my opinion.”

At the meeting, the select board unanimously voted to officially keep all of Rodgers Road part of Town Highway 48, allowing the road crew to continue to work on and maintain the road.

“Now, the war begins,” one select board member said moments after the vote.

On June 4, select board member Glenn Gage emailed Mike Pray, alleging that when Gage went to visit Rodgers Road to check on the work the road crew did, the lieutenant governor was “confrontational about what was going on, mainly about WCAX being involved. He says it was an inside job that got this story leaked. I assured him that it was not, but he has made his mind up over that part.”

On June 11, John and Brenda Rodgers filed suit against the town, requesting a preliminary injunction to prevent Glover from performing planned work on the disputed section of Rodgers Road. They also asked the court to determine who owns the Class 4 section of the road. A hearing for the case is scheduled for October.

To bolster the lawsuit, the lieutenant governor hired a surveyor, who in an affidavit stated that there has never been a record that establishes the town’s ownership of the disputed section of Rodgers Road.

Ecker-Racz, the former select board member, disputed that conclusion, providing VTDigger with a 19th-century document that he says shows maintenance work was done on the road by a town road worker before it was owned by the Rodgers family. 

James Ehlers, Rodgers’ chief of staff, declined to comment on the Rodgers Road dispute because the matter was making its way through the court, and referred all questions to the lieutenant governor’s legal representation.

“We assert that the Town never lawfully established the disputed section of Rodgers Road as a legal town highway,” Michael Tarrant, one of Rodgers’ lawyers told VTDigger this week. “We believe that a segment that runs through their property has always been and remains their private property.”

Tarrant also rebuked the idea of Rodgers shuttering the road to public access.

“If we prevail in this case, the result would not be that the Rodgers will have ‘taken back’ or ‘privatized’ this disputed segment,” Tarrant wrote. “Rather, the Court would confirm that this portion of the road never belonged to the Town to begin with — and public access has and will remain within the discretion of the Rodgers.”

The Coes, who are co-chairs of the Glover Planning Commission, said the lawsuit has put a strain on town resources.

“We are on the planning commission, and we have had to stop pursuing some projects because this is happening,” Nella said. “Anything that is raised, that we’d like to do, we are being told … there is no money and it’s not an option to even ask for it, because that would just cause stress to the town.”

Despite the friction the road dispute has caused between Rodgers and town officials, Nella said it has also had a surprisingly positive effect on Glover residents.

“Its kind of brought people together. It’s been cool in that way,” she said. “… I’m sorry to say this, but they’re kind of laughing about it.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: How a dirt road became a small-town spectacle involving Vermont’s lieutenant governor.

The Woodstock Union High School and Middle School building is in bad shape. Its HVAC, electrical and sewage systems — products of the mid-1960s — are now well past their useful life, according to school officials.

Sherry Sousa, superintendent of the Mountain Views Supervisory Union that operates the school, said the district “can’t guarantee, based on where our systems are now, that our sewage system is going to work.” 

For those familiar with Vermont’s public education system, this sort of story is hardly new. Districts throughout the state routinely deal with general disrepair and disruption caused by aging school buildings.

Over the years, education officials have pleaded with the state to restart a long-dormant state aid fund for school construction, which previously supported up to 30% of construction costs. But Act 73, the new education reform bill Gov. Phil Scott signed into law last month, is creating optimism among education officials that state aid could begin again.

Mountain Views Supervisory Union officials are banking on that. Last week, members of the school board and central administration announced they would press ahead with a new working committee to oversee plans for a new high school and middle school building under the terms of Act 73.

“We’ve decided that we can’t wait. We have to move forward. We need a new school,” Keri Bristow, the Mountain Views Supervisory Union’s board chair, said in an interview. “We have to do something before we have a catastrophic failure.”

‘Cart before the horse’

Vermont’s new education law seeks to address the state’s “languishing” school infrastructure through implementation of a new state aid for school construction fund. Act 73 provides preliminary rules around what schools could be eligible for state aid, and which projects should be prioritized.

The newly created State Aid for School Construction Advisory Board, set to first meet on or before Sept. 1, according to state Board of Education Chair Jennifer Samuelson, will work with the Agency of Education to further develop and finalize those parameters before the School Construction Aid Special Fund is officially created July 1 next year.

The advisory board is one of the first facets of the new law to get off the ground. The School Redistricting Task Force has already started work to consolidate Vermont’s 118 school districts, contained within 51 supervisory districts or supervisory unions, into anywhere from 10 to 25 future districts. The school construction advisory board will work concurrently with that task force.

David Epstein with the Burlington architecture firm TruexCullins has worked with a number of Vermont’s school districts’ on facilities needs. He called the new framework in Act 73 a “positive sign.”

But he and others have cautioned that while the law sets up a framework for a revived school construction fund, the law does not directly address where funding will come from.

“Until a funding source is identified and the scale of that funding source is understood, it’s hard for me to be too optimistic,” Epstein said.

In a press conference Thursday, Scott said school construction is “going to be very important” once new school district maps are drawn and plans for consolidation are considered by the Legislature.

“That’s an appropriate time to talk about school construction,” he said. “We should be prepared for that, I realize that, but I think we’d be putting the cart before the horse in terms of school construction.”

To bond or not to bond

Vermont’s schools are the second oldest in the country and have continued to depreciate since state lawmakers paused construction aid nearly 20 years ago.

The Agency of Education has previously estimated schools will need upward of $6 billion in infrastructure investment over the next two decades.

“The level of investment has not been keeping up with the needs, and so there’s a tremendous amount of need,” Epstein said.

The disrepair in school facilities has forced districts to try and finance fixes through voter-approved bonds. Last year, the Colchester School District put forward a $115 million bond to modernize its aging schools — which, similar to the Woodstock High School, were built in the mid-20th century.

Colchester residents narrowly approved the bond proposal in November, but other districts that have floated bonds have not had such luck.

In March 2024, residents of the Mountain Views Supervisory Union’s seven member towns voted down a $99 million bond measure — throwing in flux plans to replace the Woodstock High School building.

And in 2021, voters in the member towns of the Harwood Unified Union School District sunk a $59.5 million construction bond. Without voter approval, the district is now stuck using general fund dollars to complete patch work repairs.

“We’re spending a lot of money on capital needs for things that really require wholesale renovation, new construction,” said Michael Leichliter, Harwood supervisory union’s superintendent.

Leichliter said the Harwood school district hired TruexCullins to conduct a review of its buildings, which he said should be completed by the end of August.

The Orleans Central Supervisory Union also hired TruexCullins to conduct a facilities assessment of school buildings. Dan Roock, the chair of the facilities committee there, said the district has $108 million in deferred maintenance across its eight school buildings.

Officials there are hoping to begin a community outreach campaign to gauge willingness for any new renovation projects.

Uncertainty over taxpayers’ appetite for million-dollar bond investments has created a tricky calculation for districts that fear catastrophic failure in their school buildings.

The more they wait, the more expensive repairs will cost, Roock said.

“We know we’ve got to do something,” he said. “We know it’s going to cost a lot of money — even if it’s no new construction, just fixing what we have.”

‘We’ve been patient’

For districts with construction plans in the works, like Orleans Central Supervisory Union, the decision whether to proceed with bond votes has been further complicated by the redistricting process underway.

“Some districts are waiting to see what the new districts are like,” Epstein said. “Some districts want to move forward with projects while they still can, while they still have control of their destiny, so to speak.”

Uncertainty around whether state lawmakers will even fund the new state aid construction fund only complicates that decision.

Sen. Seth Bongartz, D-Bennington, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said there is “a general recognition that we have to figure out a way to help with school construction funding.”

“But there’s also a recognition that, right now with what’s happening nationally, we’re in uncharted waters, and we’re really going to have to see where we are come January and see what kinds of immediate crises we may be facing, or not,” he said.

In the Mountain Views Supervisory Union, officials say they can’t afford to wait any longer.

“I think we’ve been patient, and the board has been really responsible,” Sousa said. “Now, we really have to fill in the gray spaces of Act 73. We want to work with the Agency of Education to fill in that gray space and acknowledge, how does this school district move forward?”

Ethan Weinstein contributed reporting.

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘We can’t wait’: Vermont school districts seek guidance from new education law as school construction needs compound.

Vermont Lt. Gov. John Rodgers and his wife, Brenda Rodgers, have sued the Town of Glover, bringing to court a longrunning debate over control of a section of the road where they live and run multiple businesses.

The lawsuit asks the court to rule that a roughly three-quarter mile stretch of Rodgers Road that runs through the couple’s property is not a town highway, but rather a private stretch of road connected to a town highway on both ends. Town officials consider this stretch of road to be part of a town highway and, therefore, town property. 

The road was named after the lieutenant governor’s ancestors and the section in dispute has been part of the family’s property since approximately 1838, according to the filing in Orleans County Superior Court.

“It has been my understanding, based on personal knowledge and experience living here for my entire life, that so-called ‘Rodgers Road,’ named for my family, exists as two segments of a town highway, separated in the middle by a private traveled way,” Rodgers wrote in an affidavit filed on June 11. “It has never been a through public road.”

The couple also filed a request for a preliminary injunction, which would prevent the town from performing upcoming planned work on the disputed section of Rodgers Road.

Rodgers asserts he and his family have “kept and maintained” this disputed segment of the road since its existence. He cites his own work in the disputed area, including allegedly repairing a culvert and laying gravel. Rodgers stated that the road, even portions not included in the disputed segment, has been “extremely poorly maintained.”

The lawsuit includes a map of Rodgers Road prepared by Rebecca Gilson, a land surveyor licensed in Vermont. Gilson told the court in an affidavit that, in her professional opinion, no record existed that establishes the town’s ownership of the disputed section of Rodgers Road.

The town claims the road section is a Class 4 town highway. Vermont law does not require towns to maintain Class 4 highways for year-round travel, unlike Class 1, 2 and 3 highways.

In his affidavit, Rodgers also alleged town officials told him they “have found no evidence that the disputed segment is a town highway,” and that a former selectboard member told him a portion of the road had been surrendered by the selectboard, though Rodgers admitted he could not find documentation of that.

According to the lawsuit, town officials have said that there is proof that the disputed section is part of Town Highway 48. Also, they point to documents that Rodgers filed when giving a portion of his property to his son and daughter-in-law. The documents show the property is served by Town Highway 48, which officials took as an effective acknowledgement of the town’s ownership.

Rodgers’ lawyers refuted this idea, writing that the reference to the document “is simply one of perpetuating wrong information supplied by the Town and is not reflective of their [The Rodgers’] intent.”

Rodgers claimed that if the road is upgraded as planned, the influx in traffic could hurt the interests of the several businesses operating on his property, as well as endanger his family.

Rodgers’ lawyers said the privacy of the road was important to those businesses. The farm grows cannabis as one of its crops, which can attract “unwanted attention,” the lawsuit states. Rodgers also stated in his affidavit that guests at the Rodgers Country Inn are attracted by the inn’s relative seclusion and that more traffic would cause guests to stop visiting.

He added that the road runs within approximately 20 feet of his front door, and that making this section of the road public “would cause safety and security risks to my family.”

This dispute has been ongoing for years, and garnered public attention after Rodgers made comments about the matter — originally reported by Laura Ullman of WCAX — on May 8 at a Glover selectboard meeting. In his comments, Rodgers threatened legal action against the town and said he would shut the road to through traffic.

“The reason I would like to be able to negotiate something that the town could support is because if we don’t, then we’re both gonna spend a ton more money on lawyers,” Rodgers said at that meeting. “And if I win, I’m going to shut the road down completely. There’ll be no access. If you win, you’re going to spend a whole bunch of money on lawyers and then have to spend money fixing up the road and maintaining it forever. And so I just don’t see how the town wins.”

Following the meeting, a number of Glover residents signed a petition requesting that the road remain open to the public. Elizabeth Nelson, a Glover resident, wrote a letter to the Glover selectboard requesting that the road stay open. 

“If this road ceases to be a public through highway, it will make access for agricultural or residential use impossible to my property. It will also significantly affect my property value,” Nelson’s letter read. 

The board subsequently voted on May 22 to keep the entirety of Rodgers Road as a town highway under its current mixed Class 3 and 4 designations.

“We look forward to the court’s decision,” Rodgers told VTDigger on Tuesday, adding that he would keep the road open to permitted individuals if he and his wife won the case. 

Glover town officials could not be reached for comment regarding the lawsuit. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont lieutenant governor sues his town over longstanding road dispute.

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 .

Updated at 12:06 a.m.

Severe thunderstorms on Thursday caused flash flooding across parts of Vermont, particularly in the Northeast Kingdom and Addison County.

The deluge marks the third year in a row that the state has experienced a major flooding event on July 10. The disasters of the past two years caused tens of millions of dollars in damage across Vermont, which towns are still recovering from.

Just after 6:30 p.m., 5.07 inches of rain had already fallen in West Burke, 4.32 inches had fallen in New Haven and Sutton saw 4.92 inches, according to Matthew Clay, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Burlington office.

In Sutton, one water rescue team was dispatched to “assist the residents of one home cut off by floodwater,” according to a press release from the Vermont Emergency Operations Center.

No injuries or deaths have been reported, as of late Thursday evening.

Other rescue teams were staged in Lyndon, Burke, Woodbury, Stowe, Johnson, Middlebury, Vergennes and Colchester, according to Mark Bosma, a spokesperson for Vermont Emergency Management, and Lyndonville Deputy Fire Chief Greg Hopkins.

“They’ll be there until the threat passes or they move to another area under threat,” Hopkins said.  

In the Northeast Kingdom, the east branch of the Passumpsic River at East Haven rose more than 4.5 feet in just over two hours to reach a “minor” flood level and began to recede by 5:30 p.m., according to the National Water Prediction Service.

The flooding washed out part of Route 114, according to a post by NBC5 meteorologist Ben Frechette, threatening the low-lying Northeast Kingdom Mobile Home Park, located on the northern side of Lyndonville. 

Burke Town Administrator Jim Sullivan said most of Thursday evening’s flooding took place in West Burke. 

“We also had a culvert that overflowed on Old Farm Road that washed out the road,” Sullivan said. “Other than our washout areas, those are the areas that people should pay attention to.”

Sullivan also said a 100-foot section of Newark Street got washed out, and one of the lanes collapsed. “As it is right now, that road is closed,” he said.

Any affected residents should visit the Burke Community Center on 212 School St. or call the clerk’s office, Sullivan said.

In the Addison County town of New Haven, no rescue teams were deployed as of Thursday evening, but town officials said they were keeping their eyes peeled. 

“I’m on Field Days Road just past the fairgrounds. We have the road closed. It’s flooded,” said Becky Hutchins, the town’s emergency manager .  

Trees and branches had come down in town, Hutchins said, and Green Mountain Power was addressing some downed power lines in the area. 

“We had two rain cells that came in: One that came in from the west and one that came in from the south, and they both hit at the same time,” she said.

She also urged New Haven residents to avoid the Otter Creek.

“Otter Creek is very high and rushing right now. I suggest that people stay off from any of the waterways and if you see water, turn around. Do not drive through it cause the roads have gotten some damage to them,” she said.

People should avoid floodwaters and seek shelter in impacted areas, Bosma said.

“All of our fatalities last year were on flooded roads. There’s often an undercurrent and/or washouts you can’t see, and even a car can be swept away,” Bosma wrote in an email. “This is fast-moving, so people should get inside if a storm approaches, monitor rivers and streams, and get to higher ground if there is a rise in the waterway. The last two years storms just stopped and dumped a ton of rain over a long period, so this is different.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Flash flooding hits towns in Vermont for the 3rd year in a row.

The estate of a Black man who died in a Vermont prison more than five years ago has agreed to accept $1.5 million to resolve a lawsuit brought against the state’s former medical provider alleging that racism, medical malpractice and negligence led to the man’s death.

Details of the proposed resolution were included in recent court filings in the case in U.S. District Court in Burlington arising from the December 2019 death of 60-year-old Kenneth Johnson at the Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport.

A court filing by attorneys in the case, titled a “Stipulated Order of Judgment,” still needs the approval of Judge Christina Reiss, who has presided over the case. 

The filing seeking the order of judgment to resolve the claims differs from a straight out settlement. 

“It’s a judgment, and that’s an important distinction,” said James Valente, an attorney representing Johnson’s estate. 

Confidentiality provisions are often part of settlements resolving litigation between private parties. A judgment, on the other hand, is a matter of public record.

“Our client had reservations about a settlement that would include a confidentiality provision,” Valente said Thursday. Olynthea Johnson, Kenneth Johnson’s sister, is the administrator of his estate. 

Shap Smith, an attorney for Centurion Health, the state’s contracted medical provider for prisons at the time of Johnson’s death, declined to comment Thursday. 

The lawsuit filed in December 2021 alleged that Johnson died in the prison infirmary after workers for Virginia-based Centurion Health failed to diagnose and treat a tumor that led to Johnson’s death by asphyxiation. 

The wrongful death and medical malpractice lawsuit also alleged Centurion Health discriminated against Johnson, a Black man, due to his race. 

According to the suit, Johnson endured “extreme pain and suffering” and “extreme psychological distress” in the hours before he died. The suit accuses guards and medical staff of ignoring his pleas for medical help.

Initial reports from the Vermont Department of Corrections at the time said  it appeared Johnson died from natural causes. A person who was incarcerated with Johnson told Seven Days a week after Johnson’s death that he had been having difficulty breathing and begging for medical care before he died. 

Later, investigations, including the one by the Vermont Defender’s General’s Office, blasted the corrections department and Centurion medical staff over the care provided to Johnson. 

A court filing by Centurion’s attorneys stated that the health care provider has made an offer of $1.5 million to the estate. “This offer of judgment includes all amounts that might be recovered by the estate for any damages, costs, attorneys’ fees, and pre-judgment interest,” the filing said. 

The offer of judgment, the filing added, was “not to be construed as an admission of liability by any defendants, or any official, employee or agent of Centurion of Vermont.”

In a separate court filing this week, the estate accepted the offer. As of Thursday afternoon, the judge had yet to sign off on the proposed order of judgment, according to court filings.

Valente, speaking Thursday afternoon, said he believed that the judge would sign off on the order. If the judge does so, the lawsuit would be resolved. 

Johnson’s estate had previously reached a settlement with the Vermont Department of Corrections, which had also been named as a defendant in the lawsuit, for $150,000, according to Valente and a corrections department spokesperson.  

That $150,000 payment is in addition to the $1.5 million the estate would receive from Centurion. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Former prison medical provider to pay $1.5 million to estate of Black man who died in custody.

Hill Farmstead has always had a hardcore contingent of Canadian fans. But even the award-winning brewery is facing boycotts from Quebecers frustrated with the Trump administration. 

Nestled in the hills of the Northeast Kingdom in Greensboro, just a few dozen miles from the northern border, Hill Farmstead has proved a must-stop destination for cross-border beer lovers passing through the area.

“For our 15 years, we’ve had a huge, huge Canadian following, particularly with our friends from Montreal,” said Bob Montgomery, Hill Farmstead’s director of brand quality. 

In recent months, though, as President Donald Trump has inflamed tensions between the U.S. and Canada with his volatile tariff policies and threatening rhetoric, a mass movement to avoid the U.S. has taken hold in Canada, and the steady flow of visitors from up north has noticeably slowed. 

Since March, Canadians have accounted for 25-30% less traffic on the brewery’s website than they usually do, Montgomery said. And some Canadians who had purchased tickets for the brewery’s sold out 15th Anniversary Celebration have said they won’t be coming and are even attempting to resell their tickets en masse. 

“Given the current circumstances, they’ve been choosing not to visit the United States and to spend their money at home instead,” Montgomery said.

President Donald Trump first sparked outrage among Canadians in February, when he imposed tariffs on most Canadian imports, a plan he has since adjusted and paused a handful of times. At the same time, he has made repeated rhetorical jabs at Canada, including threats to turn it into “the 51st state.” 

Canada responded by hitting U.S. imports with retaliatory tariffs, and a number of Canadian provinces have pulled American products from their shelves. 

But even as the tariff tit-for-tat has largely burned itself out, with both countries having repealed or delayed many of the levies they initially declared, a grassroots movement to boycott American goods and avoid travel to the U.S. has persisted in Canada, more inspired by Trump’s rhetoric and personality than his policies.

By the numbers

According to a recent survey from the Canadian Automobile Association — the Canadian equivalent of AAA — only 4% of Quebecers intend to visit the U.S. this summer, compared with 12% of survey respondents who said they planned to do so in 2024.

“Some Quebecers are just boycotting the United States while Trump is president,” said Shanny Hallé, a spokesperson for Tourism Eastern Townships. “There’s a message they’re sending that they want to keep their money here.”

The impacts of the boycott have been especially stark in Vermont, particularly in the northernmost parts of the state, where many towns and businesses that hug the northern border rely on Canadian tourism for much of their revenue. 

About 750,000 Canadians visit Vermont each year, contributing about $150 million to the state’s economy, according to data from the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing. And although Canadians account for about 5% of tourists statewide, visitors from up north account for over 30% of visitors to the northernmost counties. 

As peak summer season approaches, the loss is already being felt. 

Canadian reservations at hotels and inns across the state have decreased by up to 45% since February, said Kim Donahue, president of the Vermont Lodging Association. And according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, border crossings from Canada into Vermont have plummeted in recent months. In March and April, roughly 30% fewer people crossed over into the U.S. by car than did at the same time last year.

Canadians usually represent roughly half of yearly visitors at Jay Peak Resort, according to president and general manager Steve Wright. In recent months, however, Wright said the resort has seen a sharp decline in visitors from Canada, a trend he projects to continue through the year. 

Located just south of the border, the Northeast Kingdom ski resort has for decades accepted Canadian currency at par with the U.S. dollar, a strong lure for Canadians, who can buy ski lift passes and waterpark admission tickets at a one-to-one exchange rate.

But according to Wright, ski season pass sales to Canadians for the upcoming winter are down about 35% from previous years.

Jay Peak is also home to an indoor ice rink, the venue for year-round youth hockey tournaments and camps that take place on an almost weekly basis. Of the 300 Canadian teams that usually participate in total, though, the resort is projecting that about half as many will show up this year.

“The amount of Canadian business that is on the books this year is about 50% off from where it should be,” Wright said.  

Jay Peak has also seen widespread cancellations from Canadians who had bookings at its golf course, he said.

In recent weeks, Wright has personally spoken to dozens of Canadian customers who have chosen to steer clear of the resort this year, most of whom cited Trump’s rhetoric in explaining their decision.

“I think that, in combination with everything else, is giving Canadians pause as they plan their summer and fall and winter vacations,” Wright said.

Abby Long, executive director of Kingdom Trails, said she’s had similar conversations with longtime patrons who have decided to boycott the fabled mountain bike trail network this year.

“Earlier this year, we were definitely getting daily emails and Facebook messages from our Canadian friends who said, ‘We’ve come for years to Kingdom Trails. Please know we love the trails, but we won’t be visiting this summer,’” Long said. 

Currently, she said, just 12% of visitors to Kingdom Trails are Canadians, who represented about 24% of patrons at the same time last year. 

“We love our Canadian friends,” she said. “It’s really disheartening.”

Rebuilding bridges

As Canadian tourism continues to decline heading into the peak summer season, Vermont businesses and state officials have started extending olive branches to their counterparts in the north with the hopes of enticing Canadians to return to the Green Mountains.

On Monday, Gov. Phil Scott met with the leaders of other New England states and the premiers of five Canadian provinces in Massachusetts to discuss ways of thawing tensions, although it’s unclear what concrete steps, if any, were agreed upon. A few hours later, the Burlington City Council voted to temporarily rename Church Street “Canada Street” for the summer. 

Last week, meanwhile, tourism leaders from northern Vermont traveled to Quebec for the inaugural meeting of the Cross Border Tourism Alliance, which was held at Léon Courville Vigneron, a winery in Fulford.

“We realize it’s a tricky time to be in tourism and hospitality right now, but Quebec and Vermont have always been close,” said Jeff Lawson, vice president of tourism for Hello Burlington, which put together the event. “It was sort of an opportunity to commiserate over the situation a bit.”

The new group hopes to hold meetings twice a year, a practice Lawson hopes will foster longer term relationships, even if Canadians continue to boycott the U.S. for the foreseeable future.  

“Very few of us on either side of the border knew each other even though we’re miles apart,” Lawson said. “We’re trying to do our best to establish and maintain new connections.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: As Canadians stay home, Vermont’s tourism industry is paying the price for Trump’s rhetoric.

The Northeast Kingdom Rainbow Coalition is set to celebrate its third annual PrideFest on Sunday. While around 20 Pride events will be held around the state this year, the celebration in Newport is the only one of its kind in Vermont’s rural northeast corner.

Hannah Pearce, a queer farmer born and raised in Albany, attended the first PrideFest event in 2023.

“We know where the centerpoints of queer community are in Vermont; it’s not typically the Northeast Kingdom,” she said. “Just knowing that there was a PrideFest (in Newport) in which there were hundreds of people in the parade … just that alone, there’s value in that.”

Avi IC Ward, co-chair of the coalition, grew up in Montpelier and moved to Saint Johnsbury with their husband several years ago. Ward said they struggled to find community at first because the NEK is “so big and so spread out, it makes it particularly hard to find your people.”

Then Ward connected with the fledgling Rainbow Coalition and helped plan the first PrideFest. They said a lot of the people they have met through the LGBTQIA+ organization are now their closest friends.

“I feel really grateful to have found this group and be able to do this work,” they said.

NEK PrideFest features a one-mile parade through downtown Newport, set to begin at noon and concluding in Gardner Park. In the park, a festival is scheduled to run from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., featuring live music, speakers, vendors and activities. 

“Celebrating Pride is step one in the work we need to do to protect queer people and to make this world a safer, better place, but it’s important because it’s joyful and also just the visibility of it is really important,” Pearce said.

Ward said the nonprofit Rainbow Coalition was created from two distinct groups: one focused on planning a Pride event in Newport and another focused on creating queer community in the Northeast Kingdom.

The coalition adopted both missions and tries to host a community event at least once a month — either in Saint Johnsbury or Newport — to play games, make art or just “be in community,” Ward said. The coalition also holds a Halloween dance party and craft fair event, has a peer support program and partners with groups on other events.

“For the most part, we’ve gotten a lot of support,” Ward said. “A lot of people are just really happy that a (LGBTQIA+) group exists here. … It’s just so amazing to have that space where people can feel really comfortable.”

Last fall, Pearce held an amateur drag contest and dance party in the barn at Hillside Farm — her pastured poultry operation — to benefit the Rainbow Coalition. She said around 200 people attended the event.

“Any services of support the Rainbow Coalition can provide to make this place feel safer, to take care of their peers and other queer folks, is something I want to support,” Pearce said. “And I’m happy to have a fun party to do that.”

The farmer said she grew up in a pretty progressive family and had many connections to the queer community before she came out at age 31, relatively late in life.

“I never had to grapple with what a lot of young queer people have to, especially ones in rural communities: I wasn’t affected by fear of not being able to live my life how I wanted to,” she said. “That’s a pretty big privilege.”

Pearce points to the 2022 murder of transgender woman Fern Feather — who also grew up in Albany — as a reason why having an event celebrating LGBTQ+ pride in the area is important. While attending a vigil for Feather in Morrisville, Pearce remembers thinking to herself about the NEK, that “this place creates queer people too, and it’s not just a place for us to leave.”

“There are so many queer people doing awesome things in the Northeast Kingdom, and that love living here; that want to be a part of a rural community and love all the things that make rural communities special,” she said.

The farmer said she finds it meaningful to serve as a model of a rural queer person living their life authentically and openly — something she did not often see growing up in the Northeast Kingdom in the ‘90s and 2000s.

For her part, Pearce said Hillside Farm has employed a lot of people over the past decade, and many of her long-term and best crew members have been young queer people. It’s gratifying to know she’s had success making her farm a place where “people of any background would feel welcome and accepted and valued,” she said.

“The truth is that we all are here to take care of each other,” Pearce said. “That’s one of the values of any good rural community, and queer people are part of that community.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Third annual NEK Pride celebration in Newport, the only such event in the region, set for Sunday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials detained 10 people working at a private construction site in the town of Newport on Wednesday, marking the second large-scale immigration enforcement incident in Vermont in just two months.

The arrests took place near Newport Crossing, an affordable housing project in Newport Center by RuralEdge, a nonprofit housing developer.  

Patrick Shattuck, executive director of RuralEdge, said in an interview that the Newport project is being built by H.P. Cummings Construction Company but the 10 detained individuals were employees of subcontractor — Patriot Buildings System, a Londonderry, New Hampshire, company. Shattuck said the workers had finished work for the day and had left the construction site when the arrests took place nearby. 

As of Friday morning, the individuals were being held at Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, according to a Friday press release from the Burlington-based migrant advocacy group the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project. 

“Five or so” of the individuals were carrying proof of their immigration status at the time of the incident and are being scheduled for release, the press release stated. The immigration status of the other detainees was not immediately clear. 

ICE did not immediately respond to VTDigger’s requests for comment. 

The episode marks the second mass-detainment incident in Vermont in as many months as federal immigration officials ramp up enforcement efforts across the country to carry out the policies of President Donald Trump. 

Last month, eight migrant workers were detained at a dairy farm in Berkshire after Customs and Border Protection agents responded to a call alleging that suspicious looking men had crossed onto the farm property. Four of those arrested have already been deported to Mexico, while others remain in ICE custody.

The arrests correspond with what advocacy groups have said is an alarming increase of ICE’s use of commercial flights to transfer detainees out of the state. 

On Friday, in the latest such incident, ICE transferred seven women on a United Airlines flight from Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport to Chicago, according to the release from the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project. 

The women, who had been detained at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, were observed on the flight among commercial passengers with a plainclothes federal escort, the release stated. 

Legal observers awaiting the arrival of the flight said the ICE detainees did not get off the plane in Chicago and the plane subsequently reboarded for a flight to Washington, D.C., according to the release.

Former state Rep. Kiah Morris, who was apparently on the same flight, posted a video to social media in which she drew attention to the incident. 

“I have great concerns about the fact that this is happening and not certain on what we should be able to do as a public to really be able to really help support folks right now,” Morris said in the video. “(These are) some terrifying things to see happening right in front of our faces.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story contained the wrong day of the week of the arrests due to an error in the statement by the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Immigration officials detain 10 construction workers in Newport.

Two days before Greensboro voted on a contentious proposal to redevelop the town hall into affordable housing, longtime resident and brand-new selectboard member Judy Carpenter wrote a post on Front Porch Forum.

“Residents and friends of Greensboro, the big decision is coming,” she said. “No, I don’t mean Tuesday’s vote on the future of the Town Hall. I mean what we all do as community members after that vote.”

The housing project saw more than a year of passionate debate, spanning meetings — some organized by the town and others organized by community members themselves — a petition, yard signs, letters, a community website, numerous information sheets and a myriad of internet postings.

In the end, residents delivered a clear message, voting 227 to 147 against signing a purchase and sale agreement with nonprofit Northeast Kingdom housing agency RuralEdge. However, the small community, which has the highest rate of second home ownership in the state, is left with a dire shortage of housing as well as a divided community.

“Greensboro has survived contentious changes in the past—can we do it again?” Carpenter wrote. “No matter what the outcome of this vote is, we have many community projects in need of our efforts. Let’s get back to work.”

“You never know until you have an election”

The seeds of the town hall redevelopment project were planted around 2019, when both the town plan and a housing needs assessment detailed Greensboro’s “great need” for moderately-priced housing, especially for local employees. According to town documents, the planning commission’s housing committee began a relationship with RuralEdge around that time to develop housing, but had trouble finding a feasible site.

In 2022, local nonprofit WonderArts decided not to pursue renovating the town hall — a former high school — due to the expense. Town officials turned to the possibility of redeveloping their town hall into rental housing.

RuralEdge Executive Director Patrick Shattuck made an initial presentation of the project at the 2023 Greensboro Town Meeting, and the town signed an option agreement with Rural Edge in May 2023. Somewhere along the way, the project gained opposition, which grew louder and louder.

Had the plan been approved, Rural Edge would have bought the building from the town for $500,000 and created between 16 and 20 affordable one- to three-bedroom apartments split between the current town hall and an addition at the back of the structure. The current town offices would have been rented back to the town at operating cost and the Giving Closet, a free community donation space, would have been maintained in perpetuity in approximately half the space.

Shattuck said the town hall redevelopment would have been a really impactful project.

“One thing that struck me is just the amount of need in Greensboro for housing and people’s willingness to share their personal stories of really being unhoused and the struggles that caused,” he said. “And these are folks who work in the businesses that are so imperative to Greensboro being Greensboro.”

Shattuck expressed regret that the need won’t be addressed with a project that would have added a significant number of housing units.

“It’s sad and frustrating, but you don’t want to force something when it isn’t necessarily the right time and place,” Shattuck said. “Hopefully some of these folks who voiced their concerns, you know, it will mobilize them to continue to work for the change they want to see in their community.”

Kent Hansen, current chair of the Greensboro planning commission and a member of the housing subcommittee back when things began in 2019, said last week he was surprised by the outcome of the vote.

“I thought that the vote would be closer,” he said. “But you never know until you have an election.”

According to Hansen, there were several distinct complaints about the project. One was the scale: A number of people would have felt more comfortable with 8 or 10 units. Another group, he said, thought the town should be holding on to the building and fixing it up for community use.

And a third group, he said, was upset with the process, feeling like the selectboard didn’t build up community consensus before signing the initial option agreement with RuralEdge in May 2023.

David Kelley, a selectboard member at that time, disagreed with that characterization, stating in an email that there were “plenty of meetings and opportunities to learn” about the project before the option agreement was signed. However, he pointed to another complaint: that the concept of affordable housing “is not fully embraced by significant and influential segments of many communities.”

One other struggle the selectboard faced? Rampant misinformation.

On Wednesday night, at the first selectboard meeting since the vote, Ellen Celnik — a current selectboard member and an original member of the housing subcommittee — spoke up. She was happy there was a vote and happy the town made a decision, she said.

“The one thing that I am truly saddened by is an anonymous mailer that was sent to voters that had an enormous amount of misinformation,” Celnik said. “A part of me, who has worked on this since 2019, really was disappointed with the level of divisiveness that was put out there that was coming from other sources … I hate seeing a small town being hoodwinked by a very small group of people.”

At the meeting, the board noted a need to think long-term about the town hall, what it’s used for, and where the money is going to come from to make it useful; the building needs major repairs and the third floor is currently not usable.

“It is going to take education, communication and stronger leadership”

Looking ahead, Hansen said the planning commission has received a $25,000 municipal planning grant from the state, which they applied for before the vote. The grant aims to help Greensboro build consensus on where they want to grow geographically and what types of housing structures townspeople support.

The process is slated to include major public outreach and meetings, an expansion of a survey and several community conversations the commission conducted this past winter. Hansen expects the work to be completed around September.

“Hopefully people can pull together,” he said.

In the meantime, other smaller housing projects and initiatives are in the works. For one, Shattuck said the very same morning he heard about the results of the vote, he signed a check to fund an accessory dwelling unit in Greensboro. Local businesses have encouraged such units, and a panel discussion about them held last fall in neighboring Craftsbury is thought to have generated at least six such dwellings.

The Greensboro Initiative, associated with Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity and whose steering committee is chaired by Hansen, is in the process of constructing a new duplex in Greensboro Bend. The proceeds from the sale of those homes are planned to be reinvested in constructing additional affordable homes.

One major local employer, Jasper Hill Farm, continues to take matters into its own hands. Mateo Kehler, co-founder of the artisan cheesemaking business and an outspoken proponent of the town hall redevelopment project, wrote in an email that Jasper Hill currently provides housing for employees in eight houses.

Kehler said the business recently purchased an additional six housing units (currently occupied by inherited tenants) to support their team, and is in the process of subdividing and selling another house to one of its key employees. Following the vote, he said Jasper Hill is reassessing its ambitions for future growth, particularly in Greensboro.

“To make sure our efforts have the most impact, we will be shifting our direct support and investments towards surrounding towns that are more aligned with our mission,” Kehler wrote.

Kehler said Jasper Hill also plans to continue its focus on housing by engaging local organizations, including Let’s Build Homes, a pro-housing coalition (Kehler serves on its board), and the Headwaters Community Trust, a community land trust serving Greensboro and three neighboring towns — both of which were launched this year.

Kelley, when looking back on the rejected project, noted that Greensboro’s struggle to create affordable housing is not unique. The problem is accelerating across Vermont and the country, he said — and the anger that has fueled recent national and local elections is not going to solve it.

“It is going to take education, communication and stronger leadership,” he wrote. “And as a member of our Select Board, I think we failed on those accounts.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘Let’s get back to work’: Greensboro grapples with vote against affordable housing project.

Scientists have found invasive zebra mussels in Vermont’s section of Lake Memphremagog, sparking concern among state officials, according to Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

Zebra mussels, which scientists have detected in only two other water bodies of Vermont — Lake Champlain and Lake Bomoseen — are considered a harmful species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service due to their rapid proliferation on underwater surfaces. 

Surveys taken last summer by Arrowwood Environmental, an environmental consulting group, confirmed adult zebra mussels’ presence in Lake Memphremagog, a lake that extends across the border of Canada to Vermont. They found zebra mussel larvae in all but one of the water samples collected by state scientists, according to a Tuesday press release from the Department of Environmental Conservation.

Staff at the Department of Environmental Conservation and Arrowwood Environmental did not immediately respond to VTDigger’s request for comment. 

Accumulation of zebra mussels, called “biofouling,” can hurt the local ecology and economy. Zebra mussels encrust themselves on boats left in water for long periods, which can clog and destroy their machinery. Additionally, the invasive mussels latch onto other native mussels, killing them by outcompeting the native species for food and space, according to the National Park Service.

Zebra mussels were first reported in the Canadian waters of Lake Memphremagog in 2018, according to the release. Since then, the department’s scientists and partners have been monitoring their spread to the southernmost part of the lake, which extends to Newport, Vermont.

The discovery “renews our concerns about the spread of aquatic invasive species in Vermont,” state scientist Kimberly Jensen said in the release. “As the original population of zebra mussels spread from the northern region of Lake Memphremagog, we expect to see more in the southern region over time.”

Originally found in the Black, Caspian and Azov seas of Eastern Europe, zebra mussels likely invaded the Great Lakes in the 1980s via ballast water taken on by ships coming from Europe. Since their introduction to North America, they have spread as far as the eastern Mississippi River watershed and to Texas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. 

In order to prevent the spread of invasive species, state officials encouraged boaters and other recreators to use the “Clean, Drain, Dry” initiative when entering and exiting waters with invasive species. They should clean mud, plants and animals from boats and other equipment, dispose of any material in the trash away from nearby water bodies and drain any water from boats away from the water. Any wet equipment should be dried completely and rinsed with hot, high-pressure water or dried in the sun for at least five days. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Invasive zebra mussels discovered in Lake Memphremagog.

James Ingerson, a 54-year-old man from Hartford, died Saturday while incarcerated at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport. 

Ingerson had reported not feeling well and was receiving care for an unspecified medical issue prior to his cellmate discovering him unresponsive Saturday morning, according to a Vermont State Police press release. Medical interventions by corrections officers and emergency medical service providers were not successful, and Ingerson was pronounced dead at 9:54 a.m. 

State police said the death does not appear to be suspicious, but plans to investigate per standard protocol. The chief medical examiner’s office in Burlington also plans to conduct an autopsy to determine cause and manner of death. 

Ingerson was the fifth person pronounced dead while in the custody of the Vermont Department of Corrections this year, according to department press releases. The first two, both in Springfield, occurred while the individuals were in their cells. Two others were detained men in palliative care at local hospitals. 

Ingerson had been sentenced to up to 10 years in prison for aggravated assault and cocaine possession in Windsor County in 2022, according to the state police. He was also serving a federal charge for illegal possession of a firearm as a felon. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont man incarcerated in Newport prison dies .

A local group that includes longtime Burke Mountain benefactors and community stakeholders is on the cusp of acquiring the Northeast Kingdom ski resort, according to people familiar with the deal. 

The group, Bear Den Partners LLC, includes members of the Graham family, who have previously invested heavily in the mountain, as well as Burke Mountain Academy, an elite training school for skiers in the area. Bear Den Partners also includes Jon Schafer, owner of the Berkshire East Mountain Resort in Massachusetts, who would oversee resort operations at the mountain if the takeover bid proves successful. 

Details about the group’s attempt to acquire Burke were first reported in the Caledonian Record. 

In an interview with VTDigger Wednesday, Ken Graham, chairman and co-founder of Bear Den Partners, emphasized that a deal had not been finalized but confirmed the group was attempting to buy the beloved Northeast Kingdom resort and invest heavily in its development.

“We’re not trying to change the culture and the ethos and everything that makes Burke special,” Graham said. “The mountain is separate from the whole corporate ski experience that’s growing all over the country. It’s sort of back to the roots of why people love skiing in the first place, and that’s what we want to protect and build.”

An overview of Bear Den Partners’ vision for the resort shared with VTDigger outlines sweeping plans to upgrade the mountain’s snowmaking and chairlift infrastructure, expand trail access and renovate the resort’s mountain-side hotel.

“It’s needed this kind of investment for a long, long time,” Graham said.

The details of the prospective acquisition come just a month after Michael Goldberg, the court-appointed receiver of Burke Mountain, announced he was in the process of “finalizing” a deal to sell the Northeast Kingdom resort to an anonymous party. 

At the time, Goldberg denied claims from investors Todd Firestone and Mark Greenberg that he was ignoring their bid, saying that he had found a buyer that “has deep roots in the community and will insure (sic) that Burke Mountain will have the stable future it deserves.”

Goldberg did not immediately respond to VTDigger’s requests for comment Wednesday.  

If a contract is signed, the federal judge overseeing the mountain’s receivership would need to sign off on the agreement. If completed, the deal would cap Goldberg’s almost decade-long attempt to successfully sell the property.

The lawyer was appointed receiver of Burke Mountain and Jay Peak, another Northeast Kingdom resort, in 2016 in the wake of a financial scandal, after the resort’s former owner, Ariel Quiros, was indicted for defrauding investors.

Quiros and Bill Stenger, the former CEO and president of Jay Peak, were in the process of funding massive upgrades to both resorts with money from the EB-5 visa program when federal regulators accused both men of misusing $200 million of the $350 million they had raised for the projects.

Prior to Goldberg’s latest announcement, he had stated on two separate occasions he was on the verge of selling the resort, only to have the deals collapse. His drawn-out receivership provoked frustration among community members, who argued that the property and the surrounding community were losing value. 

But Bear Den Partners’ bid seems to enjoy strong community support. Included in the group is Tom Bledsoe, president of the Burke Mountain Owners Association and a representative of Burke Mountain Community Partners, organizations that represent the bulk of Burke homeowners and community members. 

Frank Adams, a Burke homeowner who in January launched a petition urging Goldberg to expedite the sale of the mountain, said he was “thrilled” that Bear Den Partners appeared poised to acquire the resort. 

“I think that this is the right team,” Adams said. “I honestly believe that this mountain will be here for decades to come now, and I didn’t always feel that way.” 

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the role of a Burke Mountain Academy representative in the expected purchase deal.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Local group expected to acquire Burke Mountain ski resort.

DERBY LINE — Local Canadian officials hosted a press conference Friday to condemn the U.S. government’s decision to limit Canadians’ access to an iconic library and theater that straddles the northern border in Vermont.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Friday afternoon that beginning Monday, the agency would be restricting Canadian access to the entrance of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which is on U.S. soil, attributing the decision to safety concerns. Staff and library card holders are allowed to access the entrance until October, when limitations are expected to become even more stringent, the agency said.

“The goal of this phased rollout is to provide members the opportunity to obtain the necessary travel documentation without negatively impacting library operations,” Ryan Brissette, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a written statement. 

“On October 1, 2025, all visitors from Canada wishing to use the front entrance will be required to present themselves at a port of entry to enter the library from the United States,” with some exceptions provided for handicapped access and emergencies, he wrote. 

First opened in 1904, the library and opera house is situated between Derby Line and Stanstead, Quebec. For more than 120 years, the library has enjoyed a unique status as a neutral space, where those in Canada can enter U.S. territory to use the space without first going through customs. The building is a heritage site and has long been considered a symbol of the close relationship between the two nations.

On Tuesday, however, U.S. Customs and Border Protection informed library staff that the longstanding arrangement was over, according to Sylvie Budreau, president of Haskell’s board of trustees. 

“No matter what this administration does, it will not change the fact that Stanstead and Derby Line are friends and partners forever,” said Stanstead Mayor Jody Stone said at the press event. “Without borders you wouldn’t even know that we are two separate communities. 

According to Budreau, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had similarly moved to restrict access from the Canadian side of the border in 2022 but ultimately agreed to let the operation run as usual.

“They have more support now,” she said.

The library plans to open a service entrance on the northern side of the building for Canadian patrons to use, which they hope to renovate in the coming months, Budreau said.

Within the library, it would be “business as usual,” she said, and there are no plans to restrict patrons’ movement within the library, which is bisected by a line of tape representing the international border. 

Dozens of people from both sides of the border gathered outside the building Friday to watch the press conference and protest the decision. 

Among them was Clement Jacques, a lifelong Stanstead resident who said he was “not comfortable at all” with the change. 

Wearing a bright red hat that read “Canada is Not for Sale,” Jacques said he was a library card holder and had been coming to Haskell for decades.

“This building is used by both countries,” he said angrily. 

The announcement came just weeks after U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited the library, as first reported by VTDigger, during a whirlwind trip to Vermont following the death of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent David Maland.

During that visit, Budreau said, Noam crossed back and forth over the line of tape on the floor that represents the international border while saying, “U.S.A number one” and calling Canada “the 51st state,” echoing a common taunt from President Donald Trump.

Since then, tensions between the two nations have continued to soar as Trump continues to wage an on-again off-again trade war against Canada while suggesting that the U.S. should annex the country. 

Still, Canadian officials at Friday’s press conference were eager to reaffirm the close ties between the two nations. 

“The Haskell Free Library & Opera House is a testament to the amazing relationship between our two communities,” said Marie-Claude Bibeau, who represents the Compton-Stanstead district in Canada’s House of Commons. 

Earlier this week, Bibeau joined Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt. at a roundtable discussion in Newport, where she denounced Trump’s controversial tariffs on Canadian goods. 

“Our border community is strong and this will only further our strength and our ties,” Bibeau said Friday. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: US to restrict Canadian access to historic Vermont library straddling northern border.

NEWPORT — Track Inc., a leading distributor of snow grooming equipment, straddles the U.S.-Canada border, so it doubly fears being caught in the middle of a trade war between the two nations.

With offices in Newport and Richmond, Quebec — as well as one in Wisconsin — the company provides snowcats and other utility vehicles made in both countries to ski mountains and trail systems throughout North America. 

“50% of our products are made in the United States, 50% are imported from Europe and Canada,” said Mike Desmarais, owner and CEO of the company, speaking at a roundtable convened in Newport Tuesday by Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt. 

“What’s going to happen,” he said, “when we can’t sell the Canadian and the European products in the United States, when we can’t sell the American products in Canada?”

Desmarais was one of about two dozen business leaders and officials from both Vermont and Quebec that came to Newport to vent their frustration with the Trump administration’s on-again off-again trade war with Canada. 

A dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada, Desmarais was among the many attendees who said President Donald Trump’s attempts to drive a wedge between the two countries weren’t just bad for business, but personally upsetting. 

“We can’t separate the two countries,” he said. “We’re one people. We’re one history.”

Officials and members of the business communities in both Vermont and Quebec have been on edge since early February, when Trump first announced sweeping tariffs on imports from the U.S’s closest trade partner. 

Although Trump has since postponed most of those levies, which are now expected to take effect on April 2, the climate of uncertainty created by his volatile trade policies has caused widespread consternation among businesses attempting to adjust to the rising prices and supply chain disruptions that would result from the tariffs.

The president has also inflamed tensions between the two nations with repeated suggestions that the U.S. should take over its northern neighbor, sparking outrage among Canadians, who have begun to boycott American goods and cancel trips to the U.S.

“To speak bluntly, I am absolutely horrified at these tariffs,” Welch told attendees. “I am appalled at what our president is saying about Canada in reference to ‘a 51st state.’ There’s no place for that.” 

Speaking at Tuesday’s event, Marie-Claude Bibeau, who represents the Compton-Stanstead district in Canada’s House of Commons, said the frustration in Canada over Trump’s rhetoric was “without precedent.”

“The threat is over and above tariffs right now,” she said. “It’s a threat against our sovereignty, and if it was a joke for the first 24 hours, it’s not a joke anymore. We take it very seriously.” 

Canadian and Vermont businesses have faced collateral damage from those rising tensions.

Denis LaRue, president of J.A. LaRue, a snowblower manufacturer based in Quebec City, was among the many attendees who said a trade war would drive up costs unsustainably. 

The company makes snowblowers with parts from the U.S., Mexico and Canada, and Larue said if tariffs take effect in April, price increases “will kill our industry.”

Facing similar price increases, Vermont industries have also had to contend with boycotts from Canadians, which have upended a tourism and hospitality sector that relies heavily on visitors from the north. 

Several attendees — including representatives from the Jay Peak ski resort and Hill Farmstead Brewery, among others —  reported they had seen a steep drop in visitors from Canada in recent weeks.

Abby Long, executive director of Kingdom Trails, which oversees a network of trails for recreational use in the Northeast Kingdom, said Canadian users told the organization they were canceling trips to Vermont indefinitely. 

“They express their love for Kingdom Trails and our community, but they go on to share that they will not be visiting until our political environment has shifted,” Long said.

An outspoken critic of the tariff policy, Welch promised attendees he would continue to oppose the president’s tariff policy as much as he could in Washington. 

“I am absolutely all in on sticking up for maintaining the good relationships that we’ve had,” Welch said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Canadian and Vermont business leaders commiserate at Newport roundtable .

NEWPORT — The gaping construction site in the heart of downtown serves as a reminder of what might have been. 

Referred to simply as “the pit” by most locals, the patch of barren land was meant to house the centerpiece of an ambitious plan to redevelop Newport funded by the EB-5 visa program, which pairs foreign investors with rural development projects in the U.S.

The project collapsed in 2016, when the orchestrators of the development plan, Ariel Quiros and Bill Stenger, were indicted for defrauding investors of millions of dollars. 

In the wake of what has since become known as the EB-5 scandal, the money to develop the parcel of land in Newport dried up, and with it went the plans for revitalizing the Northeast Kingdom city.   

Sitting in his downtown office on a recent afternoon, Rick Ufford-Chase pointed out the window at the empty construction site and sighed.

“While that property across the street itself serves as a reminder, the scar on the psyche of the community is actually bigger. People feel like they’ve been hoodwinked,” he said. “It’s just really unfortunate.”

Running unopposed in Newport’s mayoral race, Ufford-Chase is the city’s presumptive next mayor. 

At the center of his campaign is the promise to make Newport a cultural and economic hub for the Northeast Kingdom, reviving a goal that was all but abandoned when the EB-5 scheme came crashing down. That project has also been the focus of Ufford-Chase’s current job as the executive director of Newport City Downtown Development, a nonprofit dedicated to the economic development of the city.

“What’s actually more important than anything specific we’re building is actually rebuilding the community bond and developing a shared sense of vision,” said Ufford-Chase.

Although he has family ties in the Northeast Kingdom and grew up visiting the area often, Ufford-Chase is relatively new in town, having moved to Newport in 2021.

He quickly became an active member of the community, and won a seat on the city council several years later. In mid-January, just under a year into his tenure on the council, he declared his candidacy for the city’s top post, following Mayor Linda Joy Sullivan’s announcement that she would step down after a single term. 

“I hadn’t even contemplated running until Linda Sullivan said that she wasn’t going to run,” Ufford-Chase said. “I looked around and said, ‘Okay, if that’s true, we need a mayor who really understands the long term strategy for Newport and who can help and bring some vision and follow-through.’”

As a council member and head of Newport City Downtown Development, Ufford-Chase helped spearhead the effort to draw up the city’s updated master plan, a blueprint for development that he intends to help execute as mayor.

Adopted by the city council in December, the plan calls for the city to build about 410 housing units over the next 10 years while completely redeveloping its downtown. In it are proposals for new mixed-use buildings and added marina space along Lake Memphremagog, as well as suggestions for how entire city blocks could be revamped.

“What we are aiming for is a place where normal, everyday folks can find a place to live at a reasonable affordable cost,” Ufford-Chase said, “where they have a walkable downtown and want to be here because it’s pretty and there are activities and things to do.” 

To lay the groundwork for that vision, Ufford-Chase has emphasized the need for the city to balance its budget, which he said would be his first priority as mayor. 

According to information on Ufford-Chase’s campaign website, the city has been operating at a deficit for years, primarily owing to its failure to raise sewer and water rates between 2016 and 2024. 

But Newport’s municipal woes extend beyond its books and its post-EB-5 economic struggles.

In recent years, a series of abrupt resignations and firings has made the city government seem at times like a revolving door for officials.

Sullivan’s predecessor, Beth Barnes, stepped down less than three months into her term as mayor, alleging in a resignation letter that she had been “intimidated and bullied” by city officials and council members. In November, moreover, the city council voted to dismiss Newport’s third city manager in as many years.

Frustration over the apparent dysfunction has routinely been on display at well-attended council meetings, which have often featured impassioned speeches, shouting matches, and name-calling.

As mayor, Ufford-Chase said that he hopes to defuse those tensions. One of his main priorities, he said, is “to help the city reclaim a sense of transparency and balance and trust that has been missing for a long time.”

Some residents have expressed concerns about the presumptive mayor-elect’s own ability to cultivate such an atmosphere.

Ufford-Chase has said that he plans to continue working for Newport City Downtown Development even as he takes the helm of the city, a decision that could expose him to potential conflicts of interest. The nonprofit works closely with the city government and receives partial funding from the city’s budget.  

In a written statement, Sullivan — the current mayor — said that she has reservations about whether Ufford-Chase will have “adequate bandwidth” to do both jobs.

“We’re going to have to see if Rick can manage the inherent conflicts of holding both positions in a sufficiently transparent way as to assure our residents that his actions as Mayor are consistent with the interests of all of our constituents,” Sullivan wrote.

While acknowledging the potential for conflicts of interest, Ufford-Chase, for his part, said that he was confident in his ability to keep his footing.

Prior to declaring his candidacy, he said, he reached out to the state ethics commission to confirm that he would be able to viably manage both jobs without running afoul of ethics laws. 

“The answer I got back was no,” Ufford-Chase said. “But the level of scrutiny is likely to be different and higher, and therefore, as on any conflict of interest, the appropriate response is to name it before it’s an issue.”

When asked if, as mayor, he would recuse himself on matters relating to Newport City Downtown Development, Ufford-Chase noted that, due to the structure of Newport’s government, the mayor only votes as a tiebreaker on matters when the city council is split, making recusal a sticky proposition. 

His goal, he said, was to be “effective at building collaboration and consensus” so that he would rarely find himself with a split council.

“If you do get to that point then you name the issue yourself, you put it on the table and disclose it with the appropriate legal forms and then you make your best judgement.” Ufford-Chase said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Running unopposed, Newport’s presumptive next mayor hopes to turn a new leaf.

Residents at the southern tip of Orleans County are taking the housing crisis into their own hands. 

As established organizations pursue housing projects in the region, Northeast Kingdom locals are developing their own initiatives aimed at easing the shortage. 

In one of the latest efforts, a group of residents has formed the Headwaters Community Trust with the goal of supporting permanently affordable homes through the community land trust model. The land trust, which received its nonprofit status in December, plans to focus its work in the scenic, rural towns of Craftsbury, Glover, Greensboro and Albany.

“Having watched as the price of land and houses has climbed out of reach for regular folks, I felt there must be a solution, a way to bring access to affordable homes and land back down to ‘Earth,’” said Rick Morrill, a Greensboro resident and a member of the new trust’s board. “The CLT model is the best tool that communities like ours can use to achieve this goal.”

The trust would acquire and maintain ownership of land, selling houses on it at an affordable price. Homeowners, if they decide to sell, would do so per an established resale formula to keep the housing affordable in perpetuity, “protecting it from the speculative real estate market.” 

The trust would be governed by both “resident members,” who live in the homes on trust-owned land, and “general members” who live, work or own property in the trust’s service area.

Headwaters Community Trust began as an outgrowth of another community-driven initiative — a monthly housing forum that has been taking place at the East Craftsbury Presbyterian Church for several years.

The church, which had been looking for a way to respond to the need for affordable housing, started the forum in 2023, according to Jenny Stoner, a church official and co-convener of the forum.

Forum participants circulated a letter in Craftsbury last summer asking residents if they might help address the “urgent need for long-term housing” by converting seasonal or short-term rentals into long-term rentals or adding accessory dwelling units to their property, for which funding is available.

“Our small town is struggling to house families, students and teachers for our local schools and colleges. Our local businesses are struggling to find housing for their employees” read the letter, signed by local businesses such as Craftsbury Outdoor Center, Pete’s Greens and Sterling College and former state Rep. Katherine Sims, D-Craftsbury. “Please help us to save our community by providing long term housing for our beloved friends and neighbors.”

The group also had a panel discussion on accessory dwelling units this past fall, Stoner said in an email, and learned of six such units that RuralEdge — which develops and operates affordable rental housing across the Northeast Kingdom — thinks are a result of the panel.

In addition to the monthly housing forum and newly formed trust, two separate Greensboro housing projects are also in the works. The Greensboro Initiative, associated with Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity, plans to construct a new duplex in Greensboro Bend this spring. The proceeds from the sale of those homes would be reinvested in constructing additional affordable homes.

RuralEdge and the town of Greensboro have also formed a partnership to redevelop the town hall to include 20 new apartments. (On Town Meeting Day, residents will decide whether to hold a vote by Australian ballot on the project — which has faced significant pushback — at a later date.)

Linda Ramsdell, who grew up in Craftsbury and has made it her home for almost 40 years, serves as president of the Headwaters Community Trust’s board of directors. She said a $15,000 grant from the Northeast Vermont Development Association gave the organization some early momentum. In addition, Ramsdell said they’ve received generous volunteer support from John Davis, a founder of Burlington Associates who has worked with community land trusts all over the world.

Roughly 75 community members attended the trust’s “soft launch” last September, Ramsdell said.

“People were really excited and supportive,” she said. “That excitement was really wonderful to see because, ultimately, a community land trust is community-led development on community-owned land.”

Ramsdell said what stood out to her about the community land trust model, in addition to the perpetual affordability of its residences, was its flexibility. Over 300 exist in the country, she said, both rural and urban and of all sizes — including in more scenic places with numbers of tourists and second home owners like Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Now that Headwaters has received its nonprofit status, Ramsdell said its work turns to meeting with community organizations, boards and residents to hear their ideas and hopefully gain new members.

The group has also already received an offer of a piece of land — from the East Craftsbury Presbyterian Church, where it all started — though it would be unlikely to host housing.

The church plans to allow Craftsbury Saplings, a child care center that operates in the downstairs of the church building, to expand to the adjacent property. However, the church has offered to donate the land itself to Headwaters to hold in perpetuity.

While Ramsdell said there is likely no room for both the expanded child care center and additional housing, Headwaters’ mission does extend to other community assets and general affordability — including affordable child care. The trust hasn’t yet determined whether it will accept the church’s offer. 

While a lot of work is ahead for the community land trust, including fundraising, Ramsdell is optimistic about the opportunities for securing federal and state funding. 

“We have to be patient and just go through the steps and get it done,” she said.

Ramsdell said the group also looks forward to collaborating with organizations already working on affordable housing projects, including RuralEdge.

“We need all of the options that can possibly be on the table,” she said. “We need affordable rental housing and we need affordable homeownership opportunities. And, of course, there’s always going to be like, second homes. … Now is the time when we kind of need to have everything on the table.”

Patrick Shattuck, executive director of RuralEdge, agreed.

“Housing production is a huge challenge and we are excited to see others addressing this with us and mobilizing locally,” Shattuck wrote in an email, adding that the organization “welcomes partnerships” with other groups and views their collective efforts as complementary.

Headwaters’ board members expressed their appreciation for being able to take action and work toward housing solutions in their area directly.

“If we just shrug and let the market run its course there will be less and less housing options for those who call this region home and serve in essential roles, such as in agriculture/forest business, as caregivers, and construction and maintenance workers,” said Morrill. “These towns cannot sustain themselves without addressing the housing crisis and its impact on these people.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of duplexes the Greensboro Initiative is building this spring. It also mischaracterized the nature of a vote on a RuralEdge project taking place on Town Meeting Day.

Read the story on VTDigger here: In the Northeast Kingdom, residents organize to tackle housing crisis .

WHEELOCK— A week before engaging in a shootout that killed a border patrol agent and left one of them dead, two young visitors contacted a Vermont realtor in hopes of viewing a property. 

Teresa Youngblut, 21, of Washington state, and Felix Bauckholt, a German national — whose role in the Jan. 20 traffic stop-turned-shootout near the Canadian border has exploded into a national news story — contacted a Northeast Kingdom realtor seeking to view a house in Wheelock.

The revelations shed some light on the mystery of what exactly the pair was doing in Vermont. And they are among newly emerging details of a larger trail of sometimes unsettling interactions between Vermonters and individuals connected to the case, which has sprawled to involve over half a dozen people and at least six deaths in three states.

A federal grand jury Thursday formally indicted Youngblut on weapons charges that led to her arrest after the shooting. She is set to appear Friday in federal court in Burlington.

The Northeast Kingdom realtor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity citing safety concerns, said they spoke only with Youngblut, who referred to herself as Connie and her companion as Sam. 

Youngblut contacted the office of a Northeast Kingdom real estate firm on Jan. 13, seeking to view a property in Wheelock, the realtor told VTDigger. According to the realtor and real estate websites, the 11-acre Blodgett Road property is extremely remote and difficult to access in winter. The two-bedroom fixer-upper is off the grid — something Youngblut expressed interest in, the realtor said — and has a generator and wood stoves. 

The realtor told VTDigger that they had tried to discourage Youngblut from attempting to buy the house, at least in the middle of winter.

“I said, ‘Maybe it would be a better idea for us to go look at it in the springtime,’” the realtor said. “And she said, ‘We don’t want to wait till spring.’ She was very adamant.”

Youngblut said she planned to pay cash for the house, according to the realtor. The property is listed for just under $200,000 on Zillow.  

They made plans for a viewing on the morning of Jan. 14, but after an effort to plow the road that day was unsuccessful, the realtor called Youngblut and left messages telling her the viewing was off. The next morning, however, the realtor learned that Youngblut and at least one other person had shown up anyway, drawing the attention of neighbors.

Another viewing was scheduled for Monday Jan. 20 at 2 p.m. A day before that appointment, however, the realtor received an email from Youngblut complaining that, while she was at the property, she had had an uncomfortable exchange with two men, who allegedly commented on her clothing and what she was doing there. 

A week ago, the Barton Chronicle reported that a hunter encountered two people matching the description of Youngblut and Bauckholt in Wheelock and was “surprised” by the way they were dressed. 

“After I got that email, I was like, okay, this is a little weird,” the realtor said. The next morning, on Monday, they learned that the seller of the house had accepted another offer and informed Youngblut that the property was no longer available, they said. The viewing was canceled.

Roughly an hour after the viewing was scheduled to have taken place, Youngblut would allegedly open fire during a traffic stop shootout that left U.S. Border Patrol agent David Maland dead. Youngblut is being held at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington.

Conspicuous guests 

Youngblut and Bauckholt are two members of a loose group of people who have now been linked to at least six deaths that span three states and two U.S. coastlines — including a double homicide in Pennsylvania and the murder of a landlord in California.

Many of the people appear to be highly educated and have ties to Bay Area communities of rationalists, a movement of philosophically-minded people who prize logical reasoning and are often interested in artificial intelligence and software engineering. 

But members of this particular group — dubbed by some “Zizians,” for their following of a blog written by an individual named Jack LaSota under the pen name “Ziz” — appear to have taken those rationalist ideas in an unorthodox and extreme direction. 

In Vermont, people linked to Ziz and the shooting in Coventry had drawn the attention of law enforcement — and residents. 

The tension was palpable in much of the Northeast Kingdom on Wednesday, where nearly a dozen individuals and local officials that VTDigger attempted to interview declined to speak on record, citing fears for their safety and concerns about compromising the investigation into the shooting.

In the week prior to the shootout, Youngblut and Bauckholt stayed at a hotel in Lyndonville, where their outfits and gear — “all-black tactical style clothing with protective equipment,” including a firearm in a holster, according to court records — drew concern from an employee. 

That employee alerted law enforcement, which began to conduct “periodic surveillance” on the duo. Officers with the Vermont State Police and the federal Homeland Security Investigations sought to talk with the pair but they declined to speak at length, saying they were in the area to look at real estate, according to court records.

On Jan. 14, the pair checked out of the Lyndonville hotel and checked into the Newport City Inn & Suites “late” that same day, according to the Newport hotel’s manager Samantha Camley. They stayed there through Jan. 20, the day of the shooting, Camley said. 

Camley said staff members interacted exclusively with Youngblut, who often separated with Bauckholt in the parking lot, entering the front office alone while Bauckholt went to their room. 

According to Camley, staff described Youngblut as “quiet” and said she “answered questions when asked” but did not speak much otherwise. She said Youngblut was often seen wearing black ski pants, a large black coat, and a mask. 

Youngblut and Bauckholt rarely seemed to leave the motel, said Camley, who noted that she saw the pair walking in the direction of nearby restaurants and convenience stores in the immediate vicinity. 

The day before the shooting, according to court records, law enforcement had witnessed Youngblut, who carried a handgun, and Bauckholt walking in “tactical dress” in downtown Newport. 

Two licenses and a gun 

Years before the pair was spotted in Vermont, several other young people with ties to the same group had established residency in the Northeast Kingdom town of Coventry. One of them was 32-year-old Michelle Zajko, who in 2021 purchased a half acre of undeveloped land in Derby, near the Canadian border, according to property records.  

A day after the shooting, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sent an alert to firearms dealers seeking help “identifying any firearms purchases made by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, a person of interest in the shooting of a Customs and Border Protection Officer on Jan. 20, 2025.”

The firearms that Youngblut and Bauckholt had at the time of the shooting were purchased in Mt. Tabor, in southern Vermont, a year ago, according to court records. Authorities have not explicitly stated who purchased those guns. 

Two years earlier, Zajko had bought a gun from a different Vermont firearms dealer, Green Mountain Sporting Goods in Irasburg, according to Pennsylvania court records. 

Zajko tried to buy a Smith & Wesson handgun from the store on Feb. 3, 2022, but was initially unable to because she tried to use a California driver’s license.

Brien Lemois, who said his wife, Trish Jones, owns Green Mountain Sporting Goods, said Wednesday that he “vaguely” remembered Zajko’s visit.

Lemois said Zajko came to the store with another woman. “If I remember her correctly, she said she was living in Orleans and she produced a California license and I was like, ‘Well, you need to be a Vermont resident,’” Lemois said. 

The following day Zajko returned to the store with a Vermont driver’s license and bought the Smith & Wesson, as well as a holster and box of ammunition, according to the court documents. Zajko had gotten that driver’s license earlier that day, police later learned. 

Zajko’s new license didn’t raise any suspicions, Lemois said, noting that Zajko told him that she had been living in Vermont for nearly a year. Green Mountain Sporting Goods sees “quite a few people” who say they have lived in the state for a while but haven’t yet acquired a Vermont driver’s license, Lemois said.

Zajko appears to have lived at an address in Coventry from about 2021 through 2023. She filed a proof of residency form with the town in Jan. 2021, and police interviewed her there two years later. 

Police took an interest in Zajko’s gun purchases roughly a year after she made them, after Zajko’s parents, 72-year-old Richard Zajko and 69-year-old Rita Zajko, were shot and killed at their Delaware County, Pennsylvania residence on Dec. 31, 2022.

Police later determined that Richard and Rita were killed with a gun and ammunition consistent with those purchased by their daughter.

Lemois, of Green Mountain Sporting Goods, noted that Zajko must have passed a background check to complete the firearm purchase.

“If she picked up the gun that day, she got a proceed,” he said.

A ‘difficult customer’ 

Pennsylvania State Police, according to court filings, later recovered the handgun Zajko had purchased from the Vermont store when they raided a hotel near the Philadelphia airport where she was staying on Jan. 12, 2023, the same day as her parents’ funeral. 

At the hotel, police also found LaSota, who blogged under the name “Ziz.” LaSota was arrested that day but later made bail and stopped showing up for court hearings. 

According to court filings, police also seized cell phones, SIM cards, and receipts linked to Zajko, which were traced back to an AT&T store in Newport, Vermont. 

A Vermont State Police detective went to that store about a week later and spoke to an employee, who reported that the account associated with the receipts was for a customer named “Jacklyn Connor,” the court documents stated.

The employee described the person as a “difficult customer” because she didn’t like to provide identification or an email address. The clerk told police that “Connor” came into the store every few months to add money to her prepaid account or to open a new account, according to court filings.

“Connor” was “standoff-ish, complains about service and is uncomfortable to work with,” the employee told law enforcement, according to the court documents.

The store employee, later shown a photo lineup by police, stated that she was “100% confident” that the person she knew as “Jacklyn Connor” was actually Michelle Zajko.

The FBI take an interest

After the Jan. 20 shooting that left Maland and Bauckholt dead, FBI agents sought information from multiple real estate firms, according to Nicholas Maclure, the owner of Century 21 Farm & Forest, a firm in the Northeast Kingdom. 

In an email sent Jan. 27 to real estate agents around Vermont and obtained by VTDigger, Maclure said the FBI was seeking to speak with anyone who had interacted with Youngblut or Bauckholt. 

“As many of you know, they were looking for (real estate) in the area and (the FBI agent) would love to talk to anyone who had any communication with them,” Maclure wrote in the email.

On Tuesday, Jan, 21, the day after the shooting, FBI agents came to the real estate firm of the realtor who interacted with Youngblut and questioned them, the realtor said. The realtor said they asked the FBI agents the reason for the interview at the time but received no answers.

“All they said was to watch the news,” the realtor said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Before the shooting of border patrol officer, visitors took interest in a remote Northeast Kingdom property.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shed some more light on her surprise recent visit to northern Vermont — which followed the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in the area — in a series of posts on social media this week.

Noem wrote on X that she met with the family of that agent, David Maland, as well as other officers from the agency’s Swanton Sector, which is the Border Patrol jurisdiction that covers Vermont, New Hampshire and parts of New York State. Photos posted to Noem’s official X account show her speaking with a large group of Border Patrol agents including Robert Garcia, who is the Swanton Sector’s chief patrol agent.

Garcia wrote in an Instagram post that Noem was at the Border Patrol’s station in Newport. Pete Flores, the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection — which is under the homeland security department umbrella and oversees the Border Patrol — was also in attendance, according to Garcia. 

VTDigger previously reported that Noem visited the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Derby Line, too, which is known for straddling the U.S.-Canada border. Maland was killed, along with one other person, in a shootout during a traffic stop the afternoon of Jan. 20 on Interstate 91 in Coventry, which is just south of Newport. 

A 21-year-old from Washington State is currently in federal custody and facing two felony charges related to firing a gun during the incident. 

Noem also singled out an apparent concern, in her posts on X, with some of the equipment that’s available to agents in the Swanton Sector. 

“I was shocked to hear that some of our border patrol agents didn’t even have snow tires,” Noem wrote, pointing to how “it was 4 degrees & snowing” during her visit.

“It’s a no-brainer to make sure our law enforcement has vehicles with basic equipment for winter conditions,” she continued. “Under President Trump, our border patrol agents will have snow tires & ALL the resources they need to do their jobs.” 

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not provide answers to a series of questions this week seeking to confirm that agents in the region lack snow tires, or whether access to such equipment has been curtailed in the past. 

Noem’s visit to the state came just days after she was sworn into office and about a week after President Donald Trump, who appointed her, began his second term.

In the weeks since, immigrant rights’ advocates in the state have reported an uptick in immigration enforcement. The homeland security department also includes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, under its purview.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Kristi Noem shares more details on Vermont visit in social media posts.

In the days after Michelle Zajko’s parents were murdered in Pennsylvania, police visited her Vermont residence and inspected a handgun she owned, court documents show. A week later, police obtained a search warrant for the property, located in the Northeast Kingdom town of Coventry, with the goal of seizing that gun. 

The court documents, filed in January 2023 in Orleans County Superior criminal court in Newport, shed more light into potential connections between the December 2022 double-homicide of Richard and Rita Zajko in Pennsylvania and a fatal shooting last month of a border patrol agent in Coventry. 

The investigation into both cases has so far led only to the arrest of one person, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut of Washington, who faces federal weapons charges for allegedly opening fire on law enforcement officials during a traffic stop on Interstate 91 on Jan. 20. U.S. Border Patrol agent David C. Maland was killed in the shootout.

Felix Bauckholt, a German national who had been in the car with Youngblut and also drew a weapon, was shot and killed at the scene, according to authorities. 

An alert sent to federally licensed firearm dealers after the shootout described Zajko, 32, as a “person of interest” in the fatal shooting of the border patrol agent. 

Youngblut, Bauckholt and Zajko all have ties to a group called the Zizians, a fringe offshoot of the Rationalist movement. 

A fourth person linked to that group, Maximilian Snyder, was arrested in the Jan. 17 murder of a Vallejo, California, landlord. Snyder and Youngblut had previously applied for a marriage certificate in Washington state. 

Pennsylvania authorities, without naming Zajko, said in a press release last week that the person who purchased the firearms for Youngblut and Bauckholt was also a “person of interest” in the fatal shooting of Richard and Rita Zajko on Dec. 31, 2022.  

A search warrant request after that double-homicide indicates that police were interested in a different gun Zajko had purchased in February 2022 from Green Mountain Sporting Goods in Irasburg.

WPTZ and the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the court filings late last week.

The Pennsylvania murders

On Jan. 2, 2023, Pennsylvania State Police were called to a home in the Chester Heights Borough in Delaware County for a welfare check, according to the filings.

Arriving troopers found 72-year-old Richard Zajko and 69-year-old Rita Zajko dead inside an upstairs bedroom. Both had suffered gunshot wounds to the head.

A review of a neighbor’s Ring camera’s footage, according to the filings, showed a vehicle arriving at the Zajkos’ residence at about 11:29 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2022. 

Two minutes later, according to the court documents, a “higher pitched voice is heard shouting what sounds like, ‘Mom.’” Seconds later, a “higher pitched voice is heard exclaiming, ‘Oh my God!, God, God!’”

According to the court documents, “movement can be seen at the front door, which appears to be opened then shut, indicating the subjects entered the house” as the interior upstairs lights could be seen turning on. About nine minutes passed before two people were seen leaving the residence out the front door, getting into the vehicle and driving away, the filings stated.

When they arrived on scene two days later, police didn’t find a firearm but did recover two 9mm shell casings near the couple’s bodies in the bedroom, according to the documents.

Police also found a Pennsylvania driver’s license for a person, later identified as the couple’s daughter, Michelle Zajko.

A Vermont visit

Pennsylvania authorities soon learned that Michelle Zajko may have been living in Vermont, according to the court documents, and through Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles records found an address on Webster Road in Coventry.

On Jan. 5, 2023, Pennsylvania troopers conducted a “voluntary interview” with Michelle Zajko at the Coventry property, the court documents stated. 

Zajko told police she had been at the Coventry house, with her roommate Daniel Blank, between Dec. 29, 2022, and Jan. 1, 2023, according to the filings. 

She also said that she had not been in Pennsylvania since before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and that she had not spoken to her parents since about January 2022. Zajko acknowledged receiving a Dec. 31 text message from her mother “but only after direct” questioning, according to the filings.

As part of an investigation of Rita Zajko’s phone, court documents stated, authorities in Pennsylvania found a text sent from her to Michelle Zajko about a savings bond “for which it is believed the daughter was the intended recipient of.” The text message was not answered, the fillings added.

During the Jan. 5 questioning in Vermont, Zajko also “confirmed,” the court documents stated, that she owned a firearm and allowed one of the troopers to handle it — a “Smith and Wesson” branded “M&P” model that fires 9mm ammunition.

Sales records revealed that Michelle Zajko purchased a Smith & Wesson model M&P handgun from Green Mountain Sporting Goods on Feb. 3, 2022, according to the filings. Purchase records showed she also bought 9mm ammunition “of the same manufacturer and type as that of the spent casings that were recovered adjacent” to her parents’ deceased bodies at their home in Pennsylvania, the filings stated. 

Ballistic analysis revealed that the model of gun Zajko possessed “was capable of producing the striations present on the bullet recovered from one of the victims,” according to the court documents.

Authorities who went back to the Coventry property on Jan. 12, 2023, after obtaining a search warrant seized three 9 mm cartridges but did not report finding the firearm.

That same day, according to reporting from the California news organization Open Vallejo, Pennsylvania troopers went to a hotel near the Philadelphia airport in search of the gun.

Police detained Zajko at the hotel and subsequently found Daniel Blank and Jack “Ziz” LaSota hiding in the bathroom of another room at the same hotel, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

LaSota, 34, the namesake of the Zizian group, had previously faked their own death only to be encountered by California authorities at the scene of an earlier attack on the Vallejo landlord in November 2022, according to Open Vallejo’s reporting. 

In Pennsylvania, LaSota was charged with disorderly conduct and obstruction but later posted bail and failed to show up for subsequent court hearings, Open Vallejo reported.

It wasn’t clear whether authorities found the gun they were seeking in the hotel that day, but the Chronicle reported that the whereabouts of Zajko, LaSota and Blank are not currently known. 

According to probate court records in Pennsylvania, Zajko was listed as the sole beneficiary of her parents’ estates. 

The last person who reported seeing her, according to those records, which were signed on Feb. 6, 2023, was a funeral director who spotted her on a Ring camera at the facility around 9 p.m on Jan. 12, 2022, the day of her parents’ funeral.  

Coventry connections

According to Coventry town records obtained by VTDigger, Zajko and another individual named Alice Monday filed proof of residency forms at the Webster Road home in early 2021. 

Monday is an individual mentioned by name several times on a blog attributed to “Ziz.” In one post, dated November 2019, “Ziz” wrote that Monday was a friend and “sort of a mentor to me.”

Both Monday and Zajko had registered to vote in Coventry the previous October, and both remain registered in the town. Zajko voted at the address in 2020, according to Deb Tanguay, the Coventry town clerk. (Tanguay said she had no record of a Daniel Blank living at that address.) 

The Coventry property was purchased by a trust in 2021 and then sold again in July 2023, according to property records and Nicholas Maclure, a co-owner and broker of the real estate firm Century 21 Farm & Forest, which handled both transactions. According to public records, Zajko lived there as a tenant while the building was owned by the trust.

In an interview, Maclure said that he was “under the impression that (Zajko) had been gone for quite some time” at the time of the 2023 sale.

“When we sold that house, it was completely vacant,” Maclure said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Court records show police searched Coventry property as part of probe in Pennsylvania double-homicide.

Updated at 6:20 p.m.

COVENTRY — Days after she took the helm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Kristi Noem paid a surprise visit to northern Vermont on Thursday. 

The unannounced trip came 10 days after a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed in a shootout during a traffic stop on Interstate 91 in Coventry. Authorities have said that those implicated in the incident have ties to people of interest in separate killings in California and Pennsylvania.

According to Dustin Degree, communications director for Gov. Phil Scott, Noem had been planning to travel to a nearby U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility in a visit tied to last week’s shooting.

“The governor’s office has been tracking the secretary’s planned visit to the border station in Derby in light of the recent tragedy, and we are thankful that she took the time to visit with law enforcement officers in our region and highlight the importance of those federal employees here in Vermont,” Degree said. 

Noem, whose department oversees the border patrol, was seen touching down at Northeast Kingdom International Airport in Coventry around 2 p.m. Thursday in a plane with U.S. Coast Guard markings. Local, state and federal officials appeared to be awaiting her arrival. She exited the plane on the airport tarmac and entered a car in a nine-vehicle motorcade. 

VTDigger later sighted Noem as she and her security detail were leaving the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Derby Line. The building straddles the U.S.-Canada border and is blocks away from a border crossing at the northern terminus of Interstate 91. 

Inside the library, Sylvie Boudreau, the president of Haskell’s board of trustees and a Canadian citizen, said that she and other library staff had had a “very cordial” conversation with Noem about operations at the library. 

As a result of the building’s peculiar positioning, Canadian patrons of the library technically walk onto American soil to use the entrance without passing through a border crossing, though they must return immediately to Canada after visiting the library. 

“She wanted to come and see it herself,” Boudreau said.

It was not clear who accompanied Noem on her visit to Vermont, though Degree said that neither the governor nor other high-ranking state officials joined her. The trip did not appear to be publicized in advance.

It came on a busy day for the new secretary, who served as governor of South Dakota until last week, when she was sworn in to her new post. Earlier Thursday, according to a post on X, Noem surveyed wreckage on the Potomac River from the fatal collision Wednesday night of a U.S. Army helicopter and a regional passenger jet, killing 67 people. 

Requests for comment to the Department of Homeland Security were not immediately returned. 

Paul Heintz contributed reporting.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem makes surprise visit to Vermont following shooting of border patrol agent.

Updated at 7:13 p.m.

BURLINGTON — A Washington state woman who federal authorities say was involved in a shootout that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent last week has been ordered held in custody while her criminal case remains pending.

Teresa Youngblut, 21, faces charges of using a deadly weapon in an assault on a federal agent, as well as a separate count of firing a gun during the assault. Prosecutors have alleged that she emerged from a vehicle during a traffic stop on Interstate 91 in the Northeast Kingdom town of Coventry and opened fire, leading to the death of Agent David C. Maland and a passenger in Youngblut’s car, Felix Bauckholt.

The probe into the Vermont shooting has revealed alleged connections to other violent acts across the U.S., including homicide cases in Pennsylvania and California.

The Vermont case has also prompted law enforcement officials to issue alerts in recent days to police across the state to use caution if they come into contact with a person who has been described by authorities as having links to both the Vermont and Pennsylvania homicide investigations.

The FBI has been leading the investigation into the fatal shooting of the border patrol agent in Vermont. In a statement late Thursday afternoon, the federal law enforcement agency addressed Youngblut’s reported “associations” — also raised in open court and in court filings — with other people suspected of violent actions in the two other states. 

The FBI said in the statement that it had been “coordinating information sharing on any case related details” with other law enforcement agencies.

The sprawling web of investigations, as detailed so far by law enforcement and media reports, has left many questions unanswered about the connections between the cases and the various alleged players.

They appear, however, to be linked through a mysterious and allegedly violent group of young, highly educated people in the Bay Area who are experts in computer science, math and artificial intelligence and focused on human consciousness.  

Thursday’s court hearing

Youngblut, who was shot and injured in the Jan. 20 incident, appeared Thursday in federal court in Burlington wearing red prison clothing and a surgical mask covering her face. Her right arm was in a sling. 

She did not speak during the brief hearing and appeared to be looking down throughout the proceeding. Her parents, Eric and Carla Youngblut, sat in the courtroom in the gallery behind her. 

Youngblut made her first court appearance in the case Monday, and Thursday’s hearing was set to consider the prosecution’s request that she remain in custody while the case proceeds. Steven Barth, a federal public defender, had said at Monday’s hearing that he was contesting that request. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Lasher, the prosecutor, did not present any witnesses Thursday to make his case as to why Youngblut should remain in custody. Instead, he largely relied on arguments he made in court documents filed Monday ahead of Youngblut’s initial court appearance. 

Lasher told Magistrate Judge Kevin Doyle that Youngblut posed both a risk of flight and a danger to the community if released. The prosecutor said Youngblut had “possessed, drew and discharged a firearm” during the traffic stop. 

Barth, representing Youngblut, also did not present any witnesses during Thursday’s hearing, nor did he make his own case for his client’s release. 

“The defense is not offering argument,” Barth told the judge.

Instead, Barth said, he was holding the prosecution to its burden of proving to the judge that Youngblut should be detained.

After hearing from both attorneys, Doyle agreed to the prosecution’s request, ordering Youngblut detained. The evidence against Youngblut related to the charges against her, the judge said, appeared “to be strong.”  

Doyle said Youngblut had refused to meet with federal pretrial services personnel and, as a result, he had no information on her background, including any employment history or access to financial resources.

Doyle set the next hearing in the case for Feb. 7.

Barth declined comment following the proceeding, as did Youngblut’s parents. 

Youngblut has not been charged with firing the shot that killed Maland, 44, who served in the U.S. Air Force before joining the Border Patrol. Bauckholt, a German national and passenger in the 2015 Toyota Prius that Youngblut had been driving, had also exited the vehicle and drawn a firearm but didn’t fire any shots before being shot and killed, according to charging documents.

Youngblut and Bauckholt had been under surveillance by law enforcement for about a week prior to the shooting, a court filing stated, with reports of the two seen around the Northeast Kingdom dressed in black tactical gear, including while in downtown Newport.

Tactical gear, including a ballistic helmet and night-vision goggles, was seized from the Prius after the shooting. Cellphones wrapped in aluminum foil were also recovered from the scene, court records stated.

No new details into the ongoing probe by federal authorities were revealed during Thursday’s hearing. 

A multi-state investigation

Lasher, the prosecutor, told the judge that Youngblut fired a gun, without warning, at border patrol agents out of the driver’s side of the vehicle during the traffic stop. 

He also said Youngblut had “association” with others linked to violent acts that raised concern. Among those associations, he said, was to a person recently charged in a homicide case in California. 

Lasher did not identify that person, though the nonprofit California news organization Open Vallejo reported Monday that Youngblut had applied for a license in November 2024 to marry Maximilian Snyder. Snyder, 22, was arrested and charged last week in the stabbing death of a Vallejo landlord, Curtis Lind. He appeared in a California court for the first time Tuesday. 

Lind, according to Open Vallejo, had been set to testify in April in a criminal case against tenants stemming from a 2022 attack that left Lind blind in one eye and an alleged assailant dead.

The prosecutor, in reiterating arguments made in his court filing earlier this week, also told the judge during Thursday’s hearing that Youngblut, who has a Washington state driver’s license and has traveled internationally at least three times in recent years, lacked ties to Vermont. 

Lasher did state in his court filing that the firearms possessed by Youngblut and Bauckholt at the time of the shooting had been purchased by a person “purporting to be a resident of Orleans, Vermont.”

Also, according to the filing, the person who bought those firearms was a “person of interest” in a double-homicide investigation in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

In a press release issued Wednesday, Pennsylvania State Police said the firearm “used in the killing” of the border patrol agent in Vermont had been purchased by a “person of interest” in the December 2022 killing of a couple, 72-year-old Richard Zajko and 69-year-old Rita Zajko, who were found dead inside their home in Delaware County.

VTDigger reported earlier this week that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had issued an alert to federally licensed firearms dealers asking for their help in “identifying any firearms purchases made by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, a person of interest in the shooting of a Customs and Border Protection Officer on Jan. 20, 2025.”

A person by that name appeared linked to the couple killed in Pennsylvania, according to public records and legal notices. 

Two alerts went out last week, on Jan. 23 and Jan. 24, to police in Vermont “for officer safety awareness” about a Michelle Zajko, who the alerts described as “not wanted at this time.” A law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, shared the wording of the alerts with VTDigger.

“Subject could be armed,” one of the alerts read. “Associates are known to commit violent acts, including against law enforcement.” 

That alert also stated that Zajko had “known associates” in California, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Washington, Idaho, Massachusetts and Florida.

Any law enforcement who comes into contact with Zajko was advised in the alerts to use “extreme caution when dealing with her and/or anybody else with her.” 

The Times Union reported Thursday that a multi-state police bulletin issued last week indicated that a Michelle Zajko was a “person of interest in a double homicide that occurred in Pennsylvania in 2023.” The Albany newspaper said she “may be driving a green 2013 Subaru Outback with an expired Vermont registration.”

During Thursday’s hearing in Youngblut’s case, the judge addressed her alleged “association” to others connected to violent acts.

“I’m not going to rely explicitly on that information at this point in time,” Doyle said. 

Youngblut faces a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, if convicted.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Judge orders woman facing charges related to fatal border patrol shooting held in custody as investigation sprawls.

A day after last week’s fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in northern Vermont, federal authorities issued an alert to firearms dealers seeking information about gun purchases from a person they described as a “person of interest” in the agent’s death. 

The alert, obtained by VTDigger, identified that person of interest as Michelle Jacqueline Zajko.

Zajko has not previously been publicly identified by federal authorities as potentially connected to the fatal shooting of border patrol agent David C. Maland on Interstate 91 in Coventry on the afternoon of Jan. 20.

A day after the shooting, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sent an alert to federally licensed firearms dealers reading, “ATF is asking for your assistance in identifying any firearms purchases made by Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, a person of interest in the shooting of a Customs and Border Protection Officer on Jan. 20, 2025.”

The alert asked firearms dealers to check their records and contact ATF if they had “any information about transfers or attempted transfers” of firearms to Michelle Jacqueline Zajko.

ATF officials in Vermont did not return phone messages seeking comment Tuesday.

The federal alert further complicates an already tangled case, one in which authorities and media reports have drawn links between several acts of violence in multiple states.

Ties to the Northeast Kingdom

Teresa Youngblut, 21, of Washington state, who federal authorities said was driving the 2015 Toyota Prius pulled over by border patrol on Interstate 91 in Coventry on Jan. 20, faces federal weapons charges for allegedly opening fire on Maland during the traffic stop. 

Felix Bauckholt, a German national who was a passenger in the Prius, also allegedly drew a weapon during the traffic stop, according to federal authorities, but he was fatally shot before he could fire his weapon. 

Youngblut has not been directly charged with killing Maland.

Youngblut and Bauckholt had been under surveillance by federal authorities for about a week prior to the shooting, according to court documents in Youngblut’s case. The pair had been spotted in northern Vermont wearing tactical gear, including while walking in downtown Newport, the filings stated. 

Youngblut, who was also shot and wounded in the shootout, is set to appear Thursday in federal court in Burlington for a detention hearing to determine whether she will remain in custody while the case against her remains pending. She first appeared in court on Monday. 

The ATF’s alert now identifies a new alleged associate of the pair: Michelle Zajko, a name that is also listed on public records as the owner of a small plot of land in the Northeast Kingdom town of Derby, which is adjacent to Coventry. 

According to Derby town records, a Michelle Zajko bought a half-acre piece of property on Bates Hill Road in Derby in 2021 for $10,000. The land is undeveloped, according to town records. Zajko owes $974 in delinquent property taxes on that land, according to Derby tax records from tax years 2022 through 2024. 

Voter rolls from last fall in the town of Coventry also list a Michelle Zajko at a separate address. Coventry town officials could not be reached by phone Tuesday.

Zajko could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.

Violence in multiple states

In a court document filed ahead of Youngblut’s Monday hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Lasher wrote that the person who purchased the firearms possessed by Youngblut and Bauckholt at the time of Maland’s shooting was also a “person of interest” in a double-homicide investigation in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

Lasher’s filing does not name that person, nor does it identify the victims of that homicide or when it took place. 

In January 2023, however, a couple, 72-year-old Richard Zajko and 69-year-old Rita Zajko, were found dead inside their Chester Heights home. Their deaths were ruled homicides, CBS News reported at the time. Chester Heights is a community in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. 

According to a public records database, a Michelle Zajko was registered to vote in 2016 at 18 Highland Drive in Media, Pennsylvania. That appears to be the address of the home where Richard and Rita Zajko were found dead, according to local news reports. 

Derby property records list a Pennsylvania phone number for Michelle Zajko. 

Legal notices published in Pennsylvania indicate that a Michelle Zajko is associated with the estates of Richard and Rita Zajko. 

Lasher’s court filing also states that both Youngblut and the gun purchaser “are acquainted with and have been in frequent contact with an individual who was detained by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania during that homicide investigation; that individual is also a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.”

The court records did not identify that person either. 

According to the nonprofit California news organization Open Vallejo, Youngblut had applied for a marriage license in Washington state in November 2024 to wed a 22-year-old named Maximilian Snyder. Snyder was arrested last week in connection with the Jan. 17 stabbing death of Curtis Lind, a Vallejo landlord.

Open Vallejo reported that Lind had been blinded in one eye during an altercation with tenants in 2022. A search of the property at the time found used surgical equipment and expensive electronics in box trucks in which they lived, according to the news outlet. Those trucks were registered in Vermont. 

Lind was set to testify against the tenants in a criminal trial in April, Open Vallejo reported. 

North Carolina to Vermont

In Monday’s court filing, Lasher wrote that the serial number of the firearms possessed by Youngblut and Bauckholt at the time of the border patrol officer’s fatal shooting showed that both firearms had been purchased by a person “purporting to be a resident of Orleans, Vermont.” 

The property records portal for the town of Derby lists an Orleans address for Zajko. That address appears to be identical to the one listed in Coventry voter rolls. 

The guns, the prosecutor wrote, had been purchased from a federally licensed firearms dealer in Mount Tabor in February 2024.

Carey Halkiotis of Safari Supply, a firearms dealer in Mount Tabor, said Tuesday that he had been asked by authorities not to talk about the matter when asked if his shop sold the firearms allegedly possessed by Youngblut and Bauckholt on the day of Maland’s shooting. 

Two other federally licensed firearms dealers in the small Rutland County town said that they did not sell the firearms.

Some new details also emerged Tuesday about Bauckholt, who court filings showed owned the Toyota Prius that was involved in the traffic stop in Vermont. 

According to court filings, Bauckholt had registered the vehicle in North Carolina. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Bauckholt and Youngblut had been renting units in separate duplexes in the same area of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Box trucks were parked outside both units, according to the Associated Press, “and Bauckholt was running an electrical cord to one of them.”

The owner of the duplexes, who was not named in the article, said that another man appeared to be living with Bauckholt in his unit, according to the Associated Press.

“They were always wearing black and in the back of my mind, this entire time, I’m just thinking, ‘What is going on with these people?’” he told the Associated Press.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Federal officials link 3rd ‘person of interest’ to Vermont border patrol agent’s shooting.

Updated at 5:28 p.m.

Federal prosecutors have filed two criminal charges against a 21-year-old Washington state woman in connection with the investigation into Monday’s fatal shooting of a border patrol agent during a traffic stop in Coventry.

Court paperwork unsealed Friday morning in support of the charges against Teresa Youngblut also provides new details into the circumstances surrounding the traffic stop and shooting that killed 44-year-old David C. Maland, the border patrol agent. The filing was first reported by WCAX.

According to the criminal complaint, Youngblut faces two federal charges:

• Intentionally using a deadly weapon, a firearm, while forcibly assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating, or interfering with Border Patrol Agents while they engaged in or on account of the performance of their official duties;
• Discharging a firearm during and in relation to the assault with a deadly weapon.

Youngblut, who was also shot and wounded in the incident, has not been directly charged in the fatal shooting of Maland. She is set to appear Monday in federal court in Burlington. 

She has been at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where she was taken for treatment for her injuries following the incident, according to the new court filings.

Youngblut, who the charging documents stated had a Washington state driver’s license, was driving a 2015 Toyota Prius Monday afternoon when it was stopped by federal authorities on Interstate 91 in Coventry. A passenger, identified in the court filings as Felix Bauckholt, was also shot and killed in the incident.

The passenger had previously been identified by federal authorities only as a German national who had been in the United States on a current visa, although Friday’s court filing said a database showed the visa “appeared” to have expired when the traffic stop occurred. There was no explanation for the conflicting information.

The charging documents in Youngblut’s case provided no specific information about why she and Bauckholt were in northern Vermont. 

Among the items seized from the Prius following the shootout were tactical gear, including a ballistic vest, night-vision goggles, a tactical belt with holster, 48 rounds of .380-caliber jacketed hollow-point ammunition, shooting range targets and two hand-held two-way radios, the court records stated.

Also, according to the filings, authorities seized from the vehicle about a dozen electronic devices; identification documents; utility, lease and travel information pertaining to several states; and an “apparent journal.” The court documents do not detail the contents or subjects of that journal.

Youngblut and Bauckholt, according to the newly filed court documents, had been on the radar of federal law enforcement in the Northeast Kingdom for about a week prior to the traffic stop and shooting.

An employee of a hotel in Lyndonville had contacted law enforcement after a man and woman checked into the hotel around January 14, court filings stated.

The hotel employee reported being concerned about the pair, “including that they appeared to be dressed in all-black tactical style clothing with protective equipment,” with Youngblut carrying an “apparent firearm” in an “exposed-carry holster,” according to the charging documents.

Investigators with Vermont State Police and the federal Homeland Security Investigations tried to initiate a “consensual conversation” with Bauckholt and Youngblut, “but they declined to have an extended conversation,” the court documents stated. 

The pair, the filing stated, claimed they were in the area looking to buy property. Following the contact with law enforcement, the pair checked out of the Lyndonville hotel on the afternoon of Jan. 14, court documents stated. 

On Sunday, Jan. 19, a day before the traffic stop, the two were spotted walking in downtown Newport “in similar tactical dress,” the filing said.

On Monday, at about 3 p.m., a border patrol agent pulled over the blue Toyota Prius that Youngblut and Bauckholt were in on Interstate 91 to “conduct an immigration inspection,” court documents stated. 

Bauckholt, according to the court filing, “appeared to have an expired visa in a Department of Homeland Security database.” 

“Multiple uniformed Border Patrol Agents were present at the stop in three USBP vehicles with emergency lights illuminated,” the court document stated. 

Between 3 and 3:15 p.m., the filing stated, agents reported gunshots at the scene. Border patrol agents involved in the incident later reported that Bauckholt and Youngblut had firearms and that Youngblut “drew and fired” a handgun toward at least one border patrol agent “without warning when outside the driver’s side” of the vehicle, according to the filing.

“(Bauckholt) then attempted to draw a firearm,” the filing stated. At least one border patrol agent then fired at Youngblut and Bauckholt with his service revolver, the filing stated, not naming the agent. 

A bomb squad with robotic equipment was called to the scene of the traffic stop after the shooting.

Outside the driver’s side of the Prius, authorities found Youngblut’s Washington state driver’s license, the court documents stated. In addition, authorities seized two packets of suspected cell phones wrapped in what appeared to be aluminum foil behind a border patrol vehicle, the filing stated.

“When inspecting the Prius using the robotic equipment, the Bomb Squad observed several additional electronic devices in the Prius, to include an Apple iPhone, at least two additional cell phones, and multiple laptop computers,” according to the court records.

Hours before the traffic stop Monday, the documents stated, authorities saw Bauckholt enter a Walmart in Newport at approximately 1 p.m. and come out with what appeared to be two packages of aluminum foil. 

In the parking lot, Youngblut remained in the Prius in the driver’s seat and when Bauckholt returned to the vehicle he was seen removing sheets of foil and “wrapping unidentified objects” while seated in the car, the court records stated.

If convicted of the two charges filed in the case, Youngblut faces a maximum prison sentence of life and a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years.

Correction: Due to incorrect information included in court papers, an earlier version of this story included a misspelling of Bauckholt’s name, though the story noted inconsistencies in the spelling.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Federal prosecutors file charges in probe of fatal shooting of border patrol agent in Vermont.

Updated at 7:12 p.m.

Federal and state officials on Tuesday identified the U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot Monday afternoon in Vermont as David C. Maland. The FBI, meanwhile, shared new information about the circumstances of his death and the background of another person who died in the incident.

In a statement issued Tuesday afternoon, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the border patrol, said that Maland had “passed away in the line of duty” the day before and had “succumbed to injuries caused by gunfire following a traffic stop” in the Northeast Kingdom town of Coventry. 

In a separate press release Tuesday evening, the FBI said the incident began during a traffic stop on the southbound side of Interstate 91 on Monday at around 3:15 p.m. During the stop, the FBI said, “an exchange of gunfire occurred, and Agent Maland was struck.” 

One “subject” was killed, the FBI said, and a second was injured. The latter was being treated at a hospital in the area, the federal agency said. 

The FBI said it would not immediately identify either of the subjects but added that the Department of Homeland Security had “confirmed the deceased subject is a German national in the U.S. on a current Visa.”

Maland, who was a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, later died from his injuries, according to the FBI. 

Public records identify a David C. Maland, 44, of Newport, who previously lived in Texas near the Mexican border. Newport is mere miles from multiple Customs and Border Protection facilities, as well as from the scene of the incident in Coventry and the Canadian border itself. 

Customs and Border Protection had previously said that the fallen officer had been assigned to the Swanton Sector of the border, which extends from New York through Vermont and New Hampshire. 

Earlier Tuesday, two state officials expressed their condolences in remarks at the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier.

Speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday morning, Sen. Russ Ingalls, R-Essex, addressed Maland’s death following a moment of silence.

“I just want to put a name to the face of the officer that was killed yesterday,” Ingalls said. “His name is David Maland, and I thank you very much for the moment of silence.” 

At a press conference later Tuesday in his ceremonial Statehouse office, Gov. Phil Scott extended his “heartfelt condolences to Agent Maland’s family, friends, and colleagues.”

In an interview with VTDigger, Ingalls again expressed his condolences and noted the impact that Maland’s death had on community members.

“We have a very personal connection in the (Northeast) Kingdom with law enforcement,” he said. “We honor them, we believe in what they’re doing, and I’m sorry I never got a chance to meet this young man.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Officials identify US Border Patrol agent killed Monday in Coventry, disclose more details of shooting.

Updated at 10:17 p.m.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent was fatally shot and another person was killed Monday afternoon in the Northeast Kingdom town of Coventry, according to the FBI. A third person was injured and in custody, the federal agency said. 

The incident took place on Interstate 91 around 3:15 p.m., according to Vermont State Police, at a location roughly 10 miles south of the Canadian border.

The agent, who was “killed in the line of duty,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, had been assigned to the Swanton Sector of the Canadian border, which stretches from upstate New York through Vermont and New Hampshire. 

“Every single day, our Border Patrol agents put themselves in harm’s way so that Americans and our homeland are safe and secure,” Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Benjamine Huffman said in a written statement on the incident late Monday. “My prayers and deepest condolences are with our Department, the Agent’s family, loved ones, and colleagues.”

Federal and state agencies shared little information on the incident late Monday. They did not identify the slain agent, nor the others involved.

According to the FBI, there was no continuing threat to the public. 

In a statement issued just after 8:30 p.m., the FBI said it was “investigating an alleged assault on a federal officer” in connection with the shooting. “One U.S. Border Patrol Agent was killed, along with one subject. Another subject was injured and in custody,” the federal agency said.

The FBI said it was working with U.S. Border Patrol and Vermont State Police to collect evidence at the scene — and that Interstate 91 would remain closed in the area “due to investigative activity.” The highway had been closed in both directions between Exit 27 in Newport and Exit 26 in Orleans earlier Monday, but northbound traffic resumed around 5 p.m., according to Vermont State Police. 

At around 5:45 p.m., more than a dozen police cars with flashing lights could be seen pulled over at a southbound rest area in the Coventry area. North of that location, the southbound onramp at Exit 27 was blocked off by police cars. 

The incident came during a time of heightened tension along the northern border. Prior to his second inauguration Monday, President Donald Trump had raised concerns about the flow of migrants and drugs from Canada into the U.S., prompting the Canadian and Quebec governments to devote more law enforcement resources to the border. 

In his inaugural address, Trump previewed plans to beef up border security and crack down on cross-border crime. “We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders, or more importantly, its own people,” Trump said. 

The National Border Patrol Council, a union that represents Border Patrol agents, wrote Monday on X, “Our hearts go out to the family, friends, and coworkers of our fallen brother in green in Vermont.”

Members of Vermont’s congressional delegation — Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt. — expressed their condolences in a joint statement Monday night, thanking first-responders and saying they would continue to monitor the situation.

“Border Patrol agents do important work protecting our borders. They deserve our full support in terms of staffing, pay and working conditions,” the delegation wrote. “We look forward to working with the agency to make sure that they have all the resources they need to do the enormously important work that is their responsibility. Together, we must do everything possible to prevent future tragedies like what happened today.”

Kristen Fountain and Paul Heintz contributed reporting.

Read the story on VTDigger here: 2 dead, including US Border Patrol agent, following shooting in northern Vermont.

This story, by Bryan Marovich, was first published by the Newport Dispatch on Jan. 10, 2024.

NEWPORT — Newport Mayor Linda Joy Sullivan says she will not seek reelection in March, concluding a term focused on reforming city governance and fiscal management.

The former state representative and candidate for state auditor won a special election in August 2023 to complete the term of Beth Barnes, who stepped down as mayor that May. 

“I had no political ambition when I stepped up to fill the vacancy left by Mayor Barnes,” Sullivan said. “I have approached the duties of the office as a ‘lunch box Mayor’ of sorts, by just rolling up my sleeves and working to fix things.”

In 2024, Sullivan led efforts to realign city operations with Newport’s charter requirements, addressing what she described as previous deviations from the “strong mayor/council” model approved by voters. The reforms, she has said, restored greater oversight responsibilities to elected officials rather than the city manager.

The administration also sought to reform financial practices, ending the use of special purpose funds and grant monies to cover shortfalls in other accounts. While this created some immediate challenges, particularly in water and sewer funding, Sullivan said it improved fiscal responsibility.

Sullivan sought to enhance public accessibility through regular office hours at City Hall, weekly updates for Newport Dispatch and regular appearances on NEK-TV, including a series highlighting East Main Street businesses. She worked closely with Newport Downtown Development on initiatives aimed at economic growth.

“I encourage those of our younger families and workers who feel the desire and ability to contribute to the well-being of our ‘City by the Lake’ to consider running for a position on the Council or even for Mayor,” Sullivan said. “We’ll all benefit from the added vision and contributions new leaders offer.”

Sullivan plans to continue serving on several state commissions, including a recent appointment by Gov. Phil Scott to Vermont’s Workforce Development Task Force. She also serves on the state’s Housing Commission, Women’s Commission and Aviation Advisory Council.

“As for next year, I’ll personally be working on some really important initiatives that will have impact beyond the NEK,” Sullivan said, emphasizing her ongoing commitment to state-level service.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Newport mayor Linda Joy Sullivan says she won’t seek reelection.

An affordable housing developer in the Northeast Kingdom has begun work to construct 40 units of rental housing in Newport.

On Monday, RuralEdge started hazardous materials abatement work on Newport Crossing, a $21.8 million housing development that aims to offer affordable and mixed-income rental units to ease the ongoing housing crisis, according to Patrick Shattuck, the organization’s executive director. 

“This will be a significant boost to meeting the need for net new units in Orleans County,” he said in an interview Wednesday.

RuralEdge recently acquired the long vacant Sacred Heart High School and Convent site in Newport City and two other properties on Rt. 105 in Newport Center.

Newport Crossing will include 26 affordable rental units at the convent site and 14 more in two new buildings in Newport Center, Shattuck said.

In a second phase of development expected to start in six months, RuralEdge plans to convert the former Catholic high school into 24 affordable condominium units called The Lofts at Sacred Heart. That’s separate from the Newport Crossing legal entity but a part of the redevelopment of the Sacred Heart site, Shattuck said. Further development could also take place on the remaining 8 acres there.

In the works for more than two years, Newport Crossing has been a “major priority” for Newport, said Rick Ufford-Chase, executive director of Newport Downtown Development, a local nonprofit that works to revitalize the city’s downtown.

“Most of the people I speak with clearly understand that housing is a major priority for Newport right now. So the fact that RuralEdge is about to build out at least 50 units of housing up on that hill, that is so close to our downtown area, is just a huge boon to the community,” he said.

The development is one the largest projects the organization has undertaken. It will involve demolishing two buildings in Newport Center and replacing them with new ones to match the village’s historic streetscape and provide some community space, according to a RuralEdge press release. The entire project will require significant environmental remediation work.

“It is promising to see a property that was not marketable and that was vacant for years being turned into what is now designed to be multi-family housing,” said Newport Mayor Linda Joy Sullivan in an email. “Any opportunity to mitigate (the) housing shortage in a positive way is a path forward.”

A draft update to Newport City’s master plan noted that, as elsewhere in the state, “demand for housing is exceeding the supply, home costs are rising, and in many instances, there is a mismatch between the types of housing that is available and what is needed.”

From reusing blighted buildings and cleaning up contaminated sites to adding new rental and ownership units, the project responds to the diverse needs of smaller communities, according to Shattuck. “And one way to achieve efficiencies of scale was to combine those two,” he said. “At the same time, it didn’t make sense to do all rental housing units in the former convent and the former school in Newport City. We wanted to create a new diverse, economically diverse neighborhood that had both home ownership and rental opportunities.”

Several parties have invested in or collaborated to help create Newport Crossing, including the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board, Vermont Community Development Program and the Vermont State Treasurer’s Office. 

“Investing in new housing will help lower costs, address workforce shortages, and strengthen Vermont’s economy,” said State Treasurer Mike Pieciak in the release. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Developer breaks ground on long-awaited affordable housing project in Newport .

Nearly four years ago, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials outlined a proposal for a line of surveillance towers along the Canadian border in Vermont and New York. Since then, VTDigger has found, the agency has been quietly making good on its plans.

The federal government has built surveillance towers in recent years on at least three of the sites it identified to state and local officials, and to the public, in 2021, including one in Derby, Vermont, and two in the lakeside New York community of Champlain. 

There is almost certainly more border surveillance infrastructure in the region. Agency records describe at least five existing U.S. Customs and Border Protection towers in the federal immigration enforcement jurisdiction covering Vermont and parts of New York. That jurisdiction is called the Swanton Sector, based in the northern Vermont town of the same name.

The agency said in 2022 that it was considering building five additional towers in the Swanton Sector in the future, according to records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy and free speech advocacy organization.

Overall, the feds plan to install more than 1,000 new towers across the country’s northern and southern borders by 2034, The Intercept reported earlier this year. The plans come as national leaders on both sides of the political aisle, including president-elect Donald Trump, have pitched tough border enforcement policies in recent years.   

In 2021 Swanton Sector plans, officials said the towers would allow them to patrol more of their jurisdiction, which spans about 300 miles and also includes the New Hampshire-Canada border, without employing additional personnel or vehicles.

“The increasing frequency and nature of illegal cross-border activities, as well as the geographic area over which these activities occur, create a need for a technology-based surveillance capability that can effectively collect, process, and distribute information,” federal officials stated in the “purpose and need” section of the 2021 documents.

But the plans drew pointed criticism from some of the state’s top leaders, including all three members of its congressional delegation at the time, largely over concerns that the government had not properly taken into account nearby homeowners’ privacy.

TJ Donovan, the state’s attorney general at the time, blasted the proposal in comments saying that the government had failed to justify a need for the new infrastructure.

Despite that outcry, there’s been scant, if any, public accounting since then of whether any of the towers were built. VTDigger used a combination of on-the-ground reporting, satellite imagery and public records — as well as interviews with local residents, town officials and experts on border surveillance technology — to verify the presence of three.

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not provide answers to questions VTDigger sent for this story about the current status of the tower plans.

VTDigger also sent similar questions to the offices of Vermont’s three current members of Congress, two of whom — U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt. — raised concerns about the plans several years ago. 

Sanders’ office did not provide answers ahead of publication, while spokespeople for Welch and the office of U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., sent brief statements saying they did not have updated information about the construction of surveillance towers. 

Aaron White, a spokesperson for Welch, added that the senator “encourages CBP to consult regularly with the neighboring communities.” Sophie Pollock, a Balint spokesperson, said her boss was “keeping an eye” on the use of the technology in the region. 

A local surveillance network

All three of the towers VTDigger verified consist of a single, tall pole and a triangular platform at the top containing what appear to be arrays of cameras and antennas. They’re all within a half-mile of Canada and sit close to border crossing stations.

The Derby tower is visible to the east after exiting Interstate 91 northbound before the crossing into Canada. It’s at the top of a field owned by Phil Letourneau, a retired farmer who’s lived in the same house across the street since he was in elementary school.

The two other towers VTDigger identified are located across Lake Champlain in the town of Champlain, New York, which borders both Vermont and Canada. The town includes the village of Rouses Point, which is connected to Alburgh by a bridge.

One of the New York towers is located in a field near a duty-free store just south of the port of entry on Interstate 87. It’s about a half-mile from several homes to the east. 

The other tower is located about 1.5 miles to the west at the end of Glass Road, a quiet, residential street that dead-ends at the border and has about 10 small homes.

The government’s 2021 proposal included eight potential locations for “new tower construction,” including the three VTDigger viewed while reporting this story, as well as sites in the Vermont communities of North Troy, Richford, Franklin and Highgate. VTDigger did not find towers at the other proposed locations. 

On a recent snowy morning in Derby, Letourneau accompanied a reporter up to the hill near his home, pointing out along the way a large “Trump 2024” flag he had strung up nearby. Along the road at the foot of the hill, he has a large white and red sign telling state and federal law enforcement to “beware” and stay off of his land. 

But he does allow the government to lease a slice of that land to operate a surveillance tower, a deal Letourneau said he signed off on because he thinks the tower is an important tool for local U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. He said he’s heard for years about those same agents arresting people who attempt to enter the U.S. on the road that runs along the hill and, at points, parallels the Canadian border.

Letourneau declined to say how much the government pays him for its lease. The tower has two cameras, according to Letourneau, one of which typically points west toward the crossing while the other points east toward his farm and several houses nearby.

“We need something they can work with to catch those aliens,” he said, referring to people who cross the border without authorization. “They’re coming right and left.”

Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that migrant apprehensions in the Swanton Sector have increased dramatically in recent years. In the 2022 federal fiscal year, which ran from October 2021 to September 2022, U.S. Border Patrol agents made about 1,050 apprehensions — but that figure jumped to nearly 19,500 in the 2024 fiscal year, which started in October 2023 and ended in September 2024.

(U.S. Border Patrol is the law enforcement arm of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, responsible for policing segments of the border between official ports of entry.)

Swanton Sector agents have made more apprehensions than agents on any other part of the northern border in recent years, the data shows. U.S. Border Patrol told VTDigger in August that this prompted it to reassign more agents to Vermont, New York and New Hampshire from other border patrol jurisdictions, including those in the southwest.

Local immigrant communities have noticed an increased presence of immigration enforcement personnel in northern Vermont this year, VTDigger also reported — a buildup that came as federal officials placed new limits on people seeking asylum protections, too. 

To be sure, the number of apprehensions on the northern border is far lower than on the southern border. In the 2024 fiscal year, U.S. Border Patrol made about 25,000 total apprehensions in the north, versus about 1.5 million apprehensions in the south.

There is also a far larger network of surveillance technology, including camera towers, along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital privacy nonprofit. 

Maass and other researchers have spent more than a year mapping the locations of hundreds of surveillance towers, facial recognition cameras and other pieces of technology on the southern border, some of which have the ability to operate autonomously.

The towers on the southern border usually include cameras that capture visible and infrared light, according to Maass, as well as a laser illuminator and a spotlight.

The government’s 2021 plans state that the towers in Vermont and New York would include “a suite of sensors and/or communications equipment” that would provide “surveillance, detection, and interdiction,” though the plans do not include specifics on the type of equipment they would use. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that cameras likely similar to those in use in the Swanton Sector can detect movement up to 7.5 miles away, though Maass’ research has noted that range can actually vary.

Letourneau said he’s been told that the cameras on his land can see for seven miles in each direction, both during the day and at night.

Brian Smith, who is Derby’s representative in the Vermont House, joined then-U.S. Rep. Welch and other state and local officials in 2021 to voice concerns with the tower proposals. Smith said he still worries about the government’s ability to surveil the area around Letourneau’s farm. But he also thinks most residents have gotten used to the tower’s presence.

“I think most people in town, if you asked them about the border patrol tower in Derby, they’d know what you were talking about,” Smith said. “I guess it’s just part of life here now.”

‘Increased harm’

Vermont leaders are not the only ones who have questioned the impacts of border surveillance towers in recent years. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for one, has pointed to a 2020 RAND Corp. study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that found “strong” evidence certain surveillance towers were not leading to more border apprehensions, in addition to “weak” evidence that other towers were having any effect on apprehensions at all.

Meanwhile, NBC News reported last month that nearly a third of all surveillance towers used by U.S. Border Patrol agents on the southern border were broken, with a source within the agency blaming outdated tower equipment and deferred maintenance.

“It just seems like a system that is doomed for failure,” Maass said in an interview.

Other research from the University of Arizona has found that even as the agency says the towers help keep its own personnel safe, the technology could be exacerbating the risks migrants face while attempting to cross the border without authorization.

Geoff Boyce — who works with the university’s Binational Migration Institute and is also an assistant professor in the School of Geography at University College Dublin — co-authored a 2019 study that found “a significant correlation” between surveillance tower locations in the southern Arizona desert and where people died attempting to cross the U.S-Mexico border there. The authors argue that the towers’ presence encouraged migrants to take more dangerous routes.

The technology “has the outcome of maximizing the physiological difficulty imposed by the rugged desert landscape, resulting in increased harm to the lives and bodies of unauthorized border crossers,” the authors wrote in the peer-reviewed paper. 

While Boyce’s research focused on Arizona, he said in an interview that the findings could well apply to Vermont and New York, too — states with similarly remote terrain and their own extreme weather, albeit freezing cold rather than scorching heat. 

“Where you have towers going up, that is going to have the same kind of effect that we saw in Arizona — basically, putting a squeeze on the migration routes that are available to people,” he said, adding the towers are likely “pushing them — really, corralling them — into more remote areas where it's going to be easier for them to get lost, and harder to find help if they need it.”

VTDigger is looking for your help to report on immigration and border security in Vermont. Have you seen border surveillance technology in your community? What do you want to know about it? Contact reporter Shaun Robinson at srobinson@vtdigger.org, or find more ways to reach our newsroom on this page.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Eye in the sky: The feds have quietly built surveillance towers along the Canadian border in Vermont, New York.

A version of this story was first published by the Newport Dispatch on Oct. 24, 2024.

NEWPORT CENTER — When Justin LeBlanc’s sons set up game cameras on their family farm in Newport Center, they weren’t looking to document illegal border crossings. But over several nights, that’s exactly what they captured.

The first images were recorded Sunday, just hours after the trail cameras were installed near the intersection of Leadville Road and Lake Road. The following night, a second camera in the same area captured another group, including what appeared to be several men led by a man wearing a turban.

“The one in the front is their guide,” LeBlanc said. “He’s the one going back and forth with the different groups of people.”

While those individuals weren’t apprehended, U.S. Border Patrol agents later detained a separate group in LeBlanc’s driveway in a subsequent incident, LeBlanc said.

Border Patrol responded swiftly to the initial camera footage, according to LeBlanc. “They did a real good job of coming right out and looking at the location and then they had a big meeting with each other to figure out a game plan on what they were going to do to try to catch these guys,” he said.

The activity isn’t isolated. LeBlanc described how a neighbor recently witnessed five people emerge from the woods and quickly enter a waiting vehicle on nearby Leadville Road before speeding away. Reports of suspicious vehicles in the area have become commonplace, with some residents noting cars with out-of-state plates, including New York registrations, frequently appearing in connection with these incidents.

“This is an everyday thing,” LeBlanc said, expressing concern for his family’s safety on their farm, where they produce hay for horses and dairy cows, and regularly hunt and hike. “It’s definitely concerning, and we definitely have an uneasy feeling,” he said. “You can’t really let the kids go alone anymore. It just puts a spin on things that we’re not used to.”

As VTDigger reported in August, Border Patrol has reported a record number of migrants crossing the international border from Canada into the U.S. — particularly in the region known as the Swanton Sector, which includes Vermont, New Hampshire and portions of New York. 

The most recent figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the border patrol, shows that agents from the Swanton Sector apprehended 19,385 people in the year ending in September. That’s up from 6,925 in the previous year and 1,065 the year before that. (The latter figures also include those who were expelled under Title 42, a pandemic-era public health order.)

Apprehensions appear to have peaked in June, when 3,310 people were detained in the Swanton sector. The numbers have since declined to 1,575 in September, though that remains well above the 956 recorded in September 2023. 

Border Patrol increased its staffing in the area in response to the surge, Special Operations supervisor Josh Cozzens told VTDigger in August, stationing groups of 20 to 25 agents across the sector — some of whom were reassigned from the southern border. 

“Our agents are very busy,” Cozzens said at the time. “We have seen a number of apprehensions that we’ve never seen in our recorded history in this area.”

A Border Patrol spokesperson said Friday that he could not immediately comment on the incidents in Newport Center.

LeBlanc’s camera footage has circulated widely on social media, generating thousands of shares and comments from community members. 

“A lot of people were unaware that this was going on and some are still in disbelief,” LeBlanc said. “This is not a joke.”

VTDigger contributed reporting to this story.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Newport Center family’s game cameras document border security concerns.