This story by Matthew Thomas was first published in The Bridge on Sept. 9, 2025.

After past programmatic moves that it acknowledged can disrupt student learning, The New School of Montpelier is setting down solid roots on the college green in Montpelier. 

With last year’s purchase of Bishop-Hatch Hall at 41 College Street and Alumnx Hall at 45 College Street from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, The New School can create “stable places” for students, according to Elias Gardener, the school’s executive director. 

Gardener noted that The New School’s students “often are diagnosed with autism or have experienced trauma and are extremely dependent on predictable consistency.” 

The New School of Montpelier, a worker co-operative, is a Vermont Therapeutic School approved by the State Board of Education, Gardener said, with its tuition set by the Vermont Agency of Education. The school was founded in 2005 for 16 children with “complex challenges in central Vermont foster care homes,” whose educational needs the local public schools could not meet. “All of our students receive special education services identified on Individual Education Programs and placed by public schools.” 

The school has occupied the lower floors of Bishop-Hatch Hall since 2009 and Almunx Hall since 2013, Gardener said. He added that currently there are three programs running on the college green. The purchase and renovation of these buildings will allow the school to expand enrollment, which is very much needed, he added, because the school has more referrals than it can accommodate at the moment. 

“Both are historic buildings,” Gardener said, noting that Bishop-Hatch was built in 1958 and Alumnx Hall in 1932 and that each had “significant deferred maintenance needs.”

The New School started its restoration with Bishop-Hatch Hall. The extensive project, reviewed by the Vermont Division of Historic Preservation includes stabilization maintenance, such as replacing the roof and the original steam heat system. In addition, there will be safety updates, such as removing asbestos and installing new ventilation and sprinkler systems.

To increase student space, Gardener said the two lower floors are being renovated to make classrooms, which, upon completion, will allow The New School to add an additional program with the capacity to take up to ten more students. “We consistently have a multi-year waiting list with staffing and space being the two primary barriers to meeting the needs of the public schools,” he said. 

Gardener anticipates renovations to Bishop-Hatch Hall to be completed in March, 2026. 

The New School is planning a future fundraising campaign to restore Almunx Hall, which needs a new roof after having shingles sheared off in high winds and leaks in the cupola, he said, adding that the school hopes to make this repair in 2026. In addition, Gardener said the steam heating system needs to be replaced. The school also does not have the funding to restore the upper two floors of Bishop-Hatch Hall. “We are considering various options including conversion to housing, but for now they must be mothballed until they can be brought up to code,” said Gardener. 

“The New School is proud to be a steward of these historic buildings, particularly Alumnx Hall,” Gardner said. He added that it is important to the school to keep the hall open for community events and that the school uses the auditorium as a gymnasium and also a “vocational learning opportunity” for students involved in event set up and support, such as weddings. 

“There are so many exciting things the new owners of various buildings on the college green and Montpelier are doing,” Gardener said. “I love being a part of it.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Montpelier’s New School expands space for students with complex needs.

Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier has purchased the neighboring property of rK Miles, a lumberyard that was damaged in a 2023 fire, as part of an expansion plan.  

The co-op purchased the 1.6-acre property for $487,500, according to a press release. Co-op leaders plan to use the lot to expand its capacity for parking, storage and other operational needs. 

“This purchase is a key part of our long-term vision to deepen the Co-op’s values of health, sustainability, and cooperation,” general manager Mary Mullally said in the press release. “Back in 2012, we anticipated a need for more parking and retail space. This agreement allows us to explore those options while continuing to serve our vibrant community.” 

The co-op sits along Stone Cutters Way, a one-way street parallel to the Winooski River. Its customer parking lot is located on the northwest side of the building, while the new purchase adjoins the co-op building to the southeast. 

The exterior of an 8,000-square foot building on the former rK Miles property still has fire damage that will need to be addressed before it can be used for storage, Mullally said in a phone interview. The property will allow the co-op to buy in larger quantities, and it should also be “relatively easy” to set up staff parking on the site as an initial goal, she said. 

But the press release and website for the project seem to anticipate concerns from members. In its “frequently asked questions” section, the co-op addressed the timing of the purchase with the recent ratification of a union contract with UE 255, the union that represents co-op employees. 

According to the website, the timing was a coincidence, and the purchase should not affect salaries because money used for the purchase is from reserve funds rather than the operating budget. The union did not respond to a request for comment before publication time. 

The FAQs also addressed why the purchase negotiation was not shared with members. It was instead left to a smaller council vote. 

“We began exploring the possibility seriously in the fall of 2024, after the property’s owner expressed interest in selling,” the co-op wrote on the website. “At that point, we followed standard fiduciary and governance practices by conducting due diligence in private. This included reviewing financial terms, legal considerations, environmental assessments, and potential risks.”

Mullally said the co-op published the FAQ section to “provide as much information as possible.” So far, the feedback received has been “extremely positive,” she said. 

The co-op has its annual meeting planned for Sept. 13. Members are welcome to bring their questions about the future of the property to the meeting, Mullally said. 

In the long term, the co-op has floated ideas for the property: Expanded retail space, community gardens, housing. But the co-op may need further assessments to determine if environmental remediation is needed, it wrote on the website. The co-op is also creating a flood risk management plan. 

Mullally said it has been “a long process,” but she’s happy it’s come to completion. 

“I’m so excited about what this means to the co-op’s future,” she said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hunger Mountain Co-op purchases neighboring rK Miles property.

This story by Matthew Thomas was first published in The Montpelier Bridge on Aug. 19, 2025.

At a time when Montpelier is overwhelmed by increasing numbers of people experiencing homelessness — and President Donald Trump has decreed that homeless people be removed from public spaces — the Montpelier City Council discussed amendments to the city’s public camping policy at Wednesday’s city council meeting. 

The amended policy proposed by the City Manager’s Office passed along with two amendments during the meeting: one, proposed by Councilor Pelin Kohn, stipulated that the policy be reviewed again in six months; the other, by Councilor Cary Brown, removed the language from the city manager’s amendment designating all city parks as “High-Sensitivity Areas,” passing with help from the mayor’s tie-breaking vote.

“The city’s approach to camping in the city has not changed, and we’re not suggesting it would at this time,” said Acting City Manager Kelly Murphy. Murphy added that while the city does not allow public camping, it is also not looking to roust those who camp who aren’t causing a disturbance. So long as they are not doing so in “High-Sensitivity Areas,” a hot topic during discussion of proposed amendments to the city’s encampment policy. 

Among the particulars of the amended policy are removing the Montpelier Police Department from tasks such as triaging the city’s response to moving an encampment. The Fire, EMS and Parks departments will now be part of the group notified by the City Manager’s Office of an encampment. The city manager will now coordinate the response, relieving the beleaguered police department from such responsibility. 

Murphy said that her proposed amendments were not intended to be transformative. Rather, she said, they sought to bring the policy in line with de-facto city practice and also to account for current staff capacity. For example, Murphy cited the current practice of storing items cleared out of unattended encampments for 90 days; her office proposed the time limit be amended to 30 days so as to line up with the city’s actual storage capacity. 

Councilor Adrienne Gil said she’s not interested in talking about changes until the city’s partners have also reviewed current policy and had a chance to offer input. “We need guidance in enforcement,” Murphy said in response. To which Gil replied, “We need an emergency meeting with our partners to go through this policy to have an understanding about what we want in our community. … Just having one side of the story, updating a policy, is not sufficient.” 

Councilor Cary Brown agreed with Gil. “If we’re going to review this policy, it does need to be with everyone involved,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea to pull this policy out, to dust it off, take a look at it, because we went through a lot to put it in place.”

Brown did take issue with one of the proposals, which she deemed an “extremely substantive change,” a line in the notification letter affixed to the policy, which was amended to designate all city parks as “high-sensitivity areas,” and, therefore, subjecting any encampments within them to removal. According to Brown, this change negates the spirit and meaning of the entire original policy. 

Contained in Murphy’s response was the paradox that has flummoxed the city for years and would return throughout the meeting: If public spaces are increasingly off limits to camping, where are unhoused people supposed to go?

Councilor Sal Alfano said the policy has “many inconsistencies” and suggested the whole thing be scrapped and the city start over. As an example, he noted where the policy states that shelter will be offered when moving campers out of prohibited areas. The problem is that the city has no shelter space to offer. 

Members of the public weighed in as well. 

Richard Sheir, of Montpelier, suggested that matters related to the parks fall under the jurisdiction of the elected Parks Commission, and perhaps not the city council. 

Montpelier resident David Kitchen spoke about the encampments by the river near where he lives, and said he has instructed his son to no longer ride his bicycle on the bike path near the transit station but instead ride in traffic, as it’s “safer,” according to Kitchen. 

“I rode through there the other day,” Kitchen said, “and two individuals blocked the path and they could tell I wasn’t going to stop. They split. One guy gives me the ‘finger gun,’ pulling his trigger. The other guy mentions something about ‘destruction,’ that he’s going to ‘destroy’ me.” 

Montpelier residents Stan Brinkerhoff and TJ Poor both said that they do not allow their children to use the bike path by themselves. Poor said his daughter is afraid of using the bike path, and when she is downtown often crosses the street many times to avoid confrontation. 

Bonnie Robertson, a 30-year resident of Montpelier, described her experience of using the bike path, citing broken glass on the ground, litter down by the river, fighting, and “half-naked” people relieving themselves by the river, among other examples of disorder. While noting that she does not want to see people moved, Robertson said “I would like to see the law being enforced,” a sentiment that was echoed throughout the meeting. 

“I don’t have a solution for homelessness,” Robertson said. “But I don’t see why we can’t enforce the laws that are already on the books.” 

Multiple residents, while expressing empathy for the unhoused, also registered their discontent with what they characterized as lawlessness by some members of the city’s homeless encampments, prohibiting use of public spaces by the larger public. Poor said the problem is bigger than Montpelier and should be tackled by the state. 

“The empathy and compassion that was well intentioned with the policy has really enabled entitlement,” Poor said. “Entitlement that these public places belong only to a small portion of those who are unhoused, really, and not to the rest of the community. We’re making a choice without policy. We’ve devoted our priority. We’ve done it away from our children, done it away from the economic vitality of the community, and that really needs to change. Our town is unwelcoming now.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Montpelier amends public camping policy.

In Montpelier, city officials plan to remove the Pioneer Street Dam and restore a nearby floodplain. Together, the projects are predicted to have compounding positive effects that reduce flood risk in the city.  

The Pioneer Street Dam — an old mill dam — is about 1.3 miles upstream from the capital city’s downtown along the Winooski River. Not only is the dam filled with cracks, but engineers consider it a flood hazard. 

“It’s got about everything wrong with a dam you can imagine,” said Roy Schiff, an engineer who’s monitoring the dam. 

Nearby sits an 18 acre parcel of land at 5 Home Farm Way, where the Stevens Branch of the Winooski River joins the main branch. That land, which houses the Jacob Davis Farmstead, was historically a floodplain. Restoring it to such, coupled with the dam removal just downstream, could significantly reduce flood risk, Schiff said. 

The project offers a look at how recovery efforts from the 2023 flood are underway in the city. After years of monitoring water levels and studying the feasibility of the project, officials are starting to seek permitting and funding approval for their plans. 

“There is a real sense of forward momentum and progress,” said Jon Copans, executive director of the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience. 

The Vermont River Conservancy first pushed for Montpelier to take down four dams along the river back in 2021. Along with taking down the Pioneer Street Dam, they encouraged dismantling the Bailey Dam, the North Branch Dam and the Hidden Dam. Removing them could mitigate flood risk, improve river ecology and offer recreation opportunities, Randzio said.  

The four old dams hold back a large amount of sediment and a small amount of water, Randzio said. The sediment built up behind their structure pushes water levels even higher during times of peak flow. 

The conservancy selected consulting firm SLR International to perform feasibility studies of the four dams in 2021, she said. A grant from The Lake Champlain Basin Program paid for those studies, Randzio said. 

After floods pummeled the state in 2023 — and hit Montpelier especially hard — river experts pointed to thousands of what Schiff calls “deadbeat dams” around the state. Then, city officials and state lawmakers started taking notice. 

In Montpelier, Randzio’s proposals became a high priority. Necessary evaluations of the dams were already underway — putting the project on a fast track, Randzio said. 

The Pioneer Street Dam dates to when people used water to turn wheels or millboards or grind grains, Schiff said. But dams are expensive to maintain and they deteriorate fast, he said. 

Those working on the project anticipate the sediment built up behind the dam contains pollutants from an old coal facility that once operated along the riverbank upstream, Randzio said. Digging out that sediment while breaking down the dam is an iterative process, Schiff said. 

“You have to lower the water a little bit, remove some sediment, lower the dam a little bit,” to prevent sediment from being released downstream, he said.

Just upstream from the dam, at 5 Home Farm Way, sits The Jacob Davis Farmstead, a historic building declared a public safety hazard in 2019, according to The Barre Montpelier Times Argus. The city is currently working with The Preservation Trust of Vermont to remove the building from the property and restore some pieces of it, Copans said. 

That way, the 18 acre property would again be a floodplain. By using that land “we can create more flood storage to help protect the local area and store some more water to protect Montpelier,” Schiff said. 

The city’s also considering ways it can use the land for recreation and public enjoyment, Copans said. 

Schiff’s firm worked with city officials and employees at the regional planning commission to submit a list of projects to request funding from the state. The firm concluded the removal of the Pioneer Dam coupled with the floodplain restoration would offer significant flood mitigation risk compared to other proposed projects, and it made sense to tackle the two projects together. 

The city hopes to get funding from part of FEMA’s hazard mitigation grant program funding offered to Vermont, Copans said. So far, they’ve received positive signals from the state and remain hopeful, he said. 

Then, the project proposals must clear a number of Act 250 and permitting processes before a contractor is hired and work begins, Schiff said. 

But all acknowledge the project is just a piece of the puzzle. Randzio hopes the town can remove all four dams, especially the Bailey Dam by Shaw’s grocery store downtown. 

“Each one of these projects is a step forward and there are more projects sort of in the pipeline,” Copans said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Montpelier plans to remove Pioneer Street Dam and restore nearby floodplain.

This story by Cheryl Casey was first published in the Waterbury Roundabout on August 12.

Plans for the historic 150-year-old Goodell House at Little River State Park to be used as a trailside rental cabin are moving closer to reality: The project is now officially part of the state forestry plan, with a nonprofit gearing up to take on the work in 2026.

The 1860s structure on Ricker Mountain has been approved for relocation and preservation in the state’s forest management plan, which was amended to include the project this spring. In March, the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation revised the Mt. Mansfield State Forest Long Range Management Plan to include the preservation of the last remaining structure from the once-thriving mill and farm community near the Little River. The state has partnered with the nonprofit Vermont Huts & Trails to relocate, restore and maintain the Goodell House as part of its network of rustic, remote trail accommodations for public use. 

“This partnership expands access to state lands while preserving the distinct character of one of the original historic structures in the Ricker Basin,” said Forests, Parks and Recreation Commissioner Danielle Fitzko.

The state collected public input last year about the future of the Goodell House as an important piece of community history and an opportunity to expand recreation at the state park. Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore signed off on the update to the forest management plan in March. It now allows for “the relocation and rehabilitation of the Goodell House as a four-season hut” to be enjoyed as “an overnight resource for a diverse group of users.”

Vermont Huts & Trails Executive Director RJ Thompson said the project will give the historic house a new life that connects its history to modern times and visitors. “This is a great opportunity to preserve history and enhance recreation and access to an area of Mt. Mansfield State Forest with a mix of hiking, biking, and Nordic skiing options,” Thompson said. 

Located along the Dalley Loop trail in Little River State Park’s History Hike, the Goodell House will be moved 600 feet downhill to a gravel pit that is better situated to meet accessibility goals and minimize environmental impacts. Project planners from the state and the huts organization have been working closely with the state’s Division of Historic Preservation to ensure the building’s historic character is preserved. 

“This is almost seven-plus years in the making,” said Dani Kehlmann, development director for Vermont Huts & Trails. “It’s a cool way to preserve local history and increase access that folks have to (Little River State) park.”

The two-story 20’ x 25’ colonial home was built of hand-hewn timber beams and cedar shingles by Almeron Goodell after he purchased 14 acres on Ricker Mountain in 1863. Joined by his wife Lutheria and their two children, Goodell finished the house in 1870. A 12’ x 12’ addition was added to the footprint later. For 36 years, the Goodells were subsistence farmers, eking out a hardscrabble life alongside the farmers, loggers and sawmill workers who had settled in the Little River basin. Timber was the primary industry in the area. 

After Lutheria’s death, Goodell sold the house and moved to Hyde Park in 1906. The Ricker Mountain community, which had been there for nearly 130 years, had started to dwindle and deteriorate by that time. The last of the settlement was finally swallowed by the Waterbury Reservoir in the late 1930s after dam construction was completed. 

On higher ground, the house held out long after other structures collapsed and were overtaken by forest, likely helped along by several local families who used the structure as a hunting camp until the 1970s. Today the fragile Goodell House stands as a reminder of the industrious community that shaped a significant part of Waterbury’s early history. It won’t stand for much longer, however, without intervention and the state’s collaboration with Vermont Huts & Trails is intended to avoid this loss.

According to Kehlmann and stewardship forester Brad Greenough, the project to move and rehabilitate the house on its new site is scheduled for spring 2026. The goal is for it to be ready to welcome overnight guests by the end of next year, they said. 

The plan for the house that the state and Vermont Huts & Trails agreed to calls for the state to continue to own the house, but it will be maintained and managed by the private nonprofit as a recreation facility. Its operations will be subject to state park policies, such as mud season trail closures. Vermont Huts & Trails maintains a statewide network of hut accommodations along trails and other recreational assets. 

The renovations to the house will include making the building ADA-accessible. Likewise, the trail leading to the building will be modified to accommodate adaptive mountain bikes, Kehlmann said. 

Until work begins, project planners are taking steps to protect the delicate wood structure from the elements — its roof is covered with a tarp, for example. “Our goal is to use as much of the original material as possible,” Kehlmann said.  

Between now and next spring, Kehlmann said Vermont Huts & Trails will be working to raise $137,000 for the project. To date, $400,000 of the project’s estimated $537,000 budget has already been obtained through congressional appropriations. She is leading a new initiative called Friends of the Goodell House to recruit volunteers interested in helping with fundraising. 

“There are a lot of restrictions because the project is on state land. Many grants are not applicable, so we’ll be focusing on private foundations and private donors to raise the remaining funds,” she said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: In Waterbury, historic Goodell House approved for move and rehab.

Vermont State Police have taken over from the Northfield Police Department the investigation into the death of a 68-year-old man, later ruled a suicide, that the man’s daughter believes was suspicious.

For the past several months, Alexandria Stanley has been pushing for a law enforcement agency outside of Northfield police to conduct an independent investigation into the death of her father, Pedro “Pete” Baez. 

She has disputed the findings by the police and the Vermont’s Chief Medical Examiner’s Office that her father died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in November 2024 at his home in Northfield.

Stanley said Monday that she was heartened by the news that state police would be taking over the investigation. 

“I’m hugely thankful that this will be looked at anew,” Stanley said. “I’ve been asking for an unbiased, independent investigation into my father’s suspicious death since November.” 

A detective from the state police major crime unit has been assigned to conduct an external review of the Pedro Baez death investigation carried out by the Northfield Police Department, according to an email that State Police Detective Lt. Tyson Kinney wrote to attorney Christina Nolan, who represents Stanley, on Friday

On Monday afternoon, state police announced they had “assumed the lead role in investigating” Baez’s death. 

Detectives from the state police major crime unit will work with the Washington County State’s Attorney’s Office, the Vermont Chief Medical Examiner’s Office, and the Northfield Police Department, “which initially was the primary investigative agency” on the case, according to a statement from state police. 

“Members of the state police will interview witnesses, gather facts and review evidence before presenting a complete investigative file to the state’s attorney for review,” the statement added. “The State’s Attorney’s Office will make a final determination on whether to file charges.”

State police did not respond to a question from VTDigger about what prompted its action. State police had previously declined attempts by Stanley seeking to have them take a lead role in the investigation.

“VSP is unable to comment further on this investigation while it is open and active,” the statement Monday from state police read.

Northfield Police Chief Pierre Gomez could not be reached Monday for comment. 

Michelle Donnelly, Washington County’s state’s attorney, said Monday that she would work with the state police as the investigation progresses.

The move by state police comes days after Peter Baez, 41, of Northfield, who is Stanley’s brother and Pedro Baez’s son, was arraigned Thursday in U.S. District Court in Burlington on federal charges of possessing and stealing guns from his late father’s estate about a month after his father’s death.

Peter Baez pleaded not guilty to the two criminal charges and was released on conditions. 

At that hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Arra said that shortly before his death, Baez had removed his son from the will and made Stanley the beneficiary.

Attorney William A. Vasiliou II, representing Baez, said after the hearing that his client “had nothing to do with the death of his father.”

Vasiliou could not be reached for further comment Monday afternoon.

Nolan, Vermont’s former U.S. attorney who represents Stanley, had written an email in April to law enforcement officials, as well as state and local leaders, seeking further investigation into Pedro Baez’s death. Nolan cited several problems she saw in the probe that led to the suicide, including that no autopsy took place and that Northfield police relied heavily on information by Peter Baez, who was living with his father at that time.

Berlin police later conducted a review of Northfield Police Department’s death investigation. In a report in April obtained by VTDigger, the investigator from Berlin police stated there were issues that warranted further investigation.

The report found that there were “inadequate” photographs taken at the residence, particularly of the father’s deceased body. The recommendations for further investigation listed in the report included obtaining financial records from Pedro and Peter Baez, medical records for Pedro Baez, as well as contacting service providers to preserve any internet, social media and cellphone records of the parties.

The report also recommended that an interview be conducted with Pedro Baez’s neighbor about his mental state at the time leading up to his death.

Stanley said Monday that she looked forward to finding out what the state police probe reveals. 

“My father lived the last 40 years of his life in the town of Northfield,” she said. “He deserves the dignity of a competent police investigation.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: State police take over death investigation from Northfield police amid questions over probe.

WATERBURY — Nick Deml, Vermont’s outgoing corrections commissioner, wants the public to know that more and more is being expected of Vermont’s prisons, both from federal immigration authorities and the state’s human services landscape. 

“Today, the expectation is that the corrections agency does everything,” he told VTDigger in a wide-ranging interview this week. “That’s a good thing for the most part, but we’re expected to provide education, we’re expected to provide substance use treatment, we’re expected to provide the community standard of health care.” 

Deml plans to step down Aug. 15 after almost four years leading Vermont’s prison system

Former Burlington Police Department Chief Jon Murad will take the reins, overseeing the state’s six detention facilities, more than 900 employees and almost 1,600 incarcerated individuals.  

In an interview with VTDigger, Deml discussed the learning curve inherent in taking over the department as an outsider without previous prison experience. He detailed the challenges facing corrections, like improving working conditions in order to retain security staff and working with a population of incarcerated individuals in need of more care than they were prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Deml also addressed some of the more public struggles the Department of Corrections has faced, from replacing the state’s ailing women’s prison, Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, to the increasing burden of working with federal immigration authorities. 

After leaving the department, Deml said he plans to begin consulting on projects related to corrections as well as his past work in national security. He did not rule out a return to government work, but did swat away rumors of a run for office. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VTDigger: Why did you take this job?

Nick Deml: It’s an interesting question, because when I took the job — before and even since — people say ‘this has got to be the hardest job in state government,’ or maybe the Department for Children and Families Commissioner, which I actually think is probably harder.

It can be kind of thankless. There’s a couple of things that motivated me to do the job. One, I wanted to work in Vermont. (Two), I wanted to stay in government and public service, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find another role in Vermont that can have the impact that you can have as the commissioner of Corrections. The number of lives you touch, either people in your custody, people in the community that you’re serving. 

VTD: What do you think you didn’t understand about the job going in? 

ND: I didn’t come from a corrections background, and so there was certainly a learning curve on the front end, as there would be with any job, particularly a job of this scope and scale. But I think I underappreciated the complexity of corrections. I think initially I didn’t understand the scale or scope of the workforce crisis, the staffing crisis that we were experiencing. 

And then I think we all were on a learning curve, but by myself chiefly among us, to understand how much we changed during the pandemic, and particularly looking at our incarcerated population. I think we expected health trends to rebound and we’d go back to kind of 2019 levels of everything. And that was not the case. In fact, coming out of the pandemic, the folks that were coming into our system in particular were much sicker than they were in 2019, and that hasn’t abated. 

VTD: Do you think being an outsider made it more challenging to deal with the rank and file and have some of those workforce conversations with the union?

ND: I don’t think it made it harder to talk to our folks on the line. What I heard when I went out, especially initially, for those first, you know, year, 18 months, every time I went to a facility and met with folks, they would say, ‘It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a commissioner. I’ve not met a commissioner before.’ 

That opportunity to connect with them at their worksite, where they’re working, where they’re doing the mission, I think that is what enabled me to connect with our workforce really closely. And I think that wouldn’t matter if I was a career corrections officer or somebody off the street. You need to find ways to connect to those folks, and they’re yearning for that. They’re the folks on the ground doing the work every day, and we drifted a little bit, I think, from them. And so our mission over the last four years was really to build back that trust with our workforce, show them that we care. And I think we did that.

As it relates to the union, I think it cuts both ways. On the one hand, I don’t think they really knew what to do with me, because I wasn’t the commissioner they were used to. And on the other hand, I think they didn’t give — I don’t know, ‘respect’ is too strong of a word — but I don’t think that they were willing to engage me the way they would have somebody they’d known for a long time.

VTD: The workforce crisis has gotten better but hasn’t completely abated. There’s still mandatory overtime. (Officers are sometimes required to work 16-hour shifts.) What has worked, and what hasn’t worked?

ND: Vermont has a workforce crisis writ large. We’re an aging state. We have a decreasing number of working-age adults, and so there’s just fewer and fewer people available to do the work. 

Then you bring that down to corrections. Corrections nationally is having this staffing crisis pretty much everywhere in the country. We were at a high vacancy rate in our security ranks of 32% vacant. Today, some of the corrections agencies around the country are over 50%. 

We’re down now to 15%, and that’s great, but there’s mandatory overtime. The work-life balance isn’t there yet. Folks are stressed, it’s a tough job on its best day, and then you add the extra hours in, and it becomes very, very difficult. 

So what’s worked? I mean, we took the opportunity early in my tenure, but I think about a year into my tenure, to really go out and do focus groups, do surveying, meet with staff in the facilities to talk about, what are the pain points for them? Why would you continue working here? Why would you consider leaving? Instead of trying to decipher what we thought the problems were, we got really salient, really fairly consistent results across the entire system. And that was, ‘I’m not getting enough time away from the facilities. Work life balance isn’t there. The facilities are hard places to work. I’m not getting the supervision I’m seeking.’ 

What we didn’t hear is, ‘I don’t get paid enough.’ So it’s really for me, when we started to diagnose the workforce challenges, it’s about the experience of staff working in the system, and if we can improve that experience, we’re more likely to keep folks. Now, we did increase pay. We put more than $30 million into additional compensation over the last three years for correctional staff. We’ve added other benefits. We have a great partnership with the Community College of Vermont providing free community college education to staff. Until we can materially change the experience of a correctional officer on a day-to-day basis, going to work and having work-life balance, we’re going to continue to suffer here. 

VTD: To change staff’s experience, I imagine you need to change the facilities themselves — what they look like. There’s been an ongoing struggle to build a new women’s prison. Are we as a state still capable of building a new human services property, of siting a new facility?

ND: I mean, I hope so. At the end of the day, one of the primary functions of a state government is to provide human services. If we are going to continue to face very difficult situations trying to build new human services facilities, then the state won’t be able to deliver on its mandate. 

But I do think there’s hope. I think that we will build a new women’s prison. I think it will be a significantly different experience at that facility than hopefully any facility in the country, but certainly any facility that Vermont has ever had. 

But we’re not going to replace all the men’s facilities, certainly not in the next short period of time. I think it’ll be decades before we do that. So what do we do with the facilities we have? And that’s where we’ve tried to focus in, to improve the staff experience, by creating spaces that are dedicated to staff so they can decompress, recoup, take breaks. We’ve tried to change paint schemes and things like that just to soften the facilities. And we advocated very strongly for HVAC systems for our correctional facilities. So we’re on a multi-year project to put air conditioning throughout the system. 

VTD: You’ve described the communication breakdown or a stalemate with the town of Essex in trying to build a new women’s prison. What can change in that process? Does the state need to throw its weight around more? How does this get done? 

ND: I think Vermont as a community really leans into collaboration and partnership, and so I think that’s the space where I hope we can make the most ground up.

I understand folks don’t want the concept of a prison in their backyard, and I appreciate that. And yet, I think if you talk to the neighbors around the Chittenden facility, the current women’s facility in Vermont, they would say, ‘We like having them as our neighbors.’ I know that because we’ve talked to them, and that’s what they say. The police chief, the fire chief, local businesses have appreciated that facility being there. We’ve been good neighbors to them. They’ve been good neighbors to us. And it is part of our community, whether people want to acknowledge that or not.

I think the situation in Essex will get better. We’re trying to build a complicated human services facility in a community that hasn’t had that in the past, and so, you know, they’re going through iterations too, and there’s going to be some growing pains. But I have confidence that the town leadership will continue to advance this project. We don’t want to get to a place where the state is trying to exert control, because that’s not going to get us the best outcomes. 

VTD: Compared to commissioners past, you’ve been a more ubiquitous face. People see you on the news. Your department has taken a different media strategy than others. What’s the thinking behind that approach? 

ND: I’m a firm believer in transparent government. We’re here to serve our communities, and to do that effectively, communities need to see us and what we’re doing.

I do think we’ve really benefited from transparency. It’s helped us to re-establish credibility where it was lost. It’s helped us to elevate the work. I mean, we have almost 1,000 staff in the Department of Corrections, and they’re public servants. They’re doing really hard work every day. And I think in general, people either don’t think about it or don’t respect the profession. And I wanted to change that as part of my work here.

VTD: Do you want to run for political office?

ND: I’ve been getting this question a lot lately. I have no interest in running for office. You know, the interesting thing about that, I mean, there’s nothing about running for office that is appealing to me. But doing these jobs, having the opportunity to serve the public and being able to do the work is what’s appealing. And so, you strip the politics away from it, the government work is, I think, the important part.

VTD: It seems like in the last couple of years, the governor and his team have pushed for what might be labeled ‘tougher on crime’ policies (like a public safety package in 2025 and new crimes targeting drugs and retail theft in 2024). Your department has pushed for more progressive approaches to problems like substance use. Do you feel like you’ve been working at cross purposes?

ND: I mean, I don’t think so. You’re right, the corrections agency doesn’t get to decide who comes to us. So our job, our mandate, is to receive whoever is sent there and take care of them as best we can. So that’s care, food service, health. And helping folks go back to the community to be successful. 

And while we’re doing that, certainly I think the communities that I’ve heard from are really struggling to adapt to the substance use crisis that’s been kind of plaguing Vermont over the last several years. These kind of low-level repeat crimes over and over again — what do you do with somebody like that? And so that public policy debate has been going on, but it’s really outside the scope of the department. Our job is to take care of the folks when they come to us, and I think we’ve done a good job with that. 

We see population changes over time. I think we’re on a bit of an upswing right now, and I don’t exactly know what the cause of that is, but our job is to try to figure out, how do we provide for these folks in our custody as best we can for the period they’re with us. 

VTD: At the beginning of your tenure, there was a string of deaths, particularly at Southern State, a rate of deaths that data would indicate outpaces the national average. With that, there’s been a lot of attention put on the health services provided in Vermont’s prisons and the various contractors that provide those services. Is prison health care broken, and what can make it better?

ND: Yeah, I think prison health care is definitely in a tough spot. I hope it’s not broken, because I do think that there are ways that it can improve. 

States are in a difficult place. There’s kind of three general models for this. You have a private, contracted health service, that’s what we do in Vermont. You have an in-state, in-government service that’s provided. That would be like if the Department of Corrections hired nurses, doctors, and they would be department staff. Vermont used that model about 20 years ago. And then a third, you have a partnership with a hospital system in your state. Often those are tied to universities, but not always. 

A state like Vermont, I think, suffers additionally from its size, in that we can’t create economies of scale in the way that a state like Texas can, for example. So Texas has its own hospital system within the correction system, massive multiple actual physical hospitals that they can utilize. They’re all corrections patients. I mean, we couldn’t afford something like that here. 

And that’s the model that we used 20 years ago. I wasn’t in the space 20 years ago, but talking to colleagues who were, including the defender general and others, they would say that wasn’t better than what we have now. 

VTD: Do you think an improved system would have prevented some of these deaths?

ND: I think it’s pretty difficult to say. 

We looked at each individual death that occurred in our system in the last four years. We did that. There’s also multiple other investigations that take place under state law. And then we also tried to look at trending analysis. 

Our numbers are pretty small, so it’s hard to extrapolate trends out of the small numbers. But there weren’t things that were immediately apparent that were major consistencies between the deaths. That’s tough for us, because we want to solve the issue, but if there isn’t a consistent issue to solve, it makes it more difficult.

I’ve been happy — happy may not the right word — but happy that the deaths by suicide numbers have definitely gone down. That’s a space where I do think there’s different ways for us to intervene and try to pick up on signs earlier, do everything that we can to prevent that outcome from happening. And I think we’ve taken steps to do that, and hopefully that continues.

That leaves us with folks who are dying of some type of medical issue or substance use, and those are more difficult to manage and intervene in. That’s, I think, where we want to focus.

VTD: What are the biggest challenges facing your successor?

ND: He’s going to continue to have to grapple with the workforce challenge. That’s the biggest existential threat to the success of corrections agencies across the country.

He’s going to have a population that is continuing to age, continuing to present with very complicated medical issues. And you know, in Vermont, we have a unified system, so we have the sentenced population and the detained population. That detained population is presenting to us much sicker than they ever have in our history. And that’s really challenging. 

If you get somebody on a Friday night brought in by law enforcement, and an hour later they’re overdosing and need to go to an emergency room, that puts a corrections system in a really complicated place.

VTD: Have you seen eye-to-eye with Gov. Phil Scott on the department’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol?

ND: That is a really complicated issue

Vermont’s always had a relationship with ICE, or at least for a long time. Historically, it was folks who were coming across the border allegedly without authorization to do so, and they were detained by border patrol, brought to us temporarily because there’s no other detention space in the state, and then they’d be moved on and adjudicated through whatever federal immigration process existed. 

That’s changed a little bit, as we testified to recently. There’s folks being brought from other states and other spaces. It’s not just those folks who are doing the illegal border crossings. We’re just at the beginning of unpacking what this means.

But certainly I see eye-to-eye with the governor on — our obligation is to help people that are coming to our system. And I can affirm to the governor that if somebody comes to our correctional system, they will have access to the courts, they will have access to health care, they will have access to food, and we will try to provide them with any of the needs that they have in our system. 

VTD: Did any of these challenges or frustrations about collaborating with federal immigration authorities influence your decision to leave the department?

ND: No. Certainly there’s been a lot more work with ICE in the last six months. But no, my decision predated that and I was pretty confident that this was roughly the timeline I was going to be on when I was going to leave.

VTD: Was it your decision to leave?

ND: Yeah.

VTD: What are you most proud of from these years?

ND: Philosophically, we reoriented this department. Our goal, and hopefully we’ve accomplished this, was to reorient this department to the people it’s supposed to be serving. So on the one side, that’s our staff. They deserve to have a department that’s invested in them, who care about them, who want them to have meaningful careers with lots of impact, mission focused, and we know that this job extends beyond the walls of our facilities, and we need to take care of them outside of there, too. These are really, really tough jobs, 

And we have people in our care and custody that are counting on us to keep them safe, keep them fed and healthy, and take care of medical issues for them. And we, I think, reoriented the department to that work as well. In particular on the health side. That was the greatest body of work where we could make a huge impact and continue to improve on that system. 

And so we redesigned our health system. We’re about to onboard our first ever manager over nutrition to really target, How do we improve people’s health by giving them good food? Can we locally source food? Can we grow our own food so that it is the best food available for the population? I mean, just a year or so ago, we went to fluid milk across our system in partnership with the Agriculture Agency here in Vermont, and we’re using local Vermont and upstate New York milk to provide to our population. 

It’s a basic premise, but if folks are healthier when they leave, they’re more likely to be successful when they go to the community. And so it’s good for public safety, it’s good for the state and it’s just simply the right thing to do. 

VTD: What do people not understand about the Department of Corrections? And what do people maybe even within the Vermont Agency of Human Services not understand about the Department of Corrections? 

ND: One thing that we’ve been trying to highlight to folks is — as other systems across the state, across the country aren’t able to serve folks, as we have a lack of available medical care for folks, or mental health care, substance use treatment — what happens is those folks all end up kind of at the end of the line. The end of the line is either they’re unhoused, they’re in an emergency department, or they’re in a correctional facility, and often they’re cycling between the three.

I think the other thing, though, particularly in Vermont, but other places too, more and more is expected of the corrections system. Thirty years ago, largely the expectation was that somebody would be incarcerated for a period of time. You’d keep them safe, you’d stop them from fighting, and then you’d provide health care and food service and those things. And then when they got out, they got out.

Today, the expectation is that the corrections agency does everything for that person. And I think that’s a good thing for the most part, but we’re expected to provide education, we’re expected to provide substance use treatment, we’re expected to provide the community standard of health care. And all of that is good, but more and more is layered on top of the corrections agency as the one-stop-shop that can do all of that work while we have a staffing crisis, while there’s pressure for us to close facilities and decarcerate, and new resources aren’t added in. 

Frankly, corrections agencies can’t be good at everything and shouldn’t be good at everything. Our approach to that was to turn to community partners and try to bring more folks into our facilities to help. But I do think that that is kind of an untenable position that corrections agencies are being put in, and particularly as other community support systems collapse or recede from their ability to provide services.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Q&A: Outgoing Corrections Commissioner Nick Deml on the challenges facing Vermont’s prisons .

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.

BURLINGTON — A Northfield man has denied federal criminal charges that allege he stole firearms from the estate of his dead father and sold them for money. 

As Peter Baez, 41, entered his not guilty plea Thursday in federal U.S. District Court in Burlington, his sister, Alexandria Stanley, sat about 20 feet away in the gallery and watched. 

Stanley has been pushing law enforcement since shortly after the November 2024 death of her father, 68-year-old Pedro “Pete” Baez, to more fully investigate the circumstances surrounding her father’s death, which was ruled a suicide.

Peter Baez was arrested Wednesday on the federal firearm charges for allegedly possessing and selling three stolen firearms and held in jail overnight pending the court hearing Thursday afternoon. 

An indictment on the charges had been returned by a grand jury against him last month, but was sealed pending Baez’s arrest. The filing was unsealed Thursday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Arra told Magistrate Judge Kevin Doyle during Thursday’s court hearing that, shortly before the death of Baez’s father, reportedly on Nov. 9, 2024, the father had removed his son from his will, making Stanley, his daughter, the beneficiary. 

Days following the death of his father, the prosecutor alleged, the son illegally took his father’s firearms that, at that point, were part of the estate and sold them at gunshops, keeping the money.

Doyle agreed Thursday to release Baez on conditions, including that he stay at least 300 feet from the property line of the Northfield home where he had lived with his father. The judge also ordered that Baez not contact his sister or the attorney now handling his late father’s estate. 

Attorney William A. Vasiliou II, representing Baez, told the judge his client did not object to those conditions. 

Stanley, who has been critical of the Northfield Police Department’s investigation into her father’s death, has disputed findings by police and the Vermont Medical Examiner’s Office that he had shot himself. 

She has called for a law enforcement agency other than the Northfield Police Department to further investigate the matter. She hired lawyer Christina Nolan, a former U.S. attorney for Vermont, to represent her. 

After Thursday’s hearing, Stanley said she was grateful for the actions of federal prosecutors in the case, saying, “It is federal authorities who are now moving forward looking at this with the resources and the integrity that a suspicious death investigation deserves.”

Acting U.S. Attorney for Vermont Michael Drescher declined to comment Thursday when asked if his office was investigating the death of the father. 

Northfield Police Chief Pierre Gomez could not be reached Thursday for comment. 

Vasiliou, in response to journalist questions following Thursday’s hearing, said he wasn’t aware of an investigation into the death of his client’s father. Vasiliou said Baez, “had nothing to do with the death of his father.”

In an April email, Nolan wrote an email to many law enforcement officials and local and state leaders, including Vermont Chief Medical Examiner Elizabeth Bundock and Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark. In the email, Nolan argued that Stanley, her client, “has conducted as thorough an investigation into his death as any civilian could.” 

Stanely’s findings, Nolan wrote, demonstrate that her father’s death warranted further investigation. Nolan then listed off several problems with the investigation leading to the suicide finding, including that no autopsy was ever conducted.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Northfield man indicted on federal gun charges as strife persists over father’s death.

Northfield Police Chief Pierre Gomez was dressed in his uniform and heading into the town office on Main Street on Tuesday morning, when he said he was accosted by a resident who “ranted and raved” at him using racist terms.

The man, whom Gomez later identified as Northfield resident Gary Allen Smith, proceeded to call him “boy,” “scumbag chief,” told him to “do your fucking job” and to “go back to Pennsylvania,” according to an audio recording of the encounter Gomez shared with VTDigger.

“He was cursing. He was getting in my face, pointing and referencing me as ‘boy’ several times,” said Gomez, a Black Latino man. 

He said he had never met the man before and did not provoke him.

Gomez said he encountered Smith in the vestibule of the office building, as Smith held the door open for him. Gomez said he thanked him but told him he was not exiting. 

That’s when the man yelled, “Get out of here,” he said.

Smith could not be contacted to comment for this story. Calls to phone numbers associated with someone with his name and age were not answered.

Scott Kerner, owner of the nearby Good Measure Pub and Brewery, said he was on his way to the bank next door when he witnessed the incident.

“I heard somebody yelling, and I looked up, and there was a guy with a tie-dye shirt yelling and pointing very close to Chief Gomez’s face in front of the town office,” he said. “It felt very threatening.”

Kerner said he walked up toward them because he was worried about the man’s tone and how aggressive he sounded. 

“I like Chief, and it just seemed like this guy was really out of hand,” Kerner said.

He said he heard the man call the chief “boy” and say “do your fucking job.” 

“The guy continued to yell at Chief, walked across Main Street yelling, then walked back and got back in his face and yelled at him again, all while I was standing right there,” Kerner said.

Through it all, he said, Gomez remained calm.

Trained in his past law enforcement work on how to react “as far as race-baiting is concerned,” Gomez said he was able to not react in a negative way. Although, as a person of color, he said he found the multiple “boy” comments racially charged.

Smith, who is 54 and was recorded as recently living in Northfield Falls, according to court documents, was convicted for assaulting a Northfield police officer in 2023.

Gomez said he reported the latest incident to Northfield Town Manager Jeff Schulz and others. Schulz said he is aware of the encounter and has the recording of the confrontation that occurred in front of the municipal building.

“The incident is very unfortunate and very disrespectful to the Chief,” he wrote in an email Wednesday. “Please note that as the Town Manager and a representative of the Town of Northfield, I strongly condemn all forms of racism and harassment.”

Mia Schultz, president of the Rutland Area NAACP, said Gomez has faced the everyday pressures that come with the job and has carried the weight of systemic racism since the day he arrived in Northfield. She said town leaders must publicly declare their support for the chief.

“Chief Gomez was verbally attacked in broad daylight,” Schultz wrote in an email. “He was repeatedly called ‘boy,’ a word with a long and violent history that has been used to strip Black and Brown men of their humanity and authority. This is not just a personnel matter. This is a moral failure.”

Merry Shernock, the co-chair of the Northfield Selectboard, has been the most vocal of the five board members — at the last meeting and via email — in her condemnation of the continued racism and harassment Gomez has faced.

“I have nothing except respect and admiration for Chief Gomez,” she wrote in an email this week, adding that the sentiment is shared by the majority of residents. She prefers not to pay attention to those who express hate, she wrote, “but I am aware, much to my dismay, that they are among us.”

The board has initiated an investigation related to Gomez that remains ongoing, she said. Schulz and Gomez said they are unable to discuss details of the investigation itself as it involves personnel issues, which fall under protected information.

Shernock said she has been charged with organizing the racial bias training that was started at the April 28 meeting by a member of the state Office of Racial Equity. She expects that training will resume in October. A Northfield resident has also requested community racial bias training, and she said she is hopeful she can look into it this fall.

While Schulz wrote he condemns racism and found the harassment Gomez faced this week “unfortunate,” the town manager has not responded to multiple rounds of emails from VTDigger asking if he explicitly supports the police chief and his work. 

A pattern of harassment

Originally from Pittsburgh and in law enforcement for about 20 years, Gomez, 58, was a Philadelphia police officer and, later, a detective in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.

He was hired in September 2023 as chief of police in Northfield, a Washington County town of about 6,000 and home to Norwich University. Gomez told VTDigger he has faced multiple instances of harassment and discrimination in the overwhelmingly white town since he took the job in wake of former chief of police John Helfant retiring amid controversy in May 2023.

Vermont has had only three police chiefs of color — in Northfield, Montpelier and Brattleboro. Brian Peete became the capital’s first Black police chief in 2020 but left for a job in Kansas after two years. Norma Hardy has led the Brattleboro police department since 2021 and is the first Black woman police chief in Vermont.

Earlier this year, at an April 8 selectboard meeting — a YouTube recording of which now has 1,600 views —  Lynn Doney, a disgraced former selectboard member, took issue with Gomez wearing a gray hoodie on duty instead of his uniform: “so he looks like a police chief and not a gangster off the street that’s just driving our cruisers around,” Doney said.

On April 23, more than 60 residents packed the room at the following selectboard meeting, the majority in support of Gomez. Many of them denounced Doney’s racist remark at the earlier meeting and wore hoodies themselves in a show of solidarity.

Gomez said he sent a letter to Doney asking him to cease and desist from such personal attacks. “It is unlawful for an individual to make deliberate statements that intend to harm the reputation of another party without factual evidence or simply based upon hearsay,” the letter he shared read.

Doney did not respond to VTDigger’s requests for comment then or this week but responded to Gomez’s letter in April. The letter signed by Doney, shared by Gomez, reads, “I will not apology to you or anyone else as everything I have said is true.”

Since that incident, residents and racial justice leaders have pointed out that racism and retention issues are problems many predominantly white towns face when they hire people of color and urged Northfield officials to be better about calling out racism and in vocalizing support for the chief. 

“He’s an excellent leader for our town and I am well aware … of what he’s had to deal with here. So, you know, we support him,” Kerner said Thursday.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Northfield Police Chief Pierre Gomez faces racial harassment again.

A plan to buy Barre’s most prominent vacant building has gotten an eleventh-hour extension of its fundraising goal — and a lowered sale price — after the nonprofit development corporation failed to meet its initial deadline. 

The former JJ Newbury’s at 143 North Main St. has sat vacant since 2010. The nonprofit leading the fundraiser have called it the city’s “biggest eyesore.” Yet the owners, local real estate developers Jeff Jacobs and Steve Lewinstein, are looking for more than the assessed value of $325,800. 

In January, the Barre Area Development Corporation launched a campaign to raise $1.1 million for a new offer and closing costs to finally purchase the building and tear it down. The city of Barre agreed to contribute $400,000 toward that fundraiser, despite some objections from residents and city councilors who said the money would be better spent toward the city’s other needs, like housing and flood mitigation. 

The fundraiser’s initial deadline was set for June 11, the initial purchase option’s expiration date. Development corporation vice president Steve Mackenzie said as that deadline loomed, it had only raised between $600,000 and $700,000, so he approached the owners and asked if they would take that amount. “Long story short, the answer was no,” he said. 

He then went back and asked if the owners would allow a 90-day extension and a lowered sale price of $800,000. That time, the answer was yes. 

The development corporation now has until Sept. 9 to reach its revised fundraising total of $850,000, which includes closing costs. It has raised $730,000 so far, and Mackenzie said he was cautiously optimistic that it would hit the new target. 

“It’s still no small challenge, but I think it’s doable,” he said. “We have a number of folks that I still need to contact, as do other board members. We know that there are people out there considering a pledge, they’re just deciding how much.”

He noted that the 15 directors of the development corporation have contributed a total of $75,000 toward the fundraiser. “We need to have skin in the game if we’re gonna go out and ask the public for money,” he said.

Mackenzie acknowledged the “hurdle” for many Barre residents is that they are paying owners who “sat on this for 15 years” and have allowed it to go downhill. 

“I understand that, and the way I come at it is, the only way something good is going to happen with this property is that we have to get it out of the hands of the current owners,” he said. 

What happens to the property if, and when, the sale goes through is still uncertain. The nonprofit has posted an artist’s rendering of its vision for the project on its website: an interim “green space” after the current building has been torn down and a longer-term concept to construct a large mixed-use multistory building on the site. 

But Mackenzie said the nonprofit has not done any significant research or planning for those concepts yet. 

“It’s hard to invest any substantial amount of time or effort or money into a property that you don’t own,” he said.  “It’s a real risk to initiate that kind of planning and development process when you don’t know if you’ll get the property.”

The common consensus is that the current structure has deteriorated, Mackenzie said. A code inspection in December 2024 found that the building had significant damage from its years left vacant, with rotting floors and a hole in part of the roof, according to inspection documents. The inspectors also found the basement full of water, possibly from the 2023 or 2024 flooding. 

Barre City Manager Nick Storellicastro said he is preparing a memorandum of understanding for the Aug. 5 City Council meeting to provide for the transfer of the property to city ownership if the sale is successful. 

Storellicastro said the general plan was to begin an environmental study immediately. He cited the development of City Place down the street as a template — the site also spent years as a green space while the city created a development plan. 

City Councilor Sonya Spaulding was one of the three councilors who voted against the city’s contribution, unsuccessfully, in December 2024. She said she still has many of the same objections. 

“We’re putting in half the amount of money that needs to get raised, but there’s still no plan, no funding for remediation,” she said. 

She, like many people in Barre, is excited to see the building finally get torn down. But she’s also concerned that the city will be asked to contribute further funds toward infrastructure and upgrades toward those long-term plans. 

“We’re building this on the backs of taxpayers,” she said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Barre’s contentious plan to buy a vacant building gets an extension — and a discount.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Montpelier city officials have ordered the removal of a downtown encampment that had grown in recent weeks.

Elizabeth Byam, 44, had set up camp in a small park near Montpelier’s riverfront bus station after her state voucher expired at a motel in nearby Barre on July 1, she said on Thursday afternoon. 

On Wednesday, Montpelier City Police officers arrived at the encampment with notices indicating that the campers would need to leave within 24 hours, Byam said. If they didn’t vacate, their belongings would be taken and stored off-site, out of town, Byam recalled the notice saying.

The next morning, Byam packed up her things before city officials arrived to clear the area. She remained at the site shortly after officials had left, along with a handful of other campers. Her family’s belongings were piled into shopping carts.

Byam estimated that about eight to 12 people had been staying at the encampment recently. She had been living there with her sons and her pregnant daughter-in-law.

“We have a bunch of stuff because she’s got to get ready for a baby,” Byam said. “But we don’t want her outside, either. We want her into a place.”

Montpelier’s acting city manager, Kelly Murphy, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. The Montpelier City Police Department also did not respond to multiple interview requests. (Meredith Warner, deputy director of local homelessness nonprofit Good Samaritan Haven, confirmed the timeline of events relayed by Byam.)

Camping overnight at public parks is prohibited in Montpelier, though city leaders said last summer that they generally look the other way as long as campers haven’t caused issues. 

The city has a separate policy that guides how it handles encampments on other property, focused on diverting camping away from “highly sensitive areas” like grounds near a school or cemetery. The policy also lays out public health and safety issues that can prompt officials to ask campers to leave, including criminal activity and excessive amounts of waste, among others. Montpelier City Council plans to revisit its encampment policy next month, according to recent reporting by WCAX.

The area where the encampment was located, dubbed Confluence Park, garnered half a dozen calls to the police between June 30 and July 6, according to the Montpelier Police Department’s most recent call log.

One log, dated July 2, noted that an encampment was being set up at the location, along with “persons with open containers of alcohol.” Another log the following day noted: “community member very unhappy with homeless people on the bike path at Confluence Park.” An assault in the area last week impacted members of Byam’s family, she said.

The encampment removal is not the first undertaken by the city in recent memory. Last August, Montpelier officials ordered the removal of an encampment at a former country club after a pattern of “threatening behavior” developed. The move prompted a protest led by one of the unhoused people displaced from the site, demanding city officials indicate where people could camp safely.

The city’s move this month comes in the wake of the most recent round of evictions from the state’s motel voucher program, which Gov. Phil Scott has sought to cut back since its pandemic-era expansion. The July 1 exits primarily impacted families with children and people with acute medical needs who had been shielded by an executive order that expired on that date.

In the past, the Scott administration has set up temporary shelters in the wake of evictions from the state’s motel system. This time, however, the Republican’s administration has not indicated it will take such a step.

In the meantime, people living outdoors in Montpelier have few other options. Local service provider Good Samaritan Haven plans to open a long-awaited year-round shelter in the city later this year.

But that won’t come soon enough for Byam. As of Thursday afternoon, she had packed up her camping gear. She planned to sleep outside a nearby church, where she’d heard she would be allowed to stay.

“That’s probably where we’ll be tonight,” Byam said. “And then focus tomorrow on if we’re going to stay there again tomorrow night, or if we’re going to find a spot.”

Warner, from Good Sam, said small municipalities and nonprofits alike are strained by the impact of rising homelessness in Vermont – particularly as both state and federal resources retreat.

“I’m honestly just tired of talking about camping as if it’s a reasonable solution to this problem,” she said. “It is an inhumane response to a person who needs a place to live.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Montpelier moves to clear encampment near downtown bus station.

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 .

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

MAD RIVER VALLEY — For the past seven years, volunteers have been pulling and clipping Japanese knotweed from riverbanks, open fields, roadsides and plenty of places in between.

They’re part of a joint effort between conservation commissions in three towns — Waitsfield, Warren and Fayston — to fight the invasive plant, which has taken hold along the Mad River Valley.

More recently, project leaders have enlisted a helping hoof: goats that can eat the knotweed up.    

Goat grazing is a known method to control invasive plants without machinery. Goats feed on the plants, weakening or killing them entirely. In 2024, the Mad River Valley effort hired Mary Beth Herbert to do the job. This year, she’s funded by a grant from the Lake Champlain Basin Program.

According to Curt Lindberg, chair of the Waitsfield Conservation Commission, the project spans a cumulative 260 worksites across the region. Interns from the University of Vermont as well as local volunteers have been working, along with the goats, to control knotweed across the locations.

Herbert got her start with keeping goats in 2018 while working as a trail crew leader on the Appalachian Trail in the south of the state. She got interested in working with goats because of frequent machine failures on the job that set the crew behind.

She spent around five years camping on the trail with her goats, half the time as a volunteer, the other half paid.

In the same year she and her three goats — Ruth, Bader and Ginsberg, after the former U.S. Supreme Court justice — were hired by the city of Montpelier to remove poison ivy.

In the winter of 2023, Herbert gave away her then 23-strong herd and moved to Arizona to study with Navajo shepherds.

That spring, she was contacted by the Mad River knotweed operation to help rid the area of the invasive.

When efforts to remove knotweed first started out, locals found it challenging and had thought, “‘Why even bother,’” said Lindberg.

But in the past few years there has been a shift in perspective.

“With good persistent effort, you can make progress,” Lindberg said.

This year, Herbert has a herd of 18 goats, 14 of which she owns and four she has rented from Villa Villekulla Farm in Barnard.

The knotweed is extensive and dense, especially along the river.

On a recent day near the Mad River Exchange in Waitsfield, Herbert walked along a wooded trail toward the riverside clearing where her crew has been stationed this summer. Unlike the land around it, the field hasn’t been overwhelmed by knotweed; the patches are shorter and more spread out.

She’s been rotating the herd around the perimeter to prevent the invasive from growing any further.   

“I already see a difference from last year to this year,” she said.

Around the field, knotweed grazed on four weeks ago had grown back to chest height while further away, ungrazed plants stood at least 6 feet high. 

Unlike poison ivy, which can be grazed heavily one time, Knotweed needs more regular maintenance to suppress the spread. 

“Knotweed needs to be grazed many, many times, over and over,” Herbert said.

Increased flooding in Vermont is worrisome to both her and Linberg for how it could fuel the spread of the invasive.

That’s because when floodwaters pass over riverbanks with a population of Japanese knotweed, they can carry rhizomes — the part of the plant that grows new roots and shoots — downstream, where the invasives can replant themselves into the soil and spread the network further. 

The field where Herbert is working is public land that could turn entirely into knotweed if left unmanaged. 

“The goal is to work where people used to go and can’t anymore because of the knotweed and reclaim” those spots, Herbert said. 

The goats will be spending all summer eating knotweed around the field. They are moved every two or three days from one spot to another and cycle to previously grazed spots around every four weeks. On that recent afternoon, goats followed Herbert around as she kicked knotweed down to make it easier for them to reach.

“I’m happy because the goats absolutely love the knotweed,” Herbert said.

She sees animal husbandry as the most important part of her job. She trims the goats’ hooves, makes sure they get enough nutrition in their diet and sets up electric fences every time they are moved to keep them from wandering away or encountering coyotes.

Each year the knotweed is getting weaker in places the volunteers are working, Lindberg said. In some roadside spots, where the weed can’t spread as easily as by water, volunteers have eradicated the plant, he said.

Interns and volunteers are set to fight the knotweed into September. In October, volunteers will plant native plants. 

“The goal is to restore healthy, native habitat,” Lindberg said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: To fight knotweed, Mad River Valley towns let goats pig out.

This story by Matthew Thomas was first published in The Bridge on July 9.

The long search for the right site for a homeless shelter in Montpelier may be over. If all goes as planned, the former Central Vermont Solid Waste Management office at 137 Barre Street may soon house a new, permanent 18-bed emergency shelter.

In a June 21 press release, Good Samaritan Haven (central Vermont’s shelter network, also known as “Good Sam”) announced that it has signed a purchase and sale agreement for 137 Barre Street, a building that has gone up for sale because the solid waste management district has found a new home in Berlin. The building — a large blue Victorian style house — shares a driveway with Another Way, a “sanctuary for those with psychiatric disabilities,” according to its website, and an organization that, like Good Sam, offers an array of services to those without housing. 

Good Sam plans for a “partial soft opening” this November and to be fully operational in January 2026, the release noted.

Julie Bond, Good Sam’s executive director, said the organization provides services to 475 to 500 people annually through direct shelters, along with its community-, street- and motel-outreach program. 

The property will become a semi-congregate (“dorm-style”) shelter serving adults aged 18 to 80 plus, Bond said. Similar to Good Sam’s 17-bed flagship shelter in Barre, the Montpelier shelter will have multiple beds in each sleeping room, several common rooms, shared bathrooms, and a kitchen, along with laundry and staff offices, Bond
added. 

The new shelter will also provide housing case management and some community health case management onsite, said Bond. “These services will support and connect guests with housing opportunities, job training opportunities, connection to social services and medical and mental health partners in the area,” she added, along with visiting service providers from community partners. 

Aligning with Montpelier’s housing plan, the city has been “wonderfully supportive,” of the new shelter, Bond said. “We’ve been providing seasonal/winter shelter for the last several years, and it’s very intense and resource-heavy to ramp up, operate, and ramp down each season versus operating a shelter year round.” 

In order to create a more grounded and settled environment, Bond said, “Guests will not have to leave during the day … allowing folks to heal, settle, and have the time, space, and peace to meet their housing and other goals.” 

Another important feature of the Barre Street site, Bond said, is that it sits well out of the floodplain. Two of their current shelters are flood-prone, and safely sheltering guests is an organizational priority, she said.

Good Samaritan is a 90-day program, said Bond, although longer-than-average stays may happen because of the state’s housing crisis. During this time, guests receive assistance meeting their housing goals. The program has a standard intake process and is not a drop-in shelter. None of its shelters currently serve families, she said.

“With the motel exodus this week,” said Bond, “we will be supporting many more people who must leave the motels after their 80 days have run out and they have nowhere else to go but to tent outdoors, exposed to the elements.” She added that most are living with major medical, cognitive, developmental, or mental health challenges. 

Along with the city of Montpelier, Good Sam is working with the state of Vermont’s Office of Economic Opportunity and the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and has hired Evernorth, a nonprofit focused on helping low- and moderate-income people across northern New England create affordable housing and make community investments. Together, Good Sam and Evernorth are working to secure the funding to acquire the property, Bond said. 

While still in the early stages, Bond said she looks forward to connecting with future neighbors of the new shelter to share plans of what she called a “steppingstone in this community.”

Of those experiencing homelessness in Vermont, Bond said, “The situation continues to be dire and we need more creative solutions while keeping people sheltered in place until those solutions are fully realized.” 

Those needing assistance can contact Good Samaritan Haven at 802-479-2294.

Read the story on VTDigger here: New homeless shelter to open in Montpelier.

This story by Tom Mckone was first published in The Bridge on June 18.

Katherine Paterson is sitting in her Montpelier living room, doing what she does best — telling stories. Unlike the fiction she writes for children and young people, she recalls a true story about a furious woman who confronted her at a meeting. 

“These books are not for children,” the woman said. “They’re too intense.”

But intensity and her refusal to write down to children are two qualities that have made Paterson a great writer. She has published more than 40 books, and she’s won even more awards than that, including two National Book Awards and two Newberry Medals. The Library of Congress named her a living legend, and she is one of only six Americans who have won the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition given to an author or illustrator of children’s books.

In awarding Paterson the Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and in citing “Bridge to Terabithia” in particular, the American Library Association said, “Paterson’s unflinching yet redemptive treatment of tragedy and loss helped pave the way for ever more realistic writing for young people.”

“I received a letter from a teacher who enclosed the book report of ‘the bad boy’ in her class, who had read ‘The Great Gilly Hopkins,’” Paterson says. “He said, ‘This book is a miracle.’ Miss Paterson knows exactly how children feel.”

“I carry my child self around with me all the time,” she says. “A lot of people don’t remember how intensely they felt as children.”

Asked about her favorite Paterson book, Jane Knight, children’s book buyer at Bear Pond Books, selected the same book that the challenging student wrote about.

“Gilly was the first character in whom I could recognize myself — both my inner and outer selves,” Knight said, “someone who could be mean and crabby and full of great sorrow and longing, and also someone who could grow and change. Gilly gave me the agency and permission to be a whole human, warts and all.”

“The Day of the Pelican” and “Bread and Roses, Too,” are past Vermont Humanities Vermont Reads selections, and “Lyddie” and “Jacob Have I Loved” are perpetual favorites. However, the most popular remains, hands-down, “Bridge to Terabithia,” Paterson’s 1977 novel about two best friends, the imaginary world they create, and the tragedy one of them has to deal with.

The book has been translated into more than 25 languages, and the publishers have lost track of how many copies have been sold; Paterson says it’s “in the millions.” A 50th anniversary special edition is scheduled to come out in 2027.

During a talk at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in March, Paterson shared how the death of her son’s friend, who was killed by lightning, sparked the story.

“I was supposed to explain to my kid why his best friend had died,” she said. “I couldn’t explain it to myself — how such a terrible tragedy could happen to this bright, funny child. But I know a story has to make sense. I began to write this story to try to make sense out of something that made no sense to me.”

From China to Japan, and eventually to Vermont

Paterson’s parents — George Raymond Womeldorf and Mary Elizabeth (Goetchius) Womeldorf — were missionaries in China, and that’s where she was born, in 1932. Living in China for most of her first 8 ½ years and growing up bilingual, she was reading in English by the time she was four. She went to two seminaries and did missionary work in Japan.

During a stretch back in the United States, she met her future husband, John Paterson, a minister. Years later he would take a position at a Barre church, and in 1986 they would become Vermonters. After his death in 2013, Paterson moved from the large house they had needed while raising their four children into a smaller place in Montpelier.

Paterson’s Christian faith has always been important to her and to her writing.

“If you’re a person of faith, it’s going to come out in your books somehow or other,” she says during our conversation in her living room. “You don’t put it in. It’s who you are that comes out on the page.”

For many years, “Bridge to Terabithia” was one of the most-often banned books. Those challenging the book objected to Paterson’s treatment of death, religion, and fantasy. Some said the portrayal of some religious families was disrespectful and that the use of the word, “lord,” outside of prayer was sacrilegious. She was accused of promoting secular humanism and atheism.

“People who banned my books were all my Christian brothers and sisters,” she says. “The problem is that they think what I should be doing is writing propaganda, and not a story. Stories are open-ended and there for the reader to interpret if there’s a lesson.”

She says banning her books is no longer a priority, since she is “straight and white,” and book banners now focus on people of color and the LGBTQ+ community.

Life experiences inspire stories

During our interview, she shares many stories, like how seeing a black-and-white photograph on the wall at the Old Labor Hall in Barre led to “Bread and Roses, Too,” the story of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, during which children were sent out of harm’s way to temporarily live with foster families in Barre.

She says that “Jacob Have I Loved,” which she wrote at a very difficult time in her life, is the book she is most proud of. She wrote it while her mother was dying, her husband was busy with a new job, and their four children were unhappy about a family move. They lived in a small house, so her writing space was an enclosed front porch which was “freezing in winter and boiling in summer.”

While she is grateful for the “richness” of having had loving parents, when she was growing up, she experienced “what it feels like to not have enough money to do the things many people around me were doing.”

Never speechless

At the beginning of Paterson’s memoir, “Stories of My Life,” her fellow writer and longtime friend Nancy Price Graff (who is also a regular columnist for The Bridge) wrote an introduction in which she tells how for many years she and Paterson had weekly lunches at the Wayside on the Barre-Montpelier Road.

“Over the course of our friendship,” she writes, “I have seen Katherine whoop with laughter and I have seen her cry. I have seen her playful, sad, wistful, tired, thoughtful, and most often hopeful and happy, which seems to be her natural disposition. But I have never seen her speechless. Every week there are more stories.”

During Paterson’s talk at the library, she said, “Writers now are much more in touch with children’s feelings, and much more appreciative of the intelligence of children.” What she didn’t mention is that worldwide, she is credited as one of the writers who made that happen.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Prolific children’s book author Katherine Paterson finds tragedy and redemption across Vermont.

This story by Cassandra Hemenway was first published in The Bridge on June 24.

Overshadowed by the recent detention of two migrant workers in Vermont, the annual mobile Mexican Consulate event at Christ Church in Montpelier brought at least 132 people from around Vermont to the capital city on Saturday, June 21. Notably fewer people attended compared to last year, when over 200 attended.

Organizers and participants alike were palpably aware of the June 14 detentions of the two members of Migrant Justice (a sponsor of the event). In prior years, the event would spill into the Christ Church courtyard, with food, tables for eating and socializing, music, outdoor health checks and up to three entrances into the building. This year — because of heightened awareness of raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol that have increased under the Trump administration — there was only one entrance and exit, according to Deb Jerard, a Christ Church co-warden. 

Peppy fiddle notes rang from the courtyard, thanks to the Vermont Fiddle Orchestra and Make Music Day, a local event happening at the same time, but organizers decided to keep everything else inside the building.

Asked if the church felt like it needed extra precautions this year, Gerard responded “Yeah, we were more concerned, definitely.”

Nonetheless, Gerard said, the Boston-based Mexican consulate, which holds mobile events throughout New England, “kept reassuring us that they have not had any problem with these events.”

Security was also on hand, according to a staff member from Migrant Justice, and there were a couple of incidents that made people jumpy. One volunteer at the event told another that someone had been in the building “taking notes” — then realized at least two reporters had stopped by. Another told a Mexican consulate worker about a “suspicious vehicle” — a large black SUV with dark tinted windows — that had been idling behind the church for 30 minutes. (It turned out not to be an issue).

One participant, Olga (who asked that The Bridge not use her last name), noted that the risk of an ICE detention is on everyone’s minds right now.

“Given the current political situation, there’s nowhere that’s safe, whether we’re at home in bed, or here at the consulate, there’s always the risk of detention,” Olga said, through a translator.

Olga said she came to the event to update some documents, and while there, also got a blood glucose test from Bridges to Health, a migrant health program through the University of Vermont Extension.

“I also come in to help share information about Migrant Justice and knowing your rights with my communities,” she said.

Bridges to Health had three medical providers on hand, and was joined by the People’s Health and Wellness Clinic (a free clinic in Barre), which offered vaccinations, noted Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland, who oversees migrant health programs with Bridges to Health.

“When the consulate comes to this area, I coordinate the health there, which is an opportunity for people to get health screenings, consult with a doctor, or get vaccines while they’re waiting for their documents with the Mexican government to get processed,” Wolcott-MacCausland said. The program also helps people coordinate with their local health clinics and figure out health insurance, she noted.

After talking about her experience with the mobile Mexican consulate, Olga asked if she could say one more thing.

“I wanted to mention that as a community right now, we’re fighting against the detention of two of our leaders, Jose “Nacho” Ignacio De La Cruz and Heidi Perez, a father and stepdaughter. That’s something I want to make sure everyone’s aware of. And for my part, I’m a mother and I’m putting myself in the position of Heidi’s mother and Nacho’s partner who’s still here, free, but crying and heartbroken. It’s devastating.”

Olga said she is asking for community support to help free them and suggested visiting migrantjustice.net for updates and more information.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Despite fear, migrant community gathers for vital services in Montpelier.

This story by Cassandra Hemenway was first published in The Bridge on June 24.

A planned 31-lot subdivision on Isabel Circle in Montpelier that’s been in the works for nearly three years has been suspended. The “Stonewall Meadows Phase II” project, which is fully permitted with ground-breaking originally expected this year, is now on hold according to Gabe Lajeunesse, one of four partners invested in it.

“The partnership has determined that due to rising costs and the current economic uncertainty, we must suspend work on this project for now. The financial risks have become highly speculative, making it difficult to proceed in a market-based approach,” Lajeunesse wrote in an email to The Bridge, which also went out to Montpelier city officials.

“It’s maybe a five-plus-million-dollar project with no guarantee of any money coming back,” Lajeunesse told The Bridge in a June 20 interview. He pointed to a partnership with the city that fell apart as one of the reasons for pausing the project.

The four partners on the project are Lajeunesse, his brother Jason Lajeunesse, Barre City developer and mayor Thom Lauzon, and Pat Malone of Malone Properties in Montpelier.

The group bought the 72-acre wooded parcel just off of Isabel Circle for $3 million in 2024 and clear-cut a large swath of it in November of that year, preparing the site for housing lots. The four partners had planned to take advantage of a new city policy under which the city might pay for the project’s infrastructure — roads, water pipes, and sewer pipes — funded by a bond of $1.5 to $1.7 million that voters would be asked to approve. Aacred would have to guarantee that enough homes be built to pay the bond back via increased property taxes and water and sewer fees.

The plan never reached voters. In January 2025, city councilors cancelled a vote about proposing a bond for the Stonewall Meadows project after learning taxpayer investments might not be fully protected from the risk of loss.

In his June 12 email to The Bridge, Lajeunesse wrote: “We initially moved forward following early discussions with Montpelier that indicated potential financial support. However, efforts to secure a Strategic Partnership Agreement did not advance past city council to the voters. While we had hoped to continue solely through market-driven solutions, current conditions cast significant doubt on that path.”

Lajeunesse was careful to say the development is paused, not stopped. He pointed to new legislation signed by Gov. Scott, which creates a new financing tool for infrastructure that supports housing construction, but the timing and mechanism for that tool is not yet clear.

“We would love to see some public support that would make it more feasible,” he said, “… (and) we’re open to reengaging with the city and seeing if there is a strategic partnership.”

Lajeunesse ended his email with “Montpelier’s support would not only create much-needed housing but also set a precedent for future large-scale projects like the Country Club Road and Sabin’s Pasture projects.” He then thanked the city staff for their support, and said he “remain(s) open to creative solutions that could help make this project a reality.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Isabel Circle housing development in Montpelier halted over financing dispute.

Vermont State Police say they are investigating the suspicious death of a woman whose body was found along the side of a road in Woodbury.

Authorities have released few details of the ongoing investigation, which they reported began around 3:30 p.m. Thursday after police received a call that a body had been found at a roadside pull-off along Route 14.

First responders who arrived at the scene confirmed that the person, a woman, was deceased, according to a state press release issued Thursday night. 

Police have called the woman’s death “suspicious,” the release stated. No one was in custody. 

The woman’s identity has not been released pending further investigation and notification of her relatives, the release stated. 

The woman’s body was expected to be taken to the Vermont Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Burlington for an autopsy to confirm her identity and determine the cause and manner of her death, according to the release.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont State Police probe suspicious death of woman in Woodbury .

MONTPELIER — Bill Fraser attended his final City Council meeting as the capital’s longest-serving city manager on Wednesday night. 

Fraser was voted out by the City Council in February and plans to exit the role at the end of the month. Fraser’s ousting followed a potential 24% tax increase that the city decided to prevent by cutting municipal staff, a decision he pushed back on. Councilors also cited a desire for new leadership as a reason to prematurely end Fraser’s contract. 

Fraser’s exit entitled him to a severance package of almost a quarter of a million dollars after the council triggered the involuntary nonrenewal clause in his contract. Kelly Murphy, the assistant city manager, plans to take over the role until a replacement is hired.

“You’re always juggling something,” Fraser said. “We have police, fire, public works, rec, parks, finance, I’m sure I’m forgetting something. There’s just a constant information barrage and push and pull for priorities. Sorting that and keeping yourself on an even keel while facing these pressures, and criticisms.” 

Fraser got involved in local government thanks to his family — his parents were both public educators and his grandfather, Emile Fraser, was a state legislator in Maine — and the Watergate scandal. 

“I was in junior high during the Watergate era,” Fraser said. “We all watched the hearings on television and politics and government just kind of became a thing. So I got interested in it.”

He officially got his start in politics working an internship in the town manager’s office in Brunswick, Maine. 

“You see the people that you help right in front of you,” Fraser said. “You see the results right in front of you every day as opposed to working in state or federal government where you can work on something and it’s hundreds of miles away.” 

After four jobs in local government, including a stint as town manager in Ogunquit, Maine, and a master’s degree in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, Fraser became Montpelier’s city manager in 1995.

“One of the reasons I stayed here and my family stayed here for as long as we did is that it was a great place to live and raise a family,” Fraser said. “Also the work has just been really challenging and interesting for a small little city like this. We have ambitious goals and we have people with a lot of values and it’s really never been a dull place to work.”

One of the toughest, and most meaningful moments for Fraser was leading Montpelier through the floods that hit the capital in 2023. Fraser led the city through the flood, which put downtown Montpelier under several feet of water, and cost the city’s businesses more than $20 million in damages. Despite all the devastation, Fraser said residents “showed real resiliency” during that time, noting that 2,000 people signed up on the city’s volunteer list despite only having 8,000 residents.

“They care about the community. They care about their downtown. They care about their neighbor,” Fraser said. “There are differences of opinion about policy and about taxes and budgets and all those things, but when it comes to the health and welfare of the community and each other, people are right there, and that’s one of the great things about Montpelier.”

At the end of Wednesday’s meeting, Fraser said he was not going to miss the late nights and was looking forward to the next chapter in his life. 

“I want to be retired,” he said. “I’m going to vacation, play in a band. Maybe do some part-time consulting or whatever, helping communities, but I don’t really want to work full time anymore.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Longtime Montpelier city manager to exit after 30 years.

MONTPELIER — A Republican Flag Day gathering in front of the Vermont Statehouse ended in a frosting fiasco Saturday after a cake was destroyed and a man was shoved.

The intention of the gathering was to celebrate “Flag Day, the 250th Anniversary of the U.S. Army, (and) President Donald Trump’s 79th Birthday!” according to the Vermont Republican Party’s online calendar. The celebration was scheduled to start just an hour after the anti-Trump “No Kings” protest hosted in the same location. 

The event was hosted by Gregory Thayer, a notable Republican voice in Vermont politics who ran against Lt. Gov. John Rodgers in last year’s Republican primary.

The violence began when Matthew Baker came up to the table as Thayer was speaking and smushed his water bottle into the cake that read “Happy Birthday U.S Flag, U.S. Army + President Trump.” Thayer then turned and shoved the man, as other pro-Trump attendees rushed to Thayer’s aid. Thayer then threw the water bottle, which struck Baker’s chest.

“He smashed the cake with a water bottle. I grabbed him to push him away, and then I walked away ’cause other people converged on him. Then, the water bottle was sitting in the middle of the cake and I gave him back his water bottle. That’s pretty much it,” Thayer said.

“I just dipped this in their cake, and then they grabbed the bottom and threw it at me, in the chest,” Baker said. “I wanted to see how they would react, and I got what I expected, violence. I got this bottle thrown at me.”

Security officers separated the men, and police officers showed up promptly after the initial cake-clash.

Despite the bottle, the cake was still served, though the event ended about 10 minutes early.

The event started peacefully enough, with Thayer and around 30 pro-Trump supporters in attendance gathered around a table with a microphone and the cake.

The peace was short-lived, however, as minutes into the event the first arguments started. A young woman in a pink shirt and a man in a fireman’s jacket holding a Trump 2024 flag began to argue about immigration.

Then, a woman holding a “Chinga La Migra” poster who was a stayover from the prior “No Kings” rally ran around to distract pro-Trump speakers, who returned with chants like “Becca Balint get in line, learn to wipe your own behind!”

Arguments between event attendees and anti-Trump protesters punctuated the entirety of the event.

As tensions escalated between the pro and anti-Trump groups, Thayer made a move toward civility by calling up an older, liberal woman to the microphone. 

The woman asked attendees to find someone with whom they disagreed but could have a reasonable conversation with. It appeared neither crowd was listening, though, as both sides shouted over the woman — at one point while she was speaking, someone let off an airhorn — when she asked attendees to put their hands on their head if they thought her proposition was a good idea. Only she and Thayer did so. 

Tonya Cicio attended the event to celebrate President Trump’s birthday and the 250th anniversary of the U.S. army, as her son is in the Navy. 

“We’ve been supporting Trump since before the election … There’ll never be another president like him again — never,” Cicio said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Pro-Trump gathering at Vermont Statehouse ends in frosting fiasco.

MONTPELIER — Amid President Donald Trump’s push for mass deportations, the City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to form a committee that will develop a strategy for navigating U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity within Montpelier and improve how the city communicates residents’ rights.

The proposal was introduced by Councilor Pelin Kohn, who was born in Turkey and moved to the United States with her American husband in 2017. She became a citizen in 2020 and is a board member for the Central Vermont Refugee Action Network.

“Sometimes, ICE-related things are like news for people. … But for people I know, support and work with, it is their reality, and they live in fear,” she said. “For me, as an immigrant American, it is a very, very real fear. I’ve been approached by different community members, different groups, and I thought maybe our city can just review all the policies we have.”

Kohn’s proposal seeks to strengthen Montpelier’s already progressive immigration policy by having the ad hoc committee develop a community strategy for responding to “any ICE activity within city limits,” and improve “public communication, including the development of a dedicated, accessible city web page outlining resident rights, city policy, and emergency resources.”

Montpelier became Vermont’s third sanctuary city — a municipality that limits its cooperation with federal authorities to protect undocumented immigrants — in 2016. Since then, the city has adopted strategies like the “fair and impartial policing” policy, which sets strict guidelines for how Montpelier police can enforce immigration law, and restricts police cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Sanctuary cities have come under fire by Trump, who tried to pull federal and FEMA funding from sanctuary cities and recently listed them online. The administration later pulled this list down after it mislabeled multiple locations.

Councilor Ben Doyle expressed concerns about potential backlash from the federal government to any further pro-immigrant moves by the city.

“I think the motive here is really good, it’s to keep our neighbors safe,” Doyle said. “[But] when I read the description of the purpose of the committee, I did get nervous about potential unintended consequences.” 

The creation of the committee follows a statewide push for institutions addressing immigration. Gov. Phil Scott recently signed a bill establishing a committee to study whether the state should create an Office of New Americans to support people who entered Vermont from outside the country, and another putting restrictions on state agencies and local governments from entering into agreements with federal immigration officials.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Pelin Kohn’s name.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Montpelier council approves committee to bolster sanctuary city policies.

Anytime the Savoy Theater in Montpelier shows the Rocky Horror Picture Show, they’re cleaning up the theater for weeks, according to the theater’s marketing director, Leah Fishman. 

The cult classic features audience participation moments, including $5 prop bags full of messy objects like handfuls of uncooked rice. But Fishman said the cleanup was well worth the trouble. 

“It takes weeks, but we never regret it. It’s always so fun,” she said. 

Rocky Horror is one of six cinematic events planned for the theater’s Queer Film Festival, a three-week-long celebration of LGBTQ+ films and shorts, both modern and classic. The festival, now in its fourth year, is one of Vermont’s many events celebrating Pride Month this June. 

Pride Month events stretch all the way from Springfield to Newport, along with Bethel, Rutland, Morrisville, Barre and Essex, according to the Pride Center of Vermont. It kicks off two days early with Montpelier Pride on Friday, which includes a parade, music on the Statehouse lawn and street art. 

Just don’t look for Burlington on the list of June events: Vermont’s largest city has its annual Pride event scheduled for September, according to the Pride Center. 

Along with town-sponsored events, local venues have planned a wide variety of Pride-themed entertainment. Barre LGBTQ+ bar Foxy’s has an amateur drag night slated for June 7, while Babes Bar in Bethel has Gay Trivia planned on June 26 with the motto “Anyone can play but it’s gonna be gay.”

One of Savoy’s screenings has a Babes Bar tie-in: “One Night at Babes,” the first of its Queer Shorts events, depicts the bar’s connections to the LGBTQ+ community and its rural neighbors, Fishman said.

Another film at the festival, the surreal trans allegory “I Saw the TV Glow,” had its Vermont premiere at the Green Mountain Film Festival in 2024, but the Savoy never had the chance to screen it. 

“We’ve had it sort of in our back pocket for a while, hoping for a chance and sort of saving it for Pride,” Fishman said. 

Fishman said the film festival was inspired by the love of “queer cinema” among Savoy staff members, some of whom are LGBTQ+ themselves. 

“We’re looking for a way to sort of share and bring new people and new voices into the theater,” she said. “Whether that be through highlighting new filmmakers or sharing stories that they love, that perhaps the community hasn’t seen yet, or engaging folks in the community in a new way and really celebrating queer voices.”

Kell Arbor, health and wellness director for the Pride Center, helped select the films this year and chose ones that would bring out a mix of “the youths and the elders.” A portion of ticket sales will go to the Pride Center as well.

Along with helping to organize Montpelier’s pride events, Arbor plans to be “DJ Kell” at a pride-themed silent disco just over the border in Lebanon, New Hampshire, on June 16. 

Arbor, whose pronouns are fae/faer, said the Pride Month festivities were even more essential this year as the Trump administration rolled back federal funding for HIV prevention and other LGBTQ+ health care in Vermont. 

“It’s hard to come in joy and pleasure when we’re living in such trauma, pain and grief — and, we need it more than ever, and the brighter we’re beaconing, the more it’s helping other people feel like they’re not alone,” fae said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Queer Film Fest kicks off Pride Month in central Vermont.

MONTPELIER — The Vermont Senate voted Thursday to scrap its version of this year’s landmark education bill, H.454, and replace it with the version of the legislation the House passed last month. 

Following an afternoon of committee hearings on a proposed amendment to the bill, senators were planning to consider changes to it on the floor Thursday evening — though it wasn’t clear when they’d arrive at a final version.

In effect, the decision backtracked on weeks of work by the chamber’s education and tax-writing committees. It came less than 48 hours after Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, conceded to his colleagues in the Democratic majority that the Senate-crafted proposal had lost substantial support. 

“This idea that we will take the House legislation — and we will amend it, make it stronger, make it better — that will require a lot of work on the floor, a lot of work from our committees,” Baruth said on the floor Thursday morning before making the procedural moves that allowed the chamber to tee up the House’s proposed bill, rather than the Senate’s proposal. 

Even after all that work, Baruth then acknowledged, the legislation still “may not” get enough votes to pass.

The Senate only took up H.454 briefly Thursday morning. During an afternoon session of voting on other bills, Baruth said he hoped to dive into substantial debate on a potential amendment to the House language on the Senate floor that evening.

Gov. Phil Scott has all but demanded that legislators pass an education bill before they adjourn for the year. Both the House and Senate, and Scott, have made education reform the year’s key issue in response to last year’s double-digit average property tax increases — and all three have drafted different versions of wide-ranging reforms. 

Both chambers of the Legislature, and the administration, have broadly agreed the state should transition to a new education funding formula and move toward consolidating school districts. But disagreement has developed over the details and the timeline. 

The Senate changes being considered Thursday in committee hearings — included in an amendment offered by Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison — would stick with the House’s longer four-year timeframe for the transition. The new funding scheme, a foundation formula, would not go into effect until July 1, 2029, and would be contingent on new districts being formed. 

A foundation formula is the most common type of education funding system across the country. The approach provides districts money based on the number of students in each district and how expensive those students are to teach. 

Hardy’s amendment would also require a comprehensive study on how those students — such as English learners, special education students and those pursuing career and technical education — should be factored to the funding formula before it could go into effect.

Meanwhile, a committee to develop new school district boundary options for consideration by the Legislature next year would largely mirror the group of public education representatives and experts assembled in the House version, though both the House and Senate would also be able to appoint two people, not just one.

While the original Senate version contained no class size minimums, the amendment maintains the minimums proposed in the House version, though it adjusts them downward. Calculation of the average class sizes would be based on student populations over three years rather than two, and the state secretary of education would have discretion about whether there would be certain mandates for schools that do not meet those minimums. The House version would have required the department to take those actions.

The proposed changes to the House version would increase the number of currently operating independent schools in Vermont that would remain eligible to receive public tuition once new districts are operating. The Hardy amendment would limit eligibility to schools where tuitioned public students made up 40% of the student body during the 2024-25 school year. The House version uses a 51% threshold and a different comparison year, while the earlier Senate version set the boundary at 25%.

Hardy presented her amendment to the Senate’s education and finance committees simultaneously Thursday afternoon.

“We’re back to starting with the House version of the bill, so it’s deja vu all over again,” she told her colleagues.

Kristen Fountain contributed reporting.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Senate looks to House language, rather than its own, on education reform package.

Lucy Renaud and Kingsten Zenick are reporters with the Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship, on assignment for the Montpelier Bridge

Five years of survival through a global pandemic, historic flooding and a withering moviegoing crowd, and the Savoy Theater is still standing.

The two-screen theater in downtown Montpelier remains a hangout for people who want to share their love of cinema, a role its owners are dedicated to keeping up. 

“Reality is, if you don’t see a movie in the theaters, you can watch it later and watch it at home. So we have to make the experience unique; it has to be special to make you come out and watch the movie here,” said owner James O’Hanlon. 

“Part of that is just what we are showing: Showing films that leave people completely moved and almost as if their lives have been changed — that’s what we are here for.”

The rise of streaming services as people’s preferred movie-viewing mechanism has forced theaters across the country to close their doors. Vermont hasn’t escaped those headwinds: Merrill’s Roxy Cinema in Burlington shuttered this past fall, ending a 43-year run in the state’s biggest city.

But with post-flood renovations completed in the basement and upgrades to the theater’s upstairs pending, O’Hanlon and crew are hitting back against the streaming surge. 

The plan? Focusing on a curated selection of arthouse and indie flicks, promoting local filmmakers and offering wine and beer alongside the usual popcorn and candy.

The Savoy first opened under Rick Winston in 1981. Alongside the folks at Capitol Theater, a more traditional theater that had operated for decades around the corner, Winston helped foster a local following of film lovers in the city before selling to Terry Youk in 2009.

Youk recruited several local carpenters and volunteers to help with major renovations on the building, including the transformation of what was originally a basement video store into a second theater room. 

Among those who volunteered a day to help with renovations was O’Hanlon, who eventually bought the place from Youk in 2016. He recalls instantly falling in love with the Savoy. The theater is one of the few spots for arthouse films in the state. 

To O’Hanlon, it felt like home.

“I look at my role as sort of the steward or curator of facilitating what it’s gonna take to keep this place going,” he said. “And I love movies too. That’s why I believe in it and keep it alive.”

He understands streaming at home is typically the more affordable and easier option these days. And generational divides in moviegoing habits have been tricky to navigate: “The older crowd is the loyal base,” he said. Younger people — less so. 

But he feels a theater can offer something you just can’t get from your laptop or living room.

“Certain films are cinematic,” he said, invoking that elusive sense of spectacle, grandness. “And you’re gonna lose something if you don’t watch it on a real screen like that.”

And there’s something special, he said, about the collective buzz of a theater audience all tuned in to the same experience.

Closing shop in 2020 because of Covid — and again for almost nine weeks after the 2023 floods — only reinforced the idea of getting people to come out and be together.

The Savoy goes beyond screenings to host panel talks, rom-com-themed craft nights, cinema club meetings and showings of staff favorites. The latter, a series called “Movies We Love,” focuses on older films. 

“That will draw in a new audience who hasn’t seen them before, as well as people who have seen them before but love to come and see the films again,” O’Hanlon said. 

The theater also looks to bolster the local film community by getting involved with the annual Green Mountain Film Festival. The multiday event, held in Montpelier, features screenings in both the city’s theaters and has been running for more than two decades. Last year it returned from a four-year, pandemic-driven break.

In the end, the Savoy’s persistence only exists because of people who care. O’Hanlon is quick to credit local support for the theater’s staying in business. 

“This place only exists because of the community here,” he said. “Not because of me. It’s here because the people in this community love it.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: In Montpelier, the Savoy’s show goes on despite theater industry slump.

Parts of Vermont experienced minor flooding on Saturday as thunderstorms traveled through the state.

The National Weather Service’s Burlington office had heard reports of flooding in Irasville as well as washed out roads in Waitsfield and Warren.

A flash flood warning was in effect until 8:30 p.m. Saturday for parts of Addison, Orange and Washington counties, according to the weather service.  

As of 7:08 p.m., the state had seen 1 to 2 inches of rainfall. By 8:23 p.m., the weather service reported that the heavy rain had ended and no additional flooding was expected.

There were 2,663 customers without power as of 8:35 p.m., with Woodstock and Hartford being the hardest-hit areas, according to VTOutages. 

The weather service urged people to observe road closures and “turn around, don’t drown” if people come across high water or flooded roads since more than half of all flood-related drownings occur in vehicles.

Although rain is forecast for much of the state over the next week, the weather service does not expect hazardous weather Sunday through Friday.

A representative from the weather service’s Burlington office was not immediately available to comment. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Flash flood warnings expire for central Vermont as thunderstorms hit the state.

For roughly 22 months, the former site of the Montpelier Post Office has sat vacant, a lonely looming presence at the corner of State and Elm streets. 

The building sustained significant damage from the July 2023 flood, when water inundated the streets of Vermont’s capital. It was so hastily vacated that federal employees’ items are still sitting on their desks, creating an “eerie” feeling, according to Jon Copans, executive director of the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience. 

Now, the city and state are considering whether it may be worth buying the property at 87 State St. from its owner, the U.S. General Services Administration. 

“If you think about the location of this particular building and piece of land, it really does represent a transformative opportunity for our city in terms of what comes next,” Copans said. 

The commission, a private/public partnership between Montpelier Foundation, Montpelier Alive and the city itself that was developed in the wake of the July 2023 flood, has been working to lead a discussion about the potential uses of the property — including housing, parking, businesses, state offices and more. 

The General Services Administration announced it would begin the disposition process in December 2024. On April 21, it sent a letter to Montpelier and the state of Vermont about the possibility of a negotiated sale, similar to a “right of first refusal” for government actors before it becomes available to the general public, Copans said. 

Since then, the commission has been coordinating a collaborative discussion between Montpelier, the General Services Administration and the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development to determine whether this property could be a good fit for Montpelier’s needs. 

Many questions remain. Copans wouldn’t even put a ballpark estimate on the sale price of the property since there hasn’t been an appraisal on it post-flooding. In the 2024 Grand List, it was valued at $7.8 million.

Asked about the current condition of the building, Paul Hughes, a spokesperson for the General Services Administration, said via email that it has been “stabilized.” 

He wrote that the General Services Administration decided to dispose of the property “after it was deemed a high financial and operational risk.” Montpelier’s post office has since moved into the Montpelier City Center at the corner of State and Main streets. 

Copans said there was a “gargantuan” amount of water in the basement of the former post office, but “my understanding is they have done a lot of work.” Local rumors have circulated about problems with the building’s foundation, but Copans said the General Services Administration has reassured the commission that it’s still solid.

It’s also unclear if the building may come with a historic covenant to preserve its appearance since it’s a part of Montpelier’s historic downtown. Copans said many people find its Brutalist style not “particularly pleasing,” but nonetheless, its historic status is one issue that would need to be addressed in order for Montpelier to get a sense of the value of the building.

The 70,000-square-foot building, built in 1964, hosted the post office’s retail space on the first floor with room for postal activity in the back. The second and third floors had office space for federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. senators’ local headquarters. 

When it comes to how the city could make use of the building, Copans said housing was at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Montpelier has faced a housing shortage that only worsened after the 2023 flood. 

The property also comes with a large parking lot that could be developed into multilevel parking, Copans said. That could ease the need for parking on the other side of State Street, where riverside parking lots are exacerbating flood risk.

“We don’t believe that’s the highest and best use for that riverfront property,” he said. “A, it is ugly and B, it’s really not great when it comes to flood resilience to have a bunch of impervious surface right next to the river.”

Lindsay Kurrle, secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, said the state has a “shared interest” in building resilient communities and developing housing for workers across the state. 

“This has presented an opportunity for everyone to kind of lean in and take a look at this building and see how it could be redeveloped,” Kurrle said. 

The state has no obligation to actually take ownership, Kurrle said — but it’s facilitating the opportunity to do an assessment of the sale. There’s no risk involved at this point, she said, since the parties are just expressing interest. 

The Montpelier city manager’s office, the city spokesperson and the mayor did not respond to interview requests. 

Clarification: The headline for this story was edited for clarity.

Read the story on VTDigger here: The former Montpelier post office building is up for sale. Could it serve the city or state?.

Two-term Barre City Councilor Samn Stockwell lost her Ward 3 seat in a tight race against newcomer Don Routhier in the city’s Town Meeting Day election Tuesday. 

Routhier won the race with a vote total of 124 to Stockwell’s 110 votes. Routhier, a local business owner, campaigned on a platform of cracking down on crime and supporting Barre’s North End, a neighborhood in Ward 3 that was hit hard in the 2023 flood.

“I’m very happy that Ward 3 gave me the chance to serve them,” Routhier said Wednesday. “I do believe this is the sign that people are starting to listen (to) all the problems that we’re facing in Barre.”

Meanwhile, in Ward I, the more tough-on-crime candidate Eddie Rousse lost the race to Beth Hilgartner, an author and former minister who emphasized the need for more consensus-based city processes. Hilgartner received 201 votes to Rousse’s 173 votes for the seat, which was left open by Emel Cambel’s departure from the City Council. 

Hilgartner said via text message Wednesday that she was “grateful for the opportunity” to serve her city and neighbors.

Jeff Bergeron won an uncontested race for a City Council seat in Ward 2. Councilors Sonya Spaulding, Amanda Gustin and Michael Deering II, along with Mayor Thom Lauzon, are slated to serve their terms through 2026.

Barre voters also passed the $14.8 million budget in a year marked by ongoing flood-related fiscal challenges. Residents also voted in favor of a $600,000 ballot item for street and sidewalk improvements and the Capital Improvement Fund. They voted down a separate ballot item that would have made the city clerk into an appointed position rather than an elected role. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Incumbent Samn Stockwell loses Barre City Council seat as 2 new councilors are elected.

Camila Van Order González is a reporter for Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

Since the emerald ash borer was first detected in Vermont in 2018, Plainfield has been unlucky in its relationship with the invasive beetle. The town was a hotspot for infestations in late April, leaving dry, rotted-out ash trees ready to crash.

But Hardwick, just a few towns north, has never seen any confirmed case of emerald ash borer, according to the state.

“It’s a good lesson in how the insect spreads,” said Noah Hoffman, the invasive species coordinator for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. “Most of the emerald ash borer in the state –– we put it there.”

The emerald ash borer chews its way through forests with little regularity; it often spreads as a result of human activity, being carried on infested firewood or logging timber. They are most likely to use ash trees, which make up 6% of Vermont’s trees by volume, as hosts for larvae. The bugs have been spotted in 96 out of Vermont’s 247 municipal areas, Hoffman said.

That there are no emerald ash borers in Hardwick could be attributed to the work that foresters, educators and town management have done to slow the spread. 

“The state has done a great job with their educational outreach,” said Rose Paul of Plainfield’s conservation commission, “and we’ve tried to do our part in town.”

Hoffman said the state Agency of Natural Resources’ educational programs have been a big success in slowing the insect’s spread, teaching the public how to identify infected trees or wood and how to treat it.

“There are landowners who might have ash in their forest. If we can slow the spread, it gives people more time to think about what they want to do, do some research, create a plan for their trees,” Hoffman said. “Maybe they want to do some logging and cut their healthy ash trees.”

Trees with emerald ash borer larvae living in their bark can resemble partially peeled carrots — chunks of bark are stripped off. Those marks come from woodpeckers flecking away in search of grub. Other indications of infestation include splitting bark, thinning crowns and D-shaped exit holes on the trunk.

If left untreated, the infestation dries out the wood and turns it brittle, useless for logging, liable to fall and ultimately dead.

In Calais, townspeople’s understanding of the hazards of sick trees has made it possible to plan tree removal on a broad scale. 

“One of the things that strikes me about Calais is there’s a lot of interest in conservation and protection of natural resources,” said Kari Bradley, town administrator.

The town’s selectboard applied for an ash tree removal grant from the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program, a collaboration between the state and the University of Vermont Extension. Bradley said there was no opposition from the public on the board’s unanimous decision. 

“Calais has close to 80 miles of road, and there are somewhere (around) 3,000 ash trees along the right of way on those roads,” Bradley said.

Grant funding for the Urban and Community Forestry Program has changed due to “the shifting priorities of the current administration,” said Hoffman with a dry chuckle. “Is that a nice way of saying it?”

The Trump administration’s mass campaign to cut federal awards is a cause of “angst and concern,” Hoffman said, because although the program is state funded, “a lot of the work we actually do and the service we provide to Vermonters is through federally awarded grants.”

Other methods of managing the bug include injecting trees with a systemic insecticide, a process that can cost several hundred dollars every three years. It may seem pricey, but Hoffman argues that a tree could end up costing much more to take down than to vaccinate, especially if it caused damage on its way down.

For several years, the state has also been releasing natural predators to the emerald ash borer: few species of wasp-like insects that lay eggs inside the borer’s larvae or eggs. It’s a biocontrol measure aimed “to try to reduce its density and to try to give the trees more of a chance,” Hoffman said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: How Vermont towns are handling the emerald ash borer.

If there’s anything Barre City’s Ward 3 City Council candidates can agree on, it’s that Barre is struggling. 

“Barre has a really high poverty rate, and with the floods, that’s only gone up,” incumbent Samn Stockwell said. 

“I do believe that Ward 3 has been kind of forgotten,” her challenger, Don Routhier, told the podcast 802 Scoop last month. 

But on a variety of issues, the two candidates — who will face each other in elections on Tuesday — are at odds: from flood mitigation, to homelessness and crime, to the tenor of their candidacy and the way that the City Council should view Barre’s future. 

Routhier, owner of a local used car dealership, has framed his campaign around the concept of “Bring Barre Back” — back to the days of his family’s roots as business owners in the North End. 

The issue in Barre, as he described it on the podcast is “we have a lot of ideologies who have a dream, this rainbow coalition of everything’s going to happen, but it’s not.”

“We need doers. We don’t need teachers,” Routhier went on, “we need doers” taking action to address issues like crime and road repairs. 

Stockwell, a poet and social services coordinator for the Family Center of Washington County, has put more emphasis on the need for affordable housing and ways to support residents on the path toward homeownership. 

A similar battle of viewpoints has played out in Ward 1, where current Councilor Emel Cambel is stepping down. Former school board member Eddie Rousse said in an interview that supporting the police department and limiting loitering should be key priorities for the City Council. 

His competitor Beth Hilgartner, a retired minister and author, emphasized consensus building over jumping to specific solutions. 

In Ward 2, current Councilor Jeff Bergeron is running for another term unopposed. 

The election, scheduled to take place on May 13, will also have a budget vote, a vote on a street and sidewalk improvement fund and a vote on whether the city clerk should be appointed by the City Council rather than an elected position. 

‘Good Old Boys’?

Routhier declined to speak with VTDigger, saying that it was too close to the election for him to do an interview. As of Thursday, his sole media appearance has been on 802 Scoop, a local podcast, on April 16. 

In that appearance, Routhier held up an old photo of his parent’s former business, the Heiress Motel, now known as the Budget Inn. Although Routhier left Barre to go to college, he eventually returned and opened a used car sales business, Routhier Auto Center. 

On the 802 Scoop podcast, Rothier was asked if that made him one of the “good old boys,” an oft-used term in Barre to refer to an in-group of political figures. He replied that he finds the term “slanderous,” he said on the podcast, but indicated his support for current mayor Thom Lauzon, who came back into power in 2024 after a six-year hiatus. 

“Thank God that, you know, we have a new mayor, and I think with a little bit of help, we can turn the city around again,” he said. 

His vision for turning the city around includes more support for the police department and more cleaning up, beautifying and adding amenities in Ward 3, which includes the North End, one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in the 2023 floods. 

Stockwell also believes that new flood-safe development should be a priority in the North End. As a City Council member, she’s been working on flood mitigation through creating new floodplains, removing bridges that contribute to flooding and seeking federal funds for flood-safe housing development and home elevation. 

But at the same time, she said, Barre should be looking for more opportunities to build dense housing downtown.

“The North End would remain a rehabilitated and restored neighborhood without a ton of apartment buildings,” she said. “I think downtown is a place to develop ‘up.’” She also said Barre should look at programs to help residents become homeowners. 

The two candidates are directly at odds on whether the city should consider dredging the Stevens Branch of the Winooski River, which state officials have warned municipalities to approach with caution, since it can worsen flooding in some situations. 

Routhier told 802 Scoop he would dredge the river and recommended it be “cleaned out.” Stockwell said there were “real reasons” that dredging can be destructive and hasn’t been the most effective method for Barre. 

Not ‘that easy a divide’

Like Routhier, Rousse, in Ward 1, said he’d like to talk to Barre Police Chief Braedon Vail about ways to reduce crime. He’s specifically interested in cracking down on loitering, particularly among drug users and unhoused people, and said he believes it creates a negative image in downtown. 

Growing up in a family of seven, Rousse said he didn’t have a lot of goals, but “you’d see (someone) loitering around that was unmotivated, and I just said, ‘That’s not who I want to be.’ And I see more and more of that now.”

Rousse has spent decades as a financial planner and representative for National Life Insurance Co. He’s also active in local civic organizations like the Barre Rotary. He cited his professional experience as giving him an advantage when considering the complex fiscal situation of the city. 

“I think I could provide a common-sense response to whatever comes my way, no matter what it is,” he said. 

Hilgartner said she tried to approach issues like homelessness with “compassion.” But beyond her personal beliefs in how Barre should address the issue, she believes the emphasis should be on a more community-driven process for tackling it. It’s something she has experience with as an Episcopal minister, where you “have to keep everybody on board” to gain funding and support, she said. 

She does have one topic that is personal to her: traffic safety. Shortly after Hilgartner, a Barre native who was away a long time, moved back in 2022, two cars got into an accident on her road, damaging the heat pump connected to her home. 

Barre’s road quality was a top complaint among residents in a 2025 budget survey, and all four candidates mentioned the need to fix cracks and potholes. But Hilgartner floated the possibility of going beyond maintenance and trying to add features to slow down drivers on Main Street. 

“There’s a 25 mile-an-hour speed limit throughout the city of Barre,” she said. “It is not observed.”

Despite the challenges Barre faces, Hilgartner said it’s a wonderful place to live. She recalled the flood in 2023, when residents and community organizations across the board jumped in to help clean up. 

“The day after the rain stopped, people were just down Main Street and in the North End with their buckets and their shovels and their boots and their gloves, and they were digging their neighbors out and trying to get the businesses up and running again immediately,” she said. 

Stockwell said one recent bright spot has been the influx of new businesses to Barre, from the Slowpoke Clothing Exchange to Foxy’s, an LGBTQ+ bar. Reflecting on the tone of the different City Council campaigns, she said that Barre had a broad spectrum of political beliefs and backgrounds, among both new and longtime residents. 

“I don’t think it’s that easy a divide, and I hope people will work together to keep Barre alive,” she said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Barre voters have a choice of City Council candidates with different approaches to its biggest issues.