This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Sept. 4

On the Thursday before Labor Day, the town of Johnson gathered around its community oven.

This has been a regular occurrence at Legion Field on School Street for nearly eight years and has expanded to include Halloween bakes and “skate and bakes” in the winter, when an ice rink is set up in the park. Members of the town’s community oven committee, many of whom have been involved since the oven’s inception, pull a pie out of the stone column’s fiery maw — sometimes it’s a classic cheese pie, sometimes a custom creation — and place it before a crowd that devours each slice.

Thursday’s affair was like many of the bakes that had gone before it, but more so. There were the usual pickup soccer games, but this time they were led by athletes from Vermont State University’s Johnson campus. Hardwick’s Kingdom Creamery was selling ice cream and a raffle raised $268 for the Johnson Food Shelf. There were Charcuterie boards adorned with meat and cheese from the Johnson General Store. At a set of grills next to the oven, Jesse Whitworth grilled hamburgers and portobello mushrooms, the fragrance of which mingled with the sound of live music; all 90 burgers were gone by the end of the night.

The community oven was first lit in late October 2017, built in an effort led by former legislator and selectboard member Mark Woodward and librarian Jen Burton. Jasmine Yuris, who now chairs the community oven committee, was there at the beginning, as was Sophia Berard, who was shaping the dough before handing it to her husband, Luke Gellatly, who knows the temperament of the oven well enough to produce pies consistently with a chewy, char-kissed crust.

Yuris remembered the early conversations around building a community oven, following the example of other towns in Vermont.

“How can we make food access something that everyone experiences, rather than this idea of charity, which is just for people who need it? We all need it and deserve it,” she said.

The oven cost $8,000 to build eight years ago and has likely produced well over that amount in free meals since then. In classic Vermont fashion, it’s built upon remnants of the past — some of its stones were once part of a former talc mill in the town, according to Seven Days.

Even as the work of the oven appears straightforward, the labor and logistics required to put on the community bakes is challenging. Yuris made the dough used in the bakes in her own home the first few years before securing dough from Elmore Mountain Bread — Berard worked there as a baker before becoming a therapist. This year, for the first time in the oven’s history, they’ve used actual pizza dough. Gellatly makes the sauce with water from Johnson’s cold spring. Toppings and salad ingredients are sourced from Morrisville nonprofit Salvation Farms or purchased locally at Foote Brook Farm.

Other than the occasional repair to its stone edifice, the oven has not changed much since it was built, but the oven committee mission has evolved over the years. In the early phase of social distancing during the Covid pandemic, volunteers donned masks and gloves, and the oven became a takeout spot.

After the flood of July 2023, the oven provided free food to the community in the wake of the devastation, while pizzas were packed up and sent to the selectboard as it worked through the response. When a less damaging flood hit a year later, the committee considered calling off the bake scheduled for that week, but pressed ahead.

“I remember that was more of a question of, like, we’ve all been through this before. Is this too traumatic for us to still hold this thing and continue?” Yuris recalled. “But it all comes back to everybody’s got to eat, and it’s better to eat together, especially on a day like that, so we just continued and did the thing.”

The expanded bake night held last week was a combined effort between the oven committee and the nascent food access task force, one of several ad hoc groups formed in the wake of last year’s “Reimagine Johnson” effort, coordinated by the Vermont Council on Rural Development in effort to address the challenges the town faced after repeated flooding.

After a successful community dinner hosted at the Vermont Studio Center, the task force looked to hold an August event to benefit the Johnson food shelf, which has seen increased need over the summer after serving over 300 people in July alone, according to board member Diane Suter. Hampered by the fact that, unlike the oven committee, the task force is not an entity formally associated with the municipal government, the decision was made to expand the final bake of the summer for the benefit of the food shelf.

“We’re trying to be additive,” Whitworth said.

The task force and oven committee already share members and have similar missions. Yuris, who serves on both, said that, amid the town’s effort to consolidate the groups, she hopes to see a new food access committee take over and expand the oven’s efforts.

The oven, after all, has become more than a way to feed everyone. It’s grown into a symbol of what can be achieved through collective work, much like its new neighbor at Legion Field, the Johnson Public Library, which was moved from its flood-prone former home on Railroad Street earlier this year. When selectboard member Adrienne Parker and her partner Blake moved to Johnson from Rhode Island during the pandemic, volunteering for the oven committee was what she described as the “gateway drug” to getting more involved in the community.

“After the flood, we liked Johnson almost more because we saw how the community responded to each other. Everyone was thinking about each other,” Blake said. “In the places we’ve lived before, it’s kind of like, you’re on your own. Here, everyone’s thinking about everyone else and being strong for each other, thinking of how you can help your community members, even if you’re not affected, and I don’t know, that’s just really beautiful.”

Jasmine Yuris is a News & Citizen community columnist.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Give pizza a chance: Johnson feeds the town with community oven.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Aug. 28, 2025.

It started with a pair of ripped ski pants.

During the pandemic, Kate Harvey and her family were living in Connecticut but, like many southern New Englanders, looked north to get outdoors during the isolation. She was skiing with her son in southern Vermont when her pants ripped on the lift. They were beyond mending, but she followed her son’s youthful interest in taking things apart to see how they work. After dissembling the pants, she used the parts to make small pouches.

“It was just little zip pouches that Teddy would put his money in, and he would bring them to school, and so then his buddies would be like, ‘Oh, those are so cool.’ And then their moms would ask about them,” Harvey said.

Fast forward a few years and Harvey’s budding BirdieBlue business is partnering with apparel makers like Burton in Burlington and Turtle Fur — located nearby in Morrisville — and others to turn worn out ski jackets and snow pants into boutique fanny packs and tote bags.

It was clear to Harvey that Vermont would be an ideal place to run such a business, with its proximity to skiing-adjacent and outdoors-focused business communities, and to the material she sought to repurpose. Her husband’s flexible job as head of sales for a medical technology company allowed the family to relocate.

“We decided it’s our happy place. It’s where we wanted to be,” Harvey said. “We were a little bit of the Covid cliche, I guess, but we found that this was just an incredibly supportive community. I almost think that if I hadn’t started this fully in Vermont, there’s no way this would have been successful.”

From a workshop crowded with bags of used cold-weather clothing in an industrial area on Old Creamery Road — along the Morrisville bypass — Harvey and assistant Allegra Sargent wash loads of worn-out jackets and pants before cutting them apart and reassembling them into fanny packs, tote bags and toiletry bags. These bags are sold directly to consumers through the BirdieBlue online retail shop, but they’ve also been proliferating in local retailers in Morrisville and Stowe, and even in places like REI stores in Williston and New Hampshire.

Harvey partnered with designers to first produce the fanny pack ($58), which was the shop’s flagship product, before moving onto the toiletry bag ($58) and totes ($110).

The fanny pack comes in three-panel colorways, and over time Harvey has gauged the popularity of certain color combinations.

Harvey started the business with the pitch that 92 million tons of textile waste is produced globally, and she presumed there would be a market for people who wanted to dispose of their clothing as ethically as possible.

“We started really with thinking, let’s create a program where just any skier — an individual mom who’s got a kid at an outdoor preschool that has totally unusable gear at the end of the season — we can just create a program where you can send us your gear for free, and then you get a discount code, or we can make something out of it for you,” Harvey said.

BirdieBlue will be relaunching the program soon in anticipation of a busy holiday season. The program was also how Harvey got connected with Burton.

“They kind of heard what I was doing, and they were a great case study in the fact that gear companies were looking for something to do with all this gear that was going in the garbage,” Harvey said. “We’re providing an opportunity to be a collaborator, not a competitor, where we’ll take the gear, we’ll create something.”

This has led to an expanded retail presence, but also partnerships with ski patrols at places like Stowe Mountain Resort and Bolton Valley Resort. Earlier this week, Sargent, who has a degree in production design with an emphasis in costuming and lives in Morrisville, was busy slicing up a Stratton Mountain Resort jacket set to be refashioned.

This two-women operation is how most of the work gets done. Harvey travels to events in Vermont and beyond to spread the gospel of her upcycled accessories, which are assembled by hand. In July, she received a $25,000 grant from a nonprofit funding women whose businesses address sustainability and the environment. She invested it in a used cutting machine to make the process more efficient.

BirdieBlue went from making a couple bags a week to hundreds of bags a month, scaling with the help of a domestic network of sewing factories. But like many U.S.-based manufacturers who do most of their manufacturing and source most of their materials in the country, it hasn’t been possible to insulate the business entirely from the vagaries of the global economy and the Trump administration’s tariffs, even while limiting the parts she sources from Asian countries.

“U.S. producers are like, ‘Well, wait a minute. China’s now charging this much more. We can match that now,’” Harvey said. “This whole idea of tariffs injecting money into the U.S. economy is total bulls**t, to be honest. Where we need more investment is grants and workforce development and education.”

At the end of the day, Harvey said her path to growth has been not just about how she makes her clothes, but how she tells the story of how and why she makes them that way.

“One thing that I’ve really realized is building the community drives the sales, because it is really about the story,” Harvey said. “I mean, we’re not mass producing. It truly takes time, like a lever is cutting every single jacket by hand, so I think once we get in front of people and they really understand what we’re doing, they buy into the story.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Morrisville business upcycles Vermonters’ winter wear.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Aug. 21, 2025.

A Morristown lawmaker last week called on state health care regulators to block or delay the planned closure of Copley Hospital’s birthing center until the decision could be further analyzed by the state.

Rep. Dave Yacovone, D-Morristown, made his pitch Aug. 13, during Copley’s budget presentation to the Green Mountain Care Board.

Copley, one of the smallest critical access hospitals in the state, was the last to present its annual budgetary plans to the board. A team of administrators led by CEO Joe Woodin and Kathy Demars, vice chair of the hospital’s board of trustees, provided an explanation of the high profile and controversial decision to close the birthing center, and asked the board for support.

Woodin presented data from a consultant’s analysis that paired a declining birthrate with the expense of operating the birthing center, which ultimately swayed most of the trustees to vote to close the center by Nov. 1. An analysis that Copley presented to the Green Mountain Care Board claimed that maintaining birthing center operations would have resulted in the hospital running a $3.7 million loss, based on 2023 data. Also according to the analysis, the hospital would see a $2.9 million gain by only providing pre- and post-natal care.

Woodin’s presentation also emphasized the emotional toll the process had put upon the administration and volunteer trustees, with several slides dedicated to criticism the hospital had received during the process. Woodin claimed last week, as he had previously, that the nurses’ union had collaborated with community members to protest the closure.

“It was more than anything I’ve ever seen, and it made it really hard. But at the end of the day, it came down to a discussion of, ‘Can we afford this?’ and ‘Do we have enough volume to justify a direction towards growth?’” Woodin said. “That’s hard to say, and people really fight over those issues.”

Demars said the trustees had received hundreds of letters at their homes, some of which were unkind.

“We’re a volunteer board, and we really appreciate any support we can get from the Green Mountain Care Board in making tough decisions,” she said.

‘Defer, delay’

Yacovone, in the public comment portion following the presentation, urged the state board to prevent the hospital from closing its birthing center as planned on Nov. 1, so that its full effects on Vermont’s health care landscape could be considered and the decision could be made in accordance with the Agency of Human Services’ ongoing analysis of how to make Vermont’s health care system more efficient and less expensive.

“My request to the board is that you work to defer, to delay any decision on the Copley birthing center until the (Agency of Human Services’) strategic health plan is developed to see if this kind of decision would even comport with the strategic health plan as envisioned,” Yacovone said. “I would also ask that Copley revise their community health needs assessment to see how a community without a birthing center would be impacted and what would need to be done.”

Yacovone, a former Copley trustee, commended the current trustees for attempting to fulfill their fiduciary duty to the hospital, but said the birthing center’s closure would make health care more expensive for Vermonters, even if it helped Copley’s bottom line.

He added the travel time for residents of Morrisville and other areas of Lamoille County would be dangerous for expecting mothers.

Yacovone was not alone in his request that the birthing center be delayed. Vicki Rich, a local lactation consultant and birthing coach, asked the board to give maternal health care providers more time to respond.

Other meeting attendees, including a nurse-midwife at Copley and former birthing center patients, emphasized the importance of the birthing center in maternal health care in Lamoille County.

Yacovone contends that the Green Mountain Care Board has the ability, in setting Copley’s budget, to dictate the hospital take a specific action and require it to work with the Agency of Human Services to under Act 68, a law passed earlier this year meant to help stabilize and reform Vermont’s health care system. However, Kristen LaJeunesse, a spokesperson for the care board, said that it was beyond the board’s authority.

“Decisions about whether to continue or close specific service lines, such as birthing centers, are made by the hospitals themselves,” LaJeunesse said. “The Green Mountain Care Board’s responsibilities include hospital budget regulation and review of certain projects through the certificate of need process, but we do not have the authority to direct a hospital to keep a department open or to close one.”

Communications previously obtained by the News & Citizen between Woodin and care board chair Owen Foster show that the Copley CEO had sought the board’s endorsement of the birthing center decision. Woodin ultimately received a statement acknowledging that “transformational efforts will require hard decisions and trade-offs.”

Foster, during last week’s meeting, endorsed the idea that Vermont hospitals shouldn’t decide what services to cut purely based on their financial burden following tearful testimony from a mother who had suddenly gone into labor but was able to make it to Copley due to its proximity.

“With some of the budgets we’ve seen, there’s often a request for finances for services that lose money,” Foster said. “As we go forward with transformation, we definitely don’t want to see cherry picking and lemon dropping. It has to be consistent with the transformation plan that the Agency of Human Services is leading.”

Modest request

While the birthing center closure decision continued to be the center of attention, Copley’s actual spending proposal was more modest than in years past.

The hospital requested a 3.7% decrease to net patient revenue, a 1.6% increase to operating expenses and a 4.2% increase to commercial insurer reimbursement rates. Woodin previously asked the board for double-digit percentage increases to its commercial reimbursement rates after complaining of financial issues and a cost for services that are far lower than other hospitals in the state.

Copley also asked for spending exemptions for its financial support of the beleaguered Lamoille Health Partners and for the construction of a fourth operating room at the Morristown hospital.

The hospital gave Lamoille Health Partners a $150,000 lifeline last year after the federally qualified health care center suddenly found itself in a financial crisis. The hospital also took back some of the laboratory diagnostic work the health center had previously outsourced to a different company and provided additional services following the closure of the partner’s Stowe office.

The hospital said the construction of a new operating room was necessary to meet the demand for more space from across the hospital.

“The addition of a fourth OR is in direct response to increased demand across multiple service lines. This expansion is essential to meeting our growing patient care needs, improving financial stability, and keeping care local,” Copley’s presentation to the care board said. “The additional capacity will directly reduce patient wait times for surgical procedures, improve overall patient experience and provide surgeons with additional block time availability, supporting both provider satisfaction and recruitment efforts.”

Woodin touted the cost savings of the New England Health Care Collaborative he announced last year, and Foster encouraged hospital staff to lean into its status as a relatively low-cost health care provider and more aggressively compete with larger hospitals like the University of Vermont Medical Center.

“I think as Vermonters become more aware of the affordability challenges we have as a state, I think they probably are more sensitive to the fact that your prices are lower,” Foster said. “We would like to see you be a competitor and would like to see others compete on your prices.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: State of Vermont urged to stop Copley Hospital birthing center closure.

This story by Patrick Bilow was first published in the News & Citizen on Aug. 14, 2025.

As resident concerns linger about a proposed industrial park across from the Morrisville-Stowe Airport, a new wrinkle has drawn even more people to the opposition party — the possibility of exposure to silica, a potentially harmful rock dust, during construction.

Morrisville’s Manufacturing Solutions Inc. has been working for years to secure local and state permits to allow the development of a sprawling industrial park on an 89-acre parcel just off Route 100. According to local planning and zoning officials, it would be one of the largest developments of its kind in the region. Company management say it could help boost the local economy — if it ever comes to fruition.

Though many Morristown residents have yet to be convinced, and a groundswell of people spoke against the project at a development review board meeting in 2023, the application cleared local approval and is currently making its way through the state’s Act 250 land-use approval process.

Many residents, particularly those who abut the property, are making last ditch efforts to block the project from state approval. For two years, they’ve said the project at all phases will have a negative effect on the area’s appearance and community’s health.

During a Morristown Selectboard meeting last week, two residents — Thea Alvin and Kristin Fogdall — gave a presentation about the project to a packed room, focusing on new application materials that have surfaced as part of the Act 250 process. The thesis focused on silica, and the possibility of exposure to the dust during construction.

The first phase of the project would involve demolition of the knoll in the center of the property, allowing MSI to flatten out the land and maximize the footprint for the industrial park.

According to application materials, MSI would set up a temporary quarry to break down the knoll over a decade, crushing and trucking 49,000 tons of material each year. Morristown’s development review board approved the operation, but the exposure to silica comes as new information to residents.

As required by Act 250, the developer recently submitted a rock sample, which confirmed the presence of silica in the knoll. The mineral, when crushed into a fine powder, can become airborne, potentially causing lung and kidney disease and other respiratory illnesses for people who come in contact with it, according to some of those at last week’s meeting.

Following the presentation last week, several residents again spoke against the project.

“I’m very concerned about the health of our community,” Dacia Rockwood, a nurse at Copley Hospital and neighbor to the project, said. “I see patients everyday with (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) and cancer … and this is putting everybody at a huge risk for new or worsening problems.”

For Rockwood, the potential health impacts from silica exposure hits close to home. Her husband and son both have a genetic kidney disease, and last year her husband received a kidney transplant.

“To think his new kidney is at risk of failing because of our proximity to this is very upsetting,” Rockwood said. “We will probably have to move, and nobody will buy our property because of this project.”

Rockwood echoed the presenters, stating, “I didn’t move next door to this project; it moved next door to me.”

Patrick Towne, another neighbor to the project, agreed.

“There’s just no way I’m going to get away from the dust from this project,” Towne said. “I’ve been sick to my stomach over this project because of all the problems it’s going to cause.”

According to application documents, MSI plans to wet down the area during extraction to reduce the amount of dust, but everyday enforcement over 10 years could prove difficult. Selectboard member Laura Streets was sensitive to concerns about enforcement, stating there’s no way the town could always have someone on site.

MSI founder and CEO Garret Hirchak was invited to last week’s meeting, but the selectboard instead read a statement from his lawyer Chris Roy. In 2021, Hirchak purchased 437 acres behind the airport and only 89 of those acres are proposed for the industrial park. The knoll lies on an even smaller fraction of that land — 27 acres.

During an interview after last week’s meeting, Alvin, who presented at the selectboard meeting on the threat of silica exposure, questioned why demolishing the knoll is even necessary.

“How important is this one corner of that land that we need to put the entire community at risk?” Alvin said.

She also rebuked MSI’s classification of a temporary quarry operation. “How is 10 years of our lives temporary?”

Roy, MSI’s lawyer, pointed to the allowed used of MSI’s property, which was zoned as “light industrial” more than a decade ago, when new development at the airport was taking shape, a project that has since stalled.

According to Act 250 documents and Roy’s statement, MSI is interested in maximizing the footprint of the land, and extracting rock from the knoll will allow the company to generate initial revenue to fund the remainder of the project.

Although the project has advanced to Act 250 review and a hearing is still open, residents last week urged the selectboard to speak up, particularly if the developer mischaracterized the project in the initial development review board hearing.

As a stakeholder in the project, the board has interested party status and can submit testimony on behalf of the community, even to dispute previous local decisions.

The selectboard last week agreed to send a letter highlighting resident concerns. The board will draft the letter at its next regular meeting on August 18.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the weight of material MSI would be breaking down.

Read the story on VTDigger here: A rocky finding at a proposed industrial park raises more eyebrows in Morrisville.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Aug. 7.

“We started basically something new and innovative, honestly without really knowing what the heck we were doing at that time, but we kept our eyes open and our ears open, listening to people that had some experience, that could see what we were doing.”

With this remark, Greg Tatro articulated the spirit behind Jenna’s Promise — the substance use disorder treatment organization he and his family founded five years ago after the opioid-related death of his daughter, for whom the organization is named — and alluded to the source of its success.

Outside the former Johnson church the organization converted into a community center four years ago, Tatro was flanked by Jenna’s Promise staff, a bipartisan coalition of supportive politicians, and his family — wife Dawn, son Gregory and daughter-in-law Amy.

The genesis of Jenna’s Promise is a story the family has told many times. Jenna Tatro, in the throes of opioid dependency, in and out of rehabilitation homes, had a seed of a dream to build a program that would work for her and others, before she succumbed to her substance-use disorder in 2019.

That dream, to open a sober home “with a little more substance,” as Greg Tatro put it, began with the Rae of Hope sober home and, in the span of just a few challenging years, shot up, like the organization’s symbolic sunflower, to forever alter their family, the Johnson community and opioid treatment efforts in Vermont.

The Tatros brought in experts like Dan Franklin, who now leads the Vermont Association for Mental Health and Addiction Recovery, and developed a trauma-focused, holistic approach to treating substance use disorders that afforded residents the opportunity to stay far longer than the typical two-week timeframe at other treatment centers.

They melded this holism with a novel village recovery model, bringing together the Tatro family’s business acumen forged in its construction business, G.W. Tatro, to address the underlying material conditions that trap many in the cycle of substance use disorders, by helping them build up their resumes at two Johnson staples — JP’s Promising Goods and Jenna’s Coffee House.

These vertically integrated businesses — which also includes a coffee roasting company — didn’t just provide a leg up for those trying to address substance use disorders and produce revenue for the organization. They also helped revitalize the village of Johnson, even after the flood of July 2023 put others out of business permanently.

“Johnson is a safer place now than it was,” Tatro said. “A lot of the people that were pushing things are gone. They don’t want to be here when there’s so much recovery going on.”

Last year, Greg and Dawn stepped down from leadership roles on the Jenna’s Promise board of directors, though Greg is still involved in the day-to-day operations of the businesses, and Dawn continues her work helping “more people get into rehab in the last couple of years than anybody else in the state,” according to her husband.

Part of the transition away from a mom-and-pop substance use disorder rehabilitation organization includes bringing on Aimée Green as its new executive last fall. With her background in health care administration in behavioral and psychiatric work, she’s been working to bottle Jenna’s Promise recovery magic and codify its practices to prepare the village recovery model for further expansion.

“This isn’t some one-off miracle infrastructure. The partnerships, the blueprint — it can scale, and it should scale,” Green said on Saturday. “Communities across the country are fighting the same battles against addiction, isolation and economic decline, and Jenna’s promise is proof that we don’t have to choose between compassion and practicality.”

Recovery numbers

A report published by the Vermont Department of Health, Division of Substance Use Programs, which funds Jenna’s Promise operations along with private philanthropic efforts, looked at “phase one” of Jenna’s Promise and how it operated in fiscal years 2023 and 2024.

During those two years, the organization served an average of 31 people per year across three different sober homes. Of those who left the program, 47% were considered “successful program completions,” a number much higher than the national average, according to Gregory Tatro.

The report noted the most common reason for early departure from the program is a return to substance use.

This work comes at a cost, however, which the health department estimated is five times that of other state-funded recovery programs. But the uniqueness of the Jenna’s Promise model might make direct comparisons difficult. According to the report, it costs Vermont Foundations for Recovery in Essex Junction about $10,000 per bed, while Jenna’s Promise costs over $68,000 per bed.

Nonetheless, the Jenna’s Promise business network generated $56,000 in revenue for the organization in 2024, Green said, though the organization has struggled with staff retention over the past few years, according to its phase one report, especially in the wake of the floods which hit Johnson hard.

Partners who have worked with the organization over the past years reported satisfaction with the responsiveness to problems that may have arisen in the partnership. A minority of respondents shared concerns about a “lack of operating procedures,” an issue that Green has specifically worked to rectify.

“I like to use the term ‘bake.’ Let’s fully bake the model,” she said. “Let’s ensure we have all of our processes, systems, policies, procedures — all that stuff — fully in place, so that when we do expand, whether on this footprint or to other communities, we can share that.”

New horizons

The Vermont Department of Corrections already refers many women to the program, where, as Gregory Tatro said, they’re able to address the root causes of their anti-social behavior for a fraction of the cost of incarcerating them.

Green hopes the organization can expand its bed count with a new sober home right on the hill near Jenna’s House. She is also eager to bring the Jenna’s Promise to other towns, and perhaps even Vermont’s population centers.

The week prior to celebrating their five-year anniversary, Green and other members of Jenna’s Promise — along with state officials — met with One Brattleboro, a municipal leadership group working to address the challenges presented by, among other factors, substance-use disorder.

“Brattleboro is a great little place to visit, but there’s a lot of need,” Green said.

The organization continues to garner attention and praise at the state and federal level, thanks in part to Gregory Tatro’s agnostic interest in presidential politics, which has garnered Jenna’s Promise rare bipartisan praise. Tatro will quote a conversation with Republican Chris Christie in one instance and talk about his relationship with New Jersey Democrat Corey Booker in another. Saturday’s anniversary featured speeches from state lawmakers like Rep. Jed Lipsky, I-Stowe; Lt. Gov. John Rogers, R-Glover; and a keynote speech from Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Shelburne, the Senate majority leader.

While some current federal policy may seem to directly inhibit the work the organization is trying to do, Jenna’s Promise aims to begin accepting Medicaid insurance just as severe cuts to the program were mandated in the federal budget. Tatro believes his big tent approach can help people of all political stripes see the value in funding harm reduction.

It’s this willingness to help anyone and everyone see the Jenna’s Promise vision that both Green and Tatro believe will be key to growing one sunflower into a field.

“(My parents) helped blaze the trail,” Gregory Tatro said. “Now, it’s our job to put the pavement down, put the road markings and the guardrails up and the signs.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: In Johnson, a holistic substance use treatment organization turns 5 and eyes expansion.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on July 31.

Lamoille County’s new affordable housing nonprofit has spent the last seven months settling into its new role as some towns look for assistance in addressing the ongoing housing crisis.

Downstreet Housing and Community Development, the Washington County-based nonprofit has taken over an array of affordable housing properties previously overseen by Lamoille Housing Partnership in Cambridge, Johnson, Morrisville and Stowe, even as the full merger of the organizations is not yet completed.

The merger should be finalized in September, according to Downstreet executive director Angie Harbin. In anticipation of the resolution, the organization has added three seats to its board.

Even as the nonprofit sets up in the county, the need for its services have grown.

“Just like the entire state, Lamoille County needs more affordable housing,” Harbin said. “There’s probably not a community in Vermont right now where that’s not true.”

A statewide housing assessment conducted by the Vermont Housing Finance Agency published earlier this year said that 13% of the county’s rental stock was built with public funding, and 6% of that rental housing is available with income-sensitive rental assistance. That same report identified a third of Lamoille County occupied households as cost-burdened, where residents use more than 30% of their annual household income on housing.

Though no specific projects have been announced, towns particularly eager to expand or replace their affordable housing, like Johnson and Stowe, have begun identifying Downstreet as a potential partner in that effort.

Part of the incentive for the merger, outside of the leadership vacuum at Lamoille Housing Partnership, was Downstreet’s size — roughly double the Partnership — and thus capacity to access more federal funding and expand faster.

In Stowe, where committees are exploring potential solutions to the lack of accessible housing, town officials identified Downstreet as a potential partner that could operate and administer housing through a a community trust fund, according to a recently published housing needs assessment.

In Johnson, DEW Construction has proposed a project like the one it oversees in Barre by coordinating with Downstreet on the grant-funded construction of housing on town-owned land. The nonprofit and builder could potentially build a mix of housing types, including single-family, owner-occupied and mixed-use rentals.

The town is hoping to potentially move quickly to take advantage of $67 million in community development funds recently announced by the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, which are intended to assist communities hardest hit by the July 2023 flood. “A majority of funding will be focused on creating new housing units outside of flood plains and supporting infrastructure in the identified regions,” according to an agency press release.

“Not only are we operating existing affordable housing in Lamoille County but also making sure that we have the capacity to continue to develop there,” Harbin, the Downstreet executive director, said, noting that the group is currently exploring some properties in Johnson. “We are really committed to making sure that there’s at least one housing project that’s utilizing that (block grant) funding. We’re generally exploring real estate development opportunities in Lamoille County.”

Downstreet, like other affordable housing developers, is attempting to balance demand and funding. The Vermont Housing and Conservation Board is no longer replete with pandemic-era money, and there is now a great deal of uncertainty around federal funds amid the disruption of the Trump administration.

“We were seeing pretty significant cuts at the state level, because there has been so much Covid-era funding that was winding down, so we’re already looking at far fewer affordable housing projects developed across the state, and then there’s the federal funding,” Harbin said. “We don’t have a clear idea what’s going to happen or what’s going to be cut as at this point.”

Evictions avoided

The transfer of properties from the Lamoille Housing Partnership portfolio hasn’t been without its share of hiccups, particularly for a Jeffersonville property with a history of management issues.

Last October, just as Downstreet was about to take over management of the building, the Mann’s Meadow senior housing apartment complex was beset by a disabled elevator, stranding some of the less mobile residents on the upper floors of the building. At the time, Harbin requested patience as the nonprofit assessed each property and its maintenance needs.

Several residents at Mann’s Meadow recently received “notice to terminate tenancy” letters and warnings despite not owing any back rent. The notice was concerning enough to tenants that they reached out to the Cambridge Selectboard for help.

By the time selectboard members could inquire about the issue, according to a discussion at the board’s July 15 meeting, it had already been resolved. Downstreet had received incomplete information from the building’s former property management company, according to Harbin.

The former company abruptly ended its property management services at Mann’s Meadow, and transitioning to a new property management system quickly proved tricky.

“It’s a very alarming (notification) to receive, and we also weren’t aware that the previous property management company wasn’t using this type of notification, because it is typical all over the state,” Harbin said. “All of that has been straightened out, which is great, and we’ve been leasing up units right now, some at a bit of a clip, as we’ve been turning them over, getting them ready to lease up and then moving new folks in.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: In Lamoille County, Downstreet nonprofit takes over affordable housing efforts.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in News & Citizen on July 17.

With the pending purchase of an adjacent tract of land, the Peter A. Krusch Nature Preserve is set to greatly expand the publicly accessible forestland in Cambridge.

The Krusch Preserve Committee, which in 2021 established the preserve on land acquired by the town from resident Sally Laughlin, opened a 51-acre tract of dynamic woodland to the public, and created an accessible route to the Cambridge Pines State Forest.

A neighboring piece of land known as the Bormann property was considered for the preserve at the time, but an initial grant application was denied. Now, four years after the preserve first opened, the town is planning to acquire nearly 30 acres of additional land with assistance from the Vermont Land Trust.

The purchase will also connect the central section of the preserve with another piece of land owned by Cambridge village. Part of that land is off-limits to the public due to the existence of a wellhead on the tract, but trails that will be built through the area will more than double the area of publicly accessible forest, Laughlin said.

The expansion will add more diversity to the preserve, she said, and expand the preserve to over 200 acres.

“I was delighted when we walked up into the Bormann land, which is more hardwood forest, more maples and so forth,” Laughlin said. “There are wood thrush there, and there’ll be some different species of birds and plants and so forth.”

The Cambridge Pines State Forest contains some of the oldest trees in the town — it is a second-growth forest that has been mostly left intact since it was logged about 200 years ago. The current preserve contains meadow, forest, wetlands, Dragon Brook and a sand blow, land that has been rendered sandy and unvegetated by stiff winds.

The new portions opened up by this purchase will add higher elevation habitats to the range, and even features what Laughlin says is “probably the oldest yellow birch in Vermont,” just over the line into the village’s property.

The preserve has become regionally popular in its four years of public use, with a tracker borrowed from the Lamoille County Planning Commission indicating the preserve saw thousands of visitors within a 10-month span.

The Bormann family has entered an agreement to sell its property to the land trust, which will then transfer it to the town for the appraised value of $235,000. With additional costs, the land trust has estimated that the overall cost of the project to be at around $300,000, most of which will be covered by a grant they’re seeking from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust, along with $20,000 from the Cambridge Conservation Commission and additional funding raised by the nonprofit Friends of the Krusch Nature Preserve.

Bob Heiser and Friends of the Krusch Nature Preserve president Mary Fiedler, in a letter to the selectboard from land trust project director, noted that expanding the preserve has important environmental benefits.

“The forestland is part of a larger forest block identified by the State of Vermont as a Priority ‘Connectivity Block’ and Priority ‘Interior Forest Block,’ providing critical ecological connectivity on a statewide level,” the letter said.

The Cambridge Selectboard voted at its July 1 meeting to sign a letter of support to the housing and conservation board in support of the grant.

A public informational meeting about the project will be held Monday, Sept. 8 at 6 p.m. at the Cambridge Historical Society.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Cambridge nature preserve plans major expansion.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in News & Citizen on July 3.

A Morristown sculptor whose roadside artwork was destroyed when a commercial truck hit it three years ago has reached a settlement with the insurance company over the value of the destroyed stones.

In April 2022, the driver of an Isuzu street sweeper fell asleep at the wheel on Route 100 near Morrisville, crashing through the Phoenix Helix, a swirling stone sculpture built at the roadside of MyEarthwork, the home gallery of Morrisville artist Thea Alvin.

Alvin told the News & Citizen at the time that the driver had been working all night and was tired, was not injured and sincerely apologized, but emphasized the loss she had suffered in the incident.

“It was a very important part of my identity as a sculptor, as an inventor — defiant and strong and a little insecure, a little imperfect, beautiful and steady and heavy and profound but also carefree,” she said at the time. “When it was crashed into, it felt like my identity was broken.”

Stonemason friends ended up coming to her aid and a new Phoenix Helix rose from the ashes, but a battle with the insurer of her work was more protracted. Three years after the sculpture was destroyed, Alvin said she has finally reached a settlement over the value of the artwork and concluded a disagreement over how the piece should be assessed.

Prior to the final mediation session, she posted on social media that she was close to settling with the insurance company over whether the destroyed sculpture should be considered art or just a stone wall.

“I have stood my ground that art is art, even if it is, especially, if it is, made of stone,” Alvin said.

The settlement was reached in mid-June, but Alvin — after conferring with legal counsel — declined to share the specific terms, prior to leaving to teach stone wall restoration on a private island in Brittany, France.

Alvin confirmed that a monetary compensation was reached, though not for the full appraised value of the work. She also confirmed that the insurer acknowledged that the Phoenix Helix’s value was due to its status as a work of art and not just a wall.

The destruction of the stone wall hasn’t been the only time a driver has veered onto her property off the busy nearby highway; Alvin said an errant driver recently took out her apple tree.

Alvin is well-recognized for her art both locally and internationally, though she’s made more headlines recently for her efforts to preserve open space along the Route 100 corridor. She’s led an effort to oppose the approval of a sprawling new industrial park planned across from the Morrisville-Stowe Airport under Vermont’s environmental regulatory law and put her skills to use in the effort by building handmade dioramas to illustrate the potential impact the development would have on the land.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Morristown sculptor settles over damage to roadside attraction.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by News & Citizen on June 12.

Just south of the popular summer destination of Lake Eden lies a quieter body of water.

South Pond, an idyllic retreat populated mostly by modest bungalow camps and accessible only to property owners, is, like many such bodies of water in the state, managed by a collective. The South Pond Land Owners Association charges a small annual fee for the maintenance of roads and property owned by the association, and the cost of insurance.

Among the shared assets is a small dam at the pond’s northwestern edge where it feeds into a tributary that eventually runs into the Gihon River. The 2-foot-thick concrete core is embedded within a sloping earthen wall, with only a concrete auxiliary spillway at the hill’s summit and a green box sitting just beyond it in the water as clues to its existence.

The century-old dam is a crucial one, however. Not only is it responsible for maintaining the water level in South Pond, but it also controls the flow of water out of the pond and into the lowlands. It was reclassified within the last few years from a “significant hazard dam” to a “high hazard dam” by the state, a designation indicating the outsized risk for loss of life and property should the dam fail. South Pond Dam is one of five dams with such a designation in Lamoille County.

This increased risk designation, though it has nothing to do with the condition of the dam — both the landowners association and the state attest to it being in excellent shape and at no risk of failure — and the increasing scrutiny of state regulators toward privately owned dams has pushed the South Pond community to take proactive measures to ensure the safety of their dam, which has meant a greater shared cost.

A routine inspection of the dam in 2022 concluded with the state recommending that the hydrologic and hydraulic analysis studies be conducted to evaluate the dam’s performance, including a detailed dam failure analysis, and act on the recommendations that come out of those studies.

After the issue was discussed by association members, the majority decided to begin conducting such studies despite the increased expense to its members.

“As one association member put it at our last annual meeting, we feel we have a moral obligation to follow up on the (dam safety program) inspection recommendations in order to minimize the risks to the people living downstream,” association officer Mark Frederick said.

A history of the South Pond dam

Even before the dam was built, South Pond had been a notable water formation in the county, albeit an inaccessible one, locked away in an Edenic wilderness considered remote even by Vermont standards, although the Lamoille Newsdealer noted in 1871 that was used by the local community as a reservoir.

In 1922, a St. Albans utility company constructed the dam, expanding the pond and turning it into a reserve for downstream hydroelectric facilities, or basically turning the pond into a big battery, as Ben Green, head of the state’s dam safety program, put it.

The dam failed in the flood of 1927, contributing to the most devastating deluge Vermont has experienced to date, according to Frederick. A dam inspector brought up from New York a year later declared it to be safe, but worth watching at times of heavy rain, according to a contemporaneous report in the News & Citizen.

In the intervening decades, campers marked out their territory along South Pond’s shores. The dam was acquired by the now-defunct Central Vermont Public Service. Property owners and the utility coexisted peacefully for years, until the owners petitioned the state to tighten regulations on the publicly accessible portions of South Pond in 1988.

This prompted the utility to claim it owned all the land within 15 feet of the shore. Though some landowners had deeds dating back decades, the records for the properties had “turned up missing,” according to the News & Citizen.

After a protracted legal battle, minutes from the South Pond Land Owners Association’s annual meeting in 1990 shows its members voted unanimously to acquire the rights to the pond — and its dam — for $98,500, paid off in installments.

‘Unintended consequences downstream’

For years, it was the responsibility of a designated neighbor to alter the flow of the dam during times of intense rainfall or in danger of flooding and to “exercise” the dam annually. Still, according to Frederick, the dam was “overbuilt” and water has never been close to rising to the height of the dam as it towers 15 feet above the pond’s usual water level.

This hand-operation method was replaced in 2004 by a spillway, a green box that sits in front of the dam and allows the free flow of water through it, allowing the pond to self-regulate. A primary concern of the state remains that the dam tunnel allowing water to pass through it has been unchanged since it was built, and there is no auxiliary spillway except at the top of the dam, where water can flow out and erode the ground encasing the dam.

A spot inspection conducted by the state following the July 2023 floods found the dam to be in good condition and in no danger of failure, though investigators recommended debris be removed from its spillway.

According to Green, who has worked closely with Frederick and the landowners association to address the concerns raised in the 2022 inspection, Vermont has lagged behind the rest of the country in regulating dams, and its authority to regulate privately owned dams has historically been weak, with the state unable to step in unless a failure is imminent.

That’s beginning to change, though efforts to phase in new regulations have been stymied by the distraction of multiple 2023 floods and another last summer requiring more immediate attention. Still, Green praised the South Pond landowners for being proactive and cooperating with the state of their own volition.

Frederick said the cumulative studies recommended by the state should cost between $100,000 and $150,000, a price tag that the association members were unable to afford to pay in a single year of collected dues. The state has allowed the association to pay for the undertaking study by study in annual installments, though this still means that landowners used to paying a few hundred dollars a year are now paying over $1,000 each year for the privilege of living on South Pond.

These studies could potentially lead to an eventual reconfiguration of the dam, Green said, which could in turn allow for the reduction of the dam’s hazard level and a higher condition rating.

The amount of water the dam pushes into the Gihon brings its own considerations. The dam’s spillway, particularly in extreme flooding events, simply releases the water gathering in South Pond into the Gihon, whose flooding contributed to the excessive damage that has reshaped the town of Johnson and other downstream villages. It’s the size of the passage below the dam, unchanged for over 100 years, that will be important to get right if any changes are made.

“Whenever you modify a spillway, you have to be careful in doing so. It might be attractive to release a bunch more water,” Green said. “While that sounds attractive, that can have unintended consequences downstream.”

South Pond is the model for the rest of privately owned dams in the state, Green said, but as the state increases its regulatory scrutiny, what are now recommendations being made by the state may become requirements.

“I think a lot of owners have gotten into a little bit of a groove of not really spending the money necessary, so this is going to be, unfortunately, a little bit shocking for some owners,” Green said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Eden property owners look to solve problems with South Pond dam.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on May 29.

For nearly two years, there was no way to consistently purchase fresh produce in Johnson. The newly opened Johnson General Store changed that.

Since the Sterling Market closed following the flood of July 2023 and the grocer that operated it decided not to reopen the location, which had been repeatedly inundated over the years at its vulnerable position at the confluence of the Lamoille and Gihon rivers, the town had been without a grocery store.

The restaurants, gas stations, the dollar store and the Foote Brook farm stand in the summer months have helped fill the void, but fresh vegetables could only be acquired during the long winter months by taking a trip to Morrisville, which is seven miles away if you live in the village and even farther if you live outside of it, and only an option for those who have a car to drive.

With a grocery store’s return to the former Sterling Market location looking increasingly doubtful, longtime resident Mike Mignone and his wife Haley Newman stepped in to fill the gap by opening the Johnson General Store on Lower Main Street.

During the noon hour last Friday, a steady flow of customers signaled that the store, which opened May 9, is already settling in as part of the community. From behind the register, Newman said monitoring what sells fast and soliciting feedback from customers is helping the store owners learn what works and what doesn’t.

“We keep selling out of things that we didn’t necessarily expect would go so quickly,” Newman said. “There are certain things, like fresh produce, that we don’t want to order in large quantities and have them go bad, but then we’re selling them immediately and running out of different things.”

Mignone, who previously ran Hangry Mike’s food truck and has a background in the restaurant industry, had planned to open something similar, but after participating in the Reimagine Johnson initiative organized by Vermont Council for Community Development, where increasing food access had emerged as a vital goal for the community in the wake of the 2023 flood, he and Newman decided to prioritize a general store instead.

Supported by community members and the emerging food access task force, Mignone and Newman have put their own capital and equity on the line to open the store in the building they’re leasing from the former operators of the Get Yours head shop.

They’ve taken out loans from both the town and the village revolving loan funds — which are meant to encourage just such a community-oriented operation — filling the gap with their own savings and ensuring all the requirements for the licenses they needed were met, all while managing a family that includes two elementary school-age kids and a fifteen-month-old.

In February, a few months after Mignone announced his intent to open the general store, the Sterling Market property owners announced they would pursue a property buyout, ending speculation that a grocer might return to that location and making the need for the general store ever more urgent. Associated Grocers of New England, the former operator of the Sterling Market, is now the general store’s supplier.

The response Newman and Mignone have gotten from the community so far has primarily been gratitude.

“So much gratitude, so many smiles, so much excitement,” Newman said. “It’s really made all of the headaches and stresses of the past six months trying to get open worth it.”

A variety of fruit, vegetables, pantry staples and dry goods line evenly spaced shelves in the closely kept but clean, well-lit space. There are plenty of locally and regionally produced goods, and Newman said there’s more on the way. Occasional empty space on the shelves marks where customers have been particularly enthusiastic, and Mignone has already rolled out some ready-made options in a warming case at the back of the store.

At the community forums held as part of the Reimagine Johnson process, many remarked that it wasn’t the food they missed most about the Sterling Market, but its role as a place where shoppers ran into their neighbors.

The Johnson General Store is cozier than the old grocery store, and options more limited, but neighbors are already showing up. It’s the first general store in Johnson since Facey’s General Store, which last advertised in the News & Citizen in 1976, though DJ’s Corner Store and Deli had served a similar role in the same location well into the 2000s before its deli case was swapped out for glass pipes.

Johnson newcomer Joy Novakowski, who stopped by on Friday for a cup of coffee and a muffin to go, said food access had been important to her and her partner, and they had joined the food access task force when they came to town.

As with the recent monumental move of the Johnson Public Library from its longtime, flood-prone home on Railroad Street to higher ground at Legion Field, Novakowski sees the general store as part of Johnson’s changing narrative.

“It’s not only an essential hub, but socially, this is where we meet our neighbors,” she said. “With a community that’s trying to rebuild itself in so many ways and has the capacity to retain and grow, what does that story look like for Johnson when we’re actually nourishing the residents and people who are coming through to visit, too?”

The Johnson General Store’s story is just beginning, but just getting its doors open has felt like a monumental accomplishment to Mignone.

“We’ve got a long road ahead of us, but it’s been nice to be actually running the store,” he said.

“We’re just relieved that we made it,” Newman said. “There were so many moments of like, ‘Are we ever going to open the doors?’ Because it was just roadblock after roadblock after roadblock, and then waiting on different permits and licenses, and then that final week, everything came together.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Johnson General Store gets warm welcome.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the News & Citizen on May 8.

The shelves on the second floor of Vermont State University Johnson’s Willey library are looking empty these days as the campus makes room for its growing nursing program.

The materials that once sat on the shelves have been moved to the library’s first and third floors as the university works “to create a more accessible and versatile area for learning and collaboration,” signs posted on the shelves read. The reorganization will make room for labs and simulation space for the nursing program, according to university Provost Nolan Atkins.

“Expanding nursing through the creation of labs and simulation space will really allow us to expand our nursing capacity here at Johnson and within the Lamoille County area,” Atkins said. “It would be a huge and positive byproduct in terms of just creating more nurses and contributing to the health care workforce in this part of the state.”

The Johnson campus is building out a unique tiered nursing program, where students can work toward the most basic levels of nursing qualifications, beginning with practical nursing certifications and laddering through a registered nursing degree and eventually to some master’s degrees.

Now, five years out since a warning by former Vermont State Colleges Chancellor Jeb Spaulding proposed the closure of several campuses, including the one in Johnson, amid financial distress, the state has invested millions in turning the beleaguered university system around.

Part of the former state college system’s reorganization has included a reshuffling of its academic offerings. In 2023, the university announced consolidations and shifts in focus at its campuses, including the expansion of in-demand nursing programs at its Johnson and Williston campuses, while some fine arts programs at Johnson were either terminated or consolidated.

The university recently announced a 15% increase in new students, with the nursing program among those receiving the most interest, even as the program is being built.

The university has also been assessing the unused buildings on its campuses and attempting to work with local communities to find new uses for them. For example, McClelland Hall on the Johnson campus is in the process of being transformed into affordable senior housing through previously apportioned federal funding.

The second floor of the library was identified as the area best suited for this component of the nursing program.

“It’s the one space that really would work well to build out the lab and simulation space,” Atkins said. “It would work really well for the students and for the program and would work in terms of just making the infrastructural changes that we would make we would need to make within the budgetary constraints that we have.”

The university’s libraries were the subject of contentious public debate in winter 2023, when then-President Parwinder Grewal attempted to enact a cost-reduction plan that would have closed libraries at campuses across Vermont, including the one in Johnson.

That decision was rescinded and Grewal resigned following intense backlash from students and the public. According to Alejandra Nann, library director for the Vermont State Colleges System, the decision to give up the second floor of the Johnson library to the nursing program was out of her scope but would benefit the Johnson campus in general.

“It’s about enriching the campus with another program, and essentially everyone benefits,” Nann said. “In terms of the library space, it’s being reorganized to make room for it.”

The university libraries are still playing catch-up after the pandemic closures prevented them from enacting the regular weeding of their collections, the process through which materials that are out of date or see little use are removed from the collection. Catching up on weeding has allowed the Johnson campus to free up space on the library’s second floor, and Nann said the process was standard and evidence based.

According to Nann, these changes will ultimately benefit the library.

“Nurses are huge library advocates and library users, so if anything, it might bring more vibrancy to the library, which we’re really excited about,” she said.

A previous version misspelled Alejandra Nann’s name, mischaracterized Parwinder Grewal’s role and misidentified Nolan Atkins’ last name.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont State University-Johnson swaps library space for nursing labs.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in News & Citizen on April 24.

Lamoille Health Partners took quick action to avoid the eviction of its dental offices in Morrisville Plaza earlier this month, catching up on payments in arrears just as its landlord filed documents accusing the health care nonprofit of breaching its lease contract.

Savoy-Texas, LLC, the Delaware-incorporated group that owns the building occupied by Lamoille Family Dentistry, alleged in court filings that Lamoille Health Partners owed $50,000 in lease payments.

Peter Anderson, chair of the Lamoille Health board of directors, said the organization had caught up on lease payments just prior to the legal filing and that it was being withdrawn.

Lamoille Health Partners is also facing a lawsuit filed by its former Stowe landlords after it withdrew its primary care clinic earlier this year. The legal claim filed by Grandview Farms alleges it is owed $240,000 in back rent and an unpaid share of common-area maintenance of the building.

Susan Bartlett, Lamoille Health board member and interim CEO, said the organization’s failure to make its lease payments on the Morrisville dentistry was due to a lack of cash on hand, but the situation was stabilizing.

Bartlett said the goal now is to make more efficient use of the space at the dentistry office and consolidate some of its services there. Lamoille Health Partners, a federally qualified health center that provides primary care, pediatric care, mental health care, substance abuse treatment and dental care to around 19,000 people, is currently undergoing an organization-wide, $2 million cost-cutting effort and exploring a merger with Copley Hospital.

The dentistry, one of the few in the Lamoille County area that accepts adult patients with Medicaid insurance, has a months-long waitlist for new patient appointments.

Lamoille Health’s federally qualified status allows it to be reimbursed by Medicaid at a higher rate than other health care providers and allows patients to pay for services on a sliding scale, but its already dire financial situation is further challenged by massive cuts to Medicaid being considered at the federal level by the Republican-controlled Congress.

Lt. Gov. John Rodgers, R-Glover, raised the alarm regarding the potentially devastating health care cuts being considered at a recent Lamoille County legislative breakfast and again at a forum hosted by Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., in Stowe earlier this month, calling out specifically the threat posed to the state’s 11 federally qualified health centers.

Bartlett, who served as Lamoille County’s state senator for decades, said she didn’t envy current lawmakers and called the threatened cuts “truly terrifying.”

“It’s the chaos of not knowing,” she said. “Once you know, you can start to make some concrete plans and start to make what will be difficult choices, but it’s so hard to do any of that when you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Morristown dental clinic avoids eviction.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in News & Citizen on March 27.

After weathering several severe floods and windstorms in the last half-decade, Vermont Electric Cooperative is turning to new software that will allow them to identify the most vulnerable aspects of their infrastructure.

The Johnson-based utility announced last week it would be partnering with Rhizome, a software that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify potential points within the power grid that are likely to be damaged in future weather events.

Cyril Brunner, the utility’s innovation and technology director, said Rhizome software will help tackle the monumental challenge posed by the increasingly severe storms fueled by a changing climate.

“The example I’ll often use is that we have a $200 million problem and can spend $5 million a year,” Brunner said. “You do the quick math, and you’re like, ‘Cool, maybe in 50 years, we’ll have a better system in place.’ But the reality is, unless we want to have significant rate impacts — and we have a territory that has a lot of low-income folks on fixed incomes — we’re trying to minimize the rate impact. Because we have those limited resources, it’s all about prioritization.”

Enter Rhizome. Brunner was familiar with the company from its work on Vermont Electric Power Company, the state’s transmission operator. The company reached out with a new software it had designed specifically for smaller utilities, with a price-point to match.

Instead of Vermont Electric Cooperative spending far beyond its means to try and protect all its systems and transformers, Rhizome will allow Brunner and the co-op to take a more surgical approach. As Brunner explains it, the software takes publicly available climate models and analyzes them with the kind of powerful machine learning available through recent artificial intelligence breakthroughs, applying massive datasets to three-mile squares, downscaling the analysis to look at how weather events can impact extremely specific pieces of land.

After the massive flooding the county saw in 2023, and the many downed power lines that caused extended outages following Hurricane Debby last summer, utility officials are hoping Rhizome will help them identify the power lines and substations that could be the most easily damaged in a variety of weather scenarios.

“It’s much more about making investments into the system, replacing lines, moving lines, upgrading lines,” Brunner said. “It probably won’t help us if there’s a storm coming next week.”

Using software like Rhizome is just one way the utility is trying to make their severe weather response more efficient. Vermont Electric Cooperative recently hosted a webinar this week with COO Peter Rossi and operations supervisor Shawn Juaire on how the co-op is making use of drones in post-weather event repair and maintenance efforts.

Brunner pointed to several recent state-commissioned climate reports indicating increased precipitation will continue while the winters shorten. And technology powered by artificial intelligence like Rhizome has an outsized impact on the demand for electricity and water, which can contribute to climate change, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Brunner said, while the changing climate will affect everything, the co-op must do something to invest in its own resilience with its limited budget.

“We’re trying to figure out what is the worst problem,” he said. “We know that everything’s going to be impacted in some way, but where is there going to be the most impact to the power system and what can we mitigate the most?”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Electric co-op turning to AI to weatherize grid against future storms.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by The News & Citizen on Feb. 20. 

The first piece of legislation signed into law by Gov. Phil Scott last week cleared up the uncertainty following the discovery of decades of technically illegitimate elections in Hyde Park. The law was primarily inspired by the town’s predicament.

The law, known as H.78, updated Vermont’s laws around Australian ballot voting, allowing the process to be used for “any and all” officer elections. Previous law allowed only for the election of all town officers by Australian ballot or not at all.

Crucially for Hyde Park, the law also clarifies that “the validity of a vote by a municipality to elect some, but not all, municipal officers prior to the effective date of this act shall not be subject to challenge for failure to comply” with previous law and “any municipality that voted to elect some, but not all, municipal officers prior to the effective date of this act, the election of a municipal officer shall not be subject to challenge for failure to comply” with previous law.

The law was sponsored by the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs, which includes two members from Lamoille County: Lucy Boyden, D-Cambridge, and Mark Higley, R-Lowell, who also represents Eden.

Boyden said the law was crafted by the committee following testimony from Deputy Secretary of State Lauren Hibbert after Hyde Park’s realization that their Australian ballot elections were not in compliance with state law. This revelation also prompted an unspecified number of other Vermont towns to reach out to the secretary of state’s office with concerns that they had also been conducting similarly noncompliant elections.

Hyde Park officials discovered late last year the town had been conducting officer elections out of compliance with Vermont law since 1994, electing some of its town officers by Australian ballot but not all of them, as the previous law required.

Though the secretary of state’s office initially recommended a special town meeting be held to affirm the legitimacy of most of the selectboard, it was eventually agreed that the selectboard could affirm its own legitimacy, which it did in December.

By passing this new law, the state is both ratifying three decades of Hyde Park elections and legitimizing the process by which they were conducted going forward.

“Section two in the law kind of waved the legislative magical wand and said, ‘If you haven’t been complying with the law, no worries. It’s all OK, you’re not going to get into any trouble or anything, but just going forward, this is the way to more clearly follow it,’” Boyden said.

Boyden said the committee found that a major issue behind the Australian ballot process for many Vermont towns was the lack of a town charter, and therefore the lack of a legal document outlining how voting was conducted within the town, which led to an inconsistency in the implementation of ballot voting. Many towns use a mix of Australian ballot voting just as Hyde Park did, but have language in a town charter that legitimizes it.

Despite the passage of the law, it’s back to the drawing board for Hyde Park, where residents will elect all officers by floor vote on Town Meeting Day this year and decide if Australian ballot should be reinstated for some town officers, all town officers or replace the in-person Town Meeting Day tradition entirely.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Legislation affirms prior Hyde Park elections.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in News & Citizen on Feb. 13

After one grocery operator departed the building following the flood of July 2023, and an attempt to secure another operator fell through, the owners of the former Sterling Market building are pursuing a property buyout.

“We’re extremely disappointed, but we’re hoping we can work with the town and come up with something that’ll be a vital benefit to the community,” said Ernie Pomerleau, president of Pomerleau Real Estate, which owns the property.

The building that formerly housed Johnson’s grocery store has sat empty since it was inundated by floodwaters a year and a half ago. Its former operator, Associated Grocers of New England, initially vowed to return, but the proposal was vetoed by its governing co-op board.

The grocer instead expanded its Vermont footprint with the acquisition of Mac’s Market, a small chain of Vermont grocery stores.

Pomerleau then brought in executives from Shaw’s, a grocery chain with locations throughout New England. Shaw’s was interested in opening a store, according to Pomerleau, but needed the building’s owners to commit to installing flood mitigation measures, including a new floodgate, to ensure its protection against future flooding. With support from the town of Johnson, Pomerleau was pursuing a grant through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Swift Current program, the purpose of which is to help fund flood mitigation of buildings after a major disaster declaration is made.

As the grant application process plodded along, Pomerleau’s engineers proposed plans to renovate the property in a way that would make it nearly impervious to most future flood events, he said.

But nearly impervious ended up not being enough for Shaw’s, which pulled the plug on the venture at the end of last year, shortly before an attempted mega-merger between parent company Albertsons and another national chain, Kroger, was nixed by a federal judge following a lawsuit by former President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission.

“We had everything in place, but then in the end, they couldn’t get to 100-percent risk free, and I understand that, so here we are, and we don’t have any good, viable options,” Pomerleau said.

The Sterling Market building was built by Pomerleau Real Estate in the 1960s, and had always housed a grocery store, but, located at the confluence of the Lamoille and Gihon rivers, it was flood prone. Flooding in 2011 prompted the departure of Grand Union market.

After that, Pomerleau worked with the town, accessing its revolving loan funds to help set up Sterling Market in 2013, which was originally owned by Mike Comeau before its acquisition in 2017 by Associated Grocers of New England.

Lacking any better alternative, Pomerleau has reluctantly joined other property owners in Johnson seeking to offload their flood-prone homes and businesses and become the 17th property owner to apply for a buyout since 2023.

The former Sterling Market building joins other riverside businesses like the now-vacated Union Bank building and still-operating Johnson Health Center on the pending buyout list. Funding for buyouts can be accessed through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state, but the Sterling Market building’s buyout will be handled through the Swift Water program; so far, no property in Johnson damaged in the 2023 flood has successfully finished the buyout process.

Pomerleau said his real estate group, after over half a century, is out of the grocery store business in Johnson, at least for now.

At community forums and town meetings, residents repeatedly expressed concern about returning a grocery store to such a flood-prone site, but Pomerleau has stated that the Sterling Market location was valuable for its central location in the village, and the cost of building a new structure would not be cost-effective considering the profit-generating limitations of a market serving Johnson and the surrounding region.

“We’re going to continue to look at any and all options, but in the meantime, we didn’t want to miss the opportunity where we could do a buyout,” Pomerleau said.

Town response

If Sterling Market’s buyout application is successfully funded, it will become town-owned greenspace, where no other structure can be built.

After discussing the buyout proposal at meetings in January and February, the Johnson Selectboard voted to support Pomerleau’s buyout, despite some concerns from floodplain administrator Scott Meyer, primarily that the property could contain toxic brownfields, which would need to be remediated before it was acquired by the town, and the removal of parking capacity for the neighboring Community Bank.

If completed, the property could contain no impervious structures, meaning the parking lot that serves not just the former market building but also neighboring business would have to be removed.

Though not cited by Meyer, the Johnson Post Office, still operating in the Sterling Market building, would need to find a new home.

According to town administrator Tom Galinat, Meyer expressed some concern that FEMA may not cover those remediation costs, but Vermont Emergency Management recommended the town proceed with the buyout so the property could be included in a scoping project being undertaken by an engineer contracted by the Lamoille County Planning Commission as part of its ongoing series of region-wide flood-mitigation projects.

Support from the town is required for a buyout application to be considered for funding, and the town has supported each property owner that has requested one. Though there was some discussion about the potential for the town to purchase the property to have more flexibility with its future use, the selectboard was in general agreement that the $2.5 million appraised value of the property made such an option unfeasible.

New store coming soon

Meanwhile, the Johnson General Store, a new grocer opening at the former location of Get Yours on Lower Main Street, is slated to open soon, with a tentative mid-March opening date in its sights.

The general store won’t have the capacity of the former Sterling Market but will provide a place for the community to purchase groceries that isn’t a gas station or a dollar store.

Mike Mignone and Haley Newman decided to open a store despite Mignone’s experience in food service after attending discussions around food access that were facilitated as part of last year’s Reimagine Johnson process, a series of post-flood community building forums facilitated by the Vermont Council on Rural Development, have been investing heavily in the store and seeking outside funding.

Mignone has secured a total of $100,000 in two separate loans from the village and town of Johnson revolving loan funds to support the effort. A fundraiser being overseen by the Johnson food access and awareness task force has raised over $4,000 towards the effort, and Mignone has undertaken as much of the renovation work by himself that he can but has had to solicit personal loans to keep himself afloat.

“It’s been pretty hectic, very stressful, but we’re making progress,” Mignone said.

Along with supporting Mignone and Newman’s new general store, task force chair Jesse Whitworth said the group was working on expanding participation in a bulk food buying program, entered talks with the Vermont Studio Center to host community meals on their property and launched a community food-access survey. They’ve also set their sights on the potential for a community center in Johnson and are looking at potentially helping the Johnson Food Shelf expand.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Owner seeks buyout for former Sterling Market.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in News & Citizen on Feb. 6

Lamoille Health Partners will close Stowe Family Associates, its primary care practice on Mountain Road in Stowe, as the health care provider continues to cut services in search of financial sustainability.

The organization announced last week that its Stowe provider would be consolidated at its Morrisville location on Washington Highway. The change is effective Feb. 24, and any appointment scheduled with a Stowe doctor after that date will be honored at the Morrisville location.

In a statement, Susan Bartlett, chair of the health partners board and its interim CEO, cited the “mounting prices of real estate and building maintenance costs in Stowe” as a primary driver of the move.

Bartlett later described the building in Stowe as “not a great building” that the health partners had been looking to get out of for a while. She also emphasized that the organization plans an eventual return to Stowe.

“Our goal is — when we get through the consolidation and even talking about it now — we absolutely, positively don’t want to leave Stowe, but it is just a matter of our finances,” Bartlett said. “It’s the cost of everything, and we will begin a strategic plan immediately figuring out how to find a place in Stowe to have a presence for primary care, because we’ve been in that community forever and we don’t want to leave it.”

The move affects the six doctors currently employed at the Stowe practice, as well as a number of administrative staff. Bartlett said there may be some redundancies found in merging their Stowe and Morrisville offices, but said neighboring Copley Hospital and Lamoille Home Health and Hospice may have employment opportunities for anyone displaced in the move.

The Lamoille Health Pharmacy that occupies the same building as Stowe Family Practice will remain, for now. Pharmacies are more difficult to pick up and move, as their licenses are tied to their physical location, not a business entity, according to Bartlett. Opening a new pharmacy in the saturated market of Morrisville makes far less sense than continuing operations in Stowe, Bartlett added.

Last October, Lamoille Health Partners suddenly realized it was in dire financial straits. The nonprofit provides primary care, pediatric care, mental health care, substance abuse treatment and dental care to around 19,000 people throughout Lamoille County and the surrounding region, which Bartlett attributed primarily to the receding of post-pandemic federal funding.

As one of the state’s 11 federally qualified health centers, it is reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid at a higher rate than other health care providers, and low-income patients are also charged on a sliding scale.

Bartlett and the rest of the health partners’ board of directors have set a goal of trimming the organization’s budget by $2 million. By closing the Stowe practice, along with initially announced cuts like the closure of its Morrisville community center — the elimination of a position that oversaw the Lamoille Health Collaborative and the absence of upper administrative positions following the departure of their CEO and CFO — Bartlett said the organization is saving about $900,000 to $1 million.

Merger talks continue

Amid its financial crisis, Lamoille Health Partners turned to Copley Hospital for assistance in righting the ship long-term.

To that end, Copley put up the funding for a feasibility study that would help the two organizations work together in a mutually beneficial way that addresses both organizations’ needs, amid their differing attempts to find financial sustainability in the increasingly challenging rural health care landscape.

While a memorandum distributed among Copley employees in December signed by Bartlett and Copley Health Systems board chair Kathy Demars suggested a potential merger was on the table, Bartlett downplayed the idea at the time. Now it appears some conjoining of the two organizations is underway.

“We decided what we’re really looking at is a marriage here between equal partners,” Bartlett said.

To that end, the state of Vermont has also stepped in to help author a prenuptial agreement of sorts. DaShawn Groves, commissioner of the Department of Health Access, has been assisting in these discussions in order to ensure an accessible and sustainable health care system remains in Lamoille County.

“We want to make sure that the community continues to have access to primary care and that we are creating some sort of short-term stabilization and some long-term sustainability for those providers there,” Groves said.

Federally qualified health centers are unique entities that cannot be owned in a traditional sense, but the designation could act as an umbrella encompassing a combined Copley-health partners entity.

Copley CEO Joe Woodin previously oversaw the merger of a health center and hospital system, but both Bartlett and Groves characterized each health center as its own animal, even though all the state’s health centers and hospitals are facing the same difficult financial headwinds.

“I think what is happening in this county is kind of a microcosm of the broader issues that we’re facing in the state, around the world regarding access, financial stability and workforce,” Groves said. “This is really kind of an investment in primary care, and we see the two coming together not just for survival, but as a transformation, ensuring that providers can thrive in such a system.”

Woodin declined to comment on the ongoing merger discussions.

Groves and the state are also here to ensure that, whatever the final governance structure ends up being, it conforms to federal regulations handed down by the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Bartlett still envisions an independent Lamoille Health Partners within a shared system.

“You’ve got two organizations who can share — we all have (human resources), we all have finance, we all have maintenance, so those are the sorts of things that you can combine,” Bartlett said. “You still definitely remain totally independent, separate entities with your own boards, and there might be a governing board of two people from each organization over the whole thing, but you’re still very independent organizations.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Lamoille Health Partners to close Stowe practice.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Jan. 21. 

The parents of Tate Holtzman, the 3-year-old who died by drowning at Smugglers’ Notch Resort in 2023 while attending a licensed daycare program, have reached a settlement agreement with the resort.

Most of the terms of the settlement are not being disclosed, according to a joint statement between the family and the resort issued Tuesday morning. The family and resort did say that, as part of the resolution, resort owner Bill Stritzler apologized and offered his condolences to Jennifer and Zachary Holtzman for “their enormous loss and continual suffering,” and received their acknowledgement.

The Holtzmans and the resort have also agreed to work together on a memorial for Tate Holtzman that will be located on resort property.

Tate Holtzman died July 6, 2023, after stepping on an unsecured cover near an outdoor splash pad and falling into a below-ground cistern, according to Vermont State Police investigators. He remained trapped for about 10 minutes despite the efforts of teenage lifeguards to rescue him. He sustained critical injuries that led to his death two days after the incident.

An investigation by police did not result in criminal charges being filed, but an investigation by the Vermont Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the resort more than $21,000 for six different safety violations investigators found concerning the cistern.

An initial investigation into the incident by the Vermont Department for Children and Families found no violations, and a second investigation conducted at the urging of the Holtzman’s found only that the resort did not file an incident report.

The Holtzmans, through their Boston-based lawyer Jennifer Denker, expressed their “disappointment” in the outcome of that investigation.

In repeated statements through Denker, the Holtzmans expressed a desire to see Smugglers’ Notch held accountable for the resort’s “responsibility” in their son’s death. They also hoped to encourage “water safety and do everything possible to prevent a tragedy like this from happening to other young children.”

In the joint statement, the resort acknowledged that it is “responsible for the care of all children in its programs, including Tate Holtzman,” and said that the resort has taken additional steps “to ensure the safety of all children at the resort moving forward.”

By the time the initial state agency investigations into the incident concluded at the end of 2023, a petition organized with the Holtzmans’ blessing called upon the resort to dismantle the splash pad near the underground cistern where Tate Holtzman drowned and replace it with a memorial garden. The petition garnered over 1,500 signatures.

It’s not clear where the agreed upon memorial to Tate Holtzman will be located, but Stritzler said the Cambridge resort is in the process of evaluating the future of their waterpark and aquatic amenities.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Family settles with Smugglers’ Notch resort following son’s drowning death.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Jan. 9

The Hyde Park Selectboard met recently to affirm its own legitimacy after discovering a three-decades-old error in how the town has conducted elections on Town Meeting Day.

The error surfaced when the Lanpher Memorial Library board of trustees requested to have its officer elections included on the Australian ballot, or poll vote, that Hyde Park has long used to elect some but not all of their officers at March Town Meeting Day.

After consulting the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, town clerk Kim Moulton subsequently discovered that a voter-approved article from the 1994 annual meeting moving some Hyde Park officer elections — including the selectboard members and listers — to Australian ballot did so in violation of state law.

Other positions such as town clerk, treasurer and moderator continued to be elected by voice vote, in an apparent 30-year violation of state election law, which requires officer elections to either be conducted entirely by Australian ballot or voice vote.

“Local elections are all or nothing by one means, floor or Australian Ballot unless specifically addressed in a Town Charter,” Mark Houle, elections administrator for the Secretary of State’s office, said in a December email to the town. “Therefore, everyone elected by Australian Ballot was not properly elected.”

Both Houle and Hyde Park’s attorney, David Rugh, initially recommended that the selectboard, having only one current member, Matt Morin, who was elected in 2022 by legitimate means, call a special town meeting at which the other members of the selectboard would have to be re-elected in order to comply with the letter of the law.

Instead, interim town administrator Stephen McDonald was able to get the Secretary of State’s blessing to allow selectboard members to ratify their own election. A special meeting of the selectboard was held Dec. 9 and the current board ratified the elections held in 2023 and 2024, even though they were technically illegitimately elected.

“All Town officials during the 2023 and 2024 Town meetings should have been elected from the floor only and not by Australian Ballot,” a letter from the selectboard read, calling it a procedural error. “Australian Ballot was mistakenly used to elect Town officials, including the majority of the sitting Selectboard.”

The letter stated the error could be “cured by a resolution of the legislative body of the municipality by a vote of two-thirds of all its members at a regular meeting or a special meeting called for that purpose, stating that the defect was the result of oversight, inadvertence, or mistake.”

The board did just that by unanimous vote, extending the action to all the boards and committees that were created by appointments of the selectboard and the actions of said boards and committees, for good measure.

Board vice chair Susan Bartlett said the incident was simply an oversight.

“It’s one of those things that sounds radical but wasn’t at all,” she said.

Bartlett said that, moving forward, the town will discuss possibly moving to Australian ballot for all segments of its currently in-person Town Meeting Day decision-making, just as voters in towns like Morristown have done, but continuing to conduct business from the floor at town meetings in order to ensure compliance with the law.

Other towns have attempted to find some ground between the in-person town meeting and moving fully to the polls for all municipal matters.

Though a groundswell of morning attendees at Stowe’s 2024 town meeting voted to move to Australian ballot for all officer elections and budgetary matters going forward, they will continue to hold in-person meetings for all non-budgetary matters.

In Cambridge, an effort is underway to increase residential participation around the budget-making process, promote voter turnout and make their town meeting more accessible.

“I think over the next few years, people are going to find a way to conduct town meetings that works for town our size,” Bartlett said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hyde Park affirms elections after discovering decades-old error.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Dec. 12.

Lamoille Health Partners is facing a financial crisis, and the health care provider is turning to Copley Hospital for help.

In early October, the board of directors for the nonprofit that provides primary care, pediatric care, mental health care, substance abuse treatment and dental care to around 19,000 people throughout Lamoille County and the surrounding region found itself in dire straits.

Susan Bartlett, chair of the health partners’ board of directors, said the primary causes of this sudden deficit were the withdrawal of pandemic-era federal funding that recently buoyed the organization, and an ongoing fight between the federal government and pharmaceutical companies that cost the organization around $500,000 in rebates.

She also noted that the nonprofit’s status as one of the state’s 11 federally qualified health centers allows it to be reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid at a higher rate than other health care providers, but that still does not equal the full cost of care. Low-income patients are also charged on a sliding scale.

Bartlett wouldn’t specify the exact size of the deficit but described it as a “tight financial situation.” She said the organization is in ongoing talks with its creditors and the state to search for a more financially sustainable path and may have to refinance some of its properties to cover the deficit.

This search for fiscal solvency has meant turning to its health care neighbor, Copley Hospital. The two providers share many patients but have had a sometimes strained relationship in recent years.

The hospital has benefited from a one-time infusion of cash following the recent sale of its Copley Terrace residences to affordable housing nonprofit developer Evernorth, giving it some financial flexibility.

Following the recent departure of Lamoille Health Partners CEO Stuart May, who Bartlett described as being unwilling to work closely with Copley, the partners signed a memorandum of understanding with the hospital to initiate a feasibility study, funded by the hospital, to determine how the organizations could best work together.

Lamoille Health Partners will also return to having its medical testing done at the hospital, reversing a 2021 decision to outsource the service that Copley administrators claimed cost the hospital more than $1 million in lost revenue.

“Among the possibilities under consideration is the creation of a stable ‘new parent system,’ which could involve significant investments over the next three years to improve operations and financial stability for both (Copley Hospital) and (Lamoille Health Partners),” read a Dec. 6 memo sent to Copley staff and signed by both Bartlett and Copley Health Systems board chair Kathy Demars.

According to the memo, the study “will explore multiple collaboration options, including a potential merger, with the assistance of external audit and consulting teams.”

“We’re very happy to be working with them,” Copley CEO Joe Woodin said. “We’ve had a relationship going back decades, and if they need some help and assistance, we’re very thankful to be able to provide that, and we’re going to work together to improve quality, reduce costs and help manage our patients in a more seamless fashion.”

The results of the study will come at the end of January, but in the meantime, the health partners have sought impactful cuts to help right the ship. That includes eliminating the position of director for the Lamoille Health Collaborative, a pandemic-era initiative under the Lamoille Health Partners umbrella meant to help local health care organizations work together.

The partners are also shutting down the community center in Morrisville, which it had acquired in 2022 to provide a safe, enriching environment for local youth. Costing about $250,000 a year to operate, Bartlett said it quickly became a target for cost cutting.

“We’ve got to reduce our spending in this year’s budget by a substantial chunk. The first thing you look at in those situations are things that may be good, and they may be worthy causes, but they’re costing you money, and they aren’t generating any revenue,” Bartlett said.

CEO woes

When VTDigger reported May had stepped down as the chief executive in October, both Bartlett and the former CEO told the news website that the parting of ways was mutual. Bartlett said there was “no dramatic event” that incited the change.

Now, however, Bartlett acknowledged that the health partners’ board felt that May was not the leader for this moment of financial distress.

“He just sort of lost the confidence of the board,” Bartlett said. “We just didn’t feel that he was coming up with a lot of the kind of really hard work that comes with having to make the kinds of reductions that we were looking at making.”

May’s disinclination to work closely with Copley, and the relationship between the partners and the hospital ranging from “neutral to hostile,” as Bartlett described it, was certainly a barrier, but Bartlett said she also believed that it was a question of management style.

“Stu’s management style was very much to have departments in silos and not a lot of good communication between various internal silos,” Bartlett said.

May took over the federally qualified health center in the summer of 2020, after joining the organization as its chief financial officer in 2019. The former Community Health Services of Lamoille Valley rebranded to its more succinct moniker the following year.

He oversaw a period of ambitious expansion of services, which included the acquisition of the Morrisville community center and the beleaguered Family Practice Associates in Cambridge, and the establishment of a mobile dentistry. Much of this expansion was funded by federal grants while May added an additional 30 employees to the health partners’ payroll.

The way he described it in an interview conducted last year, May was brought in to develop a “strategic vision” and address “financial infrastructure issues” within a philosophy of providing holistic care centered around primary physicians.

Following his departure, Bartlett and partners board vice chair Peter Anderson will share interim CEO duties, but they’re also not rushing the hiring process for a new chief executive.

“We feel as a board that it’s our responsibility to get the finances sorted out, get everything moving in the right direction, particularly, excitingly, working with Copley and (Lamoille Home Health and Hospice) to come up with some interesting, exciting things that we can do that will help, and once that direction is clear and there’s a solid path, then we will be looking for a new CEO,” Bartlett said.

Possible merger

Just as the former Community Health Services of Lamoille Valley was spun out of the Copley systems in the early 2000s, there’s a possibility it could be brought back under its auspices.

The catch now is that the health partners’ status as a federally qualified health center means that it cannot be owned or acquired by another organization. A merger, however, is possible. Woodin oversaw a similar situation at Gifford Medical Center in Randolph.

In a merger, the health partners and hospital boards would combine, with the new organization retaining the federally qualified health center status. Being the larger of the two organizations, the hospital would likely retain majority control.

While Lamoille Health Partners may have the most urgent financial need, Copley has also been searching for sustainability and solutions to its own problems, trying to expand and modernize services while remaining hampered by relatively low reimbursement levels from commercial insurers despite frequent requests to state health care regulators to raise those rates.

While Woodin was enthusiastic about the possibility of a merger, Bartlett downplayed the idea.

“You say the word ‘merger,’ and immediately people begin to panic. Our doctors are like, ‘We’re not working for Copley,’ and, that said, that’s absolutely right, you’re not working for Copley. That’s nothing to fear, not in the cards, not happening.”

Bartlett instead said the organizations will start any partnership slowly, seeing what the organizations can achieve through smaller projects, perhaps joining the New England Health Network, the multi-hospital collaborative helmed by Woodin, or combining resources to bring needed specialists to the region.

If it all works out, Bartlett is hoping that a solution can be found that will be an example for rural health care providers across the United States.

“It’s not just in Vermont, but all over the country. Access to health care in rural areas is getting more and more difficult, and an awful lot of rural areas have small hospitals like Copley and a (federally qualified health center),” Bartlett said. “If we could come up with a model that works, it could help address access to health care issues all over the country.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Lamoille Health Partners turns to Copley amid financial crisis.

This story by Tommy Gardner was first published in the News & Citizen on Nov. 27

The Elmore Store will have new operators running the place next year, after the current store-runner closes shop next month following a year and a half at the post.

The store, which has been operating on the shore of Lake Elmore continuously since the early 1800s, will be shuttered all winter and into the spring as the new shopkeepers give it a facelift to bring new energy to the old place.

According to Mark Isselhardt, vice-president of the Elmore Community Trust, which owns the store, the place will wind down operations after current manager Jason Clark steps aside Dec. 21, and after the trust marks down practically everything on the shelves in preparation for the store’s winter hibernation.

The group has chosen Tim and Becca Lindenmeyr to run things. They are Shelburne farmers and entrepreneurs who launched a successful farm-based beauty product company, Farm Craft VT, on their 15-acre spread in Shelburne. Tim grew up in Elmore and met Becca when they both lived in Taos, New Mexico.

The Lindenmeyrs, in a presentation to the community Saturday, noted they are “empty nesters” and will be spending more of their time in Elmore, ceding operation of their Shelburne farm to a new team and perhaps adding a second farm and maker space at Tim Lindenmeyr’s family home, Penny Pipe Farm.

Much like the Millers — Warren and Kathy, who owned and ran the store together for about four decades until Warren died in 2020 — the Lindenmeyr name carries a certain resonance in Elmore. Jill Lindenmeyr, Tim’s mother, was a founding member of the Elmore Community Trust, as well as the town and regional planning commissions. She died last year.

Isselhardt said the Lindenmeyrs are really leaning into the idea of a “third place,” a spot that’s not home and not work, a place to socialize with a chosen community, whether that be cafes and bars or churches and libraries. Or New England general stores.

The Lindenmeyrs laid out that vision in a detailed slide show they presented to the community Saturday in the town hall, which was nearly as well-attended as the annual Town Meeting Day gatherings every March.

“I’m not an unbiased commenter, with all acknowledgement, but it was a very positive feeling in the audience,” Isselhardt said.

The Lindenmeyrs noted that the store is the hub of the town, where people are drawn “because it represents the dream of healthy small communities.” But it’s more than just a place to get groceries or a sandwich or pick up the mail.

“In an age where we are prone to be more isolated than ever — where we can digitally work from home, ship everything, and stream all of our entertainment — we believe it is critical to create physical hubs for connection and support, not just to socialize, but to be our healthiest selves,” the Lindenmeyrs noted in their presentation Saturday.

They listed “five pillars” to achieve that vision: food, body, mind, community and stewardship.

Some of the changes will be small but practical — the place will have a public restroom instead of a port-o-potty. Some will be extensive, such as a co-working space upstairs and a community room downstairs.

Isselhardt said the Lindenmeyrs plan to reconfigure the store so that people can see clear through the place to the lake as soon as they enter — there are no windows to speak of right now.

Critically, there are plans to not only keep the post office but expand it to keep up with the increasing number of large packages that get delivered daily. Isselhardt said Clark estimates he spends 15-18 hours a week just doing post office duties, which perhaps offers an opportunity for a part-timer to handle that job when the store re-opens next year.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest the community saved the post office a few years ago. In early 2022, when the trust bought the store, the U.S. Postal Service announced it would shutter the 160 mailboxes and start sending boxholders’ mail to Morrisville.

A week later, a throng of kids surrounded Sen. Peter Welch in front of the store as he announced the store would continue receiving letters.

Clearly, the way things are now just isn’t really sustainable, but it’s an important part of the community, and we don’t want that to go away,” Isselhardt said, adding the trust will have to come up with a way to transition postal services during the renovations this winter.

He said the Lindenmeyrs have pegged the cost of renovations at about $500,000-$700,000. Tim Lindenmeyr is handling the general contracting duties on his own, saving a significant chunk of change over hiring someone to oversee the renovations.

Clark was the second operator in about as many years after the trust purchased the store from the Millers in late 2021. Isselhardt said, far from his short stint being a failure, Clark kept the store going in the face of difficult economic realities; same with the previous operators, Michael Stanley and Kate Gluckman. He shouted them all out.

He said running a store, especially one that is extremely busy with tourists during the summer and frequented primarily by locals in a small town the rest of the year, is a tough business. Clark was able to put his own stamp on things, such as showcasing live music regularly during the nice-weather months.

“That was a big commitment on his part,” Isselhardt said. “He continued to bring things that the community asked for.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: New Elmore Store operators to breathe new life into old place.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in The News & Citizen on Nov. 27

Though not a perfect obstruction, the first season of chicanery in Smugglers Notch has largely been considered a success by the Agency of Transportation.

After years of stuck tractor-trailer trucks being accepted as an unavoidable part of maintaining the scenic byway connecting Cambridge and Stowe during the warmer months of the year, the installation of temporary chicane barriers on either side of the Notch resulted in just one incident of a large vehicle obstructing the highway, and it wasn’t even a truck.

“We’re very encouraged by what we saw this year. We’re looking forward to next year and seeing what happens,” Todd Sears, deputy director of operations and safety at the agency, said. “I was especially happy that — I wasn’t happy that we had the one local bus — but we didn’t have any tractor trailers this year.”

Sears has overseen the multi-agency effort to get trucks out of the Notch. Efforts toward this end ramped up after Secretary of Transportation Joe Flynn sent a letter to the Stowe Selectboard in 2021, in which he said 92 trucks had been stuck in the Notch since 2009, about 8.4 trucks per year, and 12 trucks had been stuck in the Notch each year in 2013, 2014 and 2017.

Various efforts like increased signage and steeper fines for drivers worked to curtail these perennial impediments and brought this number down. Just six trucks were stuck in 2021 and five in 2022 and 2023.

Last year, Sears and the agency unveiled a new strategy to bring the count down even further: Chicanes — barriers designed to simulate the sharp turns in the road made to avoid the massive boulders that are a hallmark of the Notch — were installed.

The chicanes were just one of several deterrent options the agency considered, and the barriers were made from temporary material this first season to allow them to be easily adapted depending on how drivers reacted.

With just one stuck bus in September, the Notch closed 2024 with the lowest number of stuck vehicles in over a decade, at least, and ensured its return next year. Last week, transportation workers could be seen disassembling the chicanes for the season.

Though multiple successful seasons could see a permanent chicane installment made from material that blends better into the area aesthetically, next year will see the same temporary material as Sears and the agency assess the multi-year impact of the barriers while collecting feedback from locals and visitors alike.

“We’ll be putting the system up next year to collect another season of data, and we’ll see where we go from there,” Sears said. “But we’re super happy with all of the work that our engineers and our partners put in to make this happen this year.”

Gaps within the chicane system remain, and time will tell how vulnerable to exploitation those gaps might be. On the very day the new chicanes opened last spring, a truck simply drove around the Cambridge-side barrier and entered the Notch. He was warned off by an Agency of Natural Resources employee who happened to be on-site before getting stuck.

Sears said there have been some reports of other drivers doing the same.

“They basically drove on the other side of the road so that they could take a straighter shot. That happened comparatively infrequently, but that’s something that we might look at,” Sears said. “On the Stowe side, because of where the chicanes were placed, there were some motorists that used the Barnes Camp parking lot to get around it.”

While there’s no data yet to support this conjecture, Sears also speculated that the chicanes may have caused the GPS systems that freight truck drivers rely on, which are mostly built on crowdsourced reports from other drivers, to increasingly warn tractor-trailer drivers away from Route 108.

While Sears continues to review data and make adjustments, the success of its inaugural season means that the chicane era has likely only just begun in Smugglers Notch.

The pass through the Notch closed to through traffic last week, but transportation officials said it could reopen should conditions allow.

Read the story on VTDigger here: First chicane season in Notch ruled a success.

This story by Tommy Gardner was first published in The News & Citizen on Oct. 10.

The dentists at Lamoille Health Partners are hitting the road.

The organization recently rolled out a new mobile dental unit, which looks a lot like an RV on the outside and quite a bit like a dentist’s office on the inside. It even has that new dentist office smell.

The truck, which the dental team has christened Flo, features two operating rooms, fully set up to handle basic dental procedures — cleanings, fillings, extractions, X-rays and “everything to sterilize and run the day,” Sara Davis, the dental director for Lamoille Health Partners, said.

According to Lamoille Health president and CEO Stuart May, instead of trying to get folks in more rural parts of the county to drive to Morrisville, it just made sense to bring the services to the people.

“This is an easier way to get to those medically underserved communities, to get to those that have transportation issues, etcetera,” May said.

Last week, the crew, including Davis and driver Scott Droney, visited Waterville Elementary School.

According to principal Jan Epstein, the dentists were able to tend to nine kids on the initial visit, with a few that the dentist team will get to on the next visit. And here’s something you might not hear very often about a trip to the dentist.

“The kids had a great time,” Epstein said. “I was waiting for the crying and the tears and there was none of that.”

Epstein said smaller communities don’t have adequate access to public services or things like banks and grocery stores.

“It’s been a real struggle for folks,” she said.

None of the small handful of dentists’ offices in the greater Lamoille County area — including in Waterbury and Hardwick — are open on the weekends, which makes it even more difficult for working parents to get their kids to an appointment.

“Parents have to take off work and then drive a half hour, and the kids are usually out of school for the whole day. Same as the parents, they just take the whole day off,” Davis said.

Flo’s visits aren’t just novelty one-off events, either. Davis said the team plans to have regular three- or six-month rotations at the schools.

“We can keep track of them that way, and it can be their permanent home for some of the services that we do,” she said.

Miles for smiles

Flo was funded through $550,000 in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds. Droney said it gets almost 10 miles to the gallon.

May said the idea of a mobile dental unit was hatched in 2022, when the organization began offering hygiene services at Johnson Elementary School.

“I remember conversations with Sara and just hearing the stories of the amount of decay,” May said. “Clearly, on the medical side and the oral health side, there’s that multi-generational education issue.”

He said most people living in smaller towns have well water at their home and are not hooked up to municipal drinking water systems, which usually add fluoride to the water.

Jessy Breault, the service line administrator for Lamoille Health’s family dentistry branch, said parents are more likely to keep up with their kids’ — and their own — regular check-ups with their primary physicians or pediatricians, but other services are often viewed as luxuries.

“If there’s something they’re going to let go of, that’s the one, a lot of times,” Breault said of dental health.

But May and the Lamoille Health team frequently refer to whole-patient care, and doctors and nurses in the various departments — primary health, dental, behavioral — can make referrals to the other departments if they sense a patient needs those services, too.

“It’s that cross-pollination, if you will, of information,” May said.

Breault said whenever Flo hits the road, it does pull some resources from the brick-and-mortar dentist office in Morrisville, but there are plans to add more staff as the mobile service grows.

“But we have three dentists now, so we are in a good position to be able to send Sara out on the unit and still have dentists back in the office. Same with hygienists,” Breault said.

Davis said the initial mission of the traveling dental unit is to get into the Lamoille County schools, first the elementary schools, then the older grades.

“Starting their oral education early is important,” Davis said.

Breault said the team brings Flo to school open houses, too, which provides great exposure for parents who are already there touring the campuses.

The billing is handled just as it would be at the office, Breault said. If a patient has insurance, they will get billed that way; if not, Lamoille Health Partners offers a sliding fee they can apply for to help cover the costs.

Epstein said she was impressed that, during the trip to Waterville last week, someone at the dentist’s office had already handled the legwork — with help from school nurse Alyssa Fuller — on billing.

“Someone was in the office getting all that taken care of behind the scenes, which I also think is really amazing, because whoever can figure out health insurance and make that work, that’s a miracle, right there,” Epstein said.

Health for life

Flo’s maiden voyage, last month, was to the Lamoille Community House, the homeless shelter that opened its doors at an expanded location off Center Road in Hyde Park earlier this year.

Shelter manager Nicole Chauvin said when people come to Lamoille Community House, staff there have a “needs sheet” with the myriad services available that the organization is connected to.

“Dental care is always at the top of the list,” Chauvin said, saying that Medicaid for adults is very limited when it comes to dental services. Many dentists’ offices require people to pay up front, even if they have dental insurance.

“Then finding a dentist that takes it, that has openings, that doesn’t have a waitlist of 600 or 700 people, is just crazy,” she said.

Chauvin said folks without adequate housing or income or access to transportation or basic services often must make decisions between very basic needs.

“Do I pay my rent, or do I get my teeth cleaned? Do put food on the table, or do I get my teeth cleaned?” she said. “You have to make these decisions, and they aren’t always easy decisions to make.”

Folks like Epstein and Chauvin, in the education and social services professions, are familiar with what are known as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). They just see it from different parts of a person’s life — the educators try and address them early on, and the social workers try to do so later in life, after they’ve affected a person’s adult life.

“There has been scientific research done that having a certain number of ACEs as a child can affect your physical health as you grow in life,” Epstein said. “So, any type of medical screening that young children can have, and an eye kept on any things that pop up, certainly can only benefit them.”

As important as getting an early jump on good oral health may be, it’s a very different scenario for adults who either neglected it for much of their lives, or simply didn’t always have to means to take care of it. May said that was evident in the trip to the Lamoille Community House.

“It allows us to break barriers,” May said. “Some of the residents in the county don’t have the self-confidence, depending on what’s going on, to walk into a traditional office. Here, we’re meeting them on their ground, so to speak.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Dentists log miles to improve smiles.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the News & Citizen on Sept. 19.

After weathering the COVID-19 pandemic, Mark Boyden found himself nearly forced out of the beef industry.

The Cambridge farmer got out of the family dairy business at the turn of the century and a few years later started raising beef cattle. In the early years, he made deliveries in his own truck with the air conditioning cranked.

A couple of decades later, Boyden Beef had found its way into stores and restaurant burgers across the region. Boyden developed a good connection with Vermont slaughterhouses and meat processors by providing a dependable number of cattle throughout the year, instead of rushing them to slaughter in the high-demand season of September to January, as some other farmers tended to do.

The pandemic changed all of that.

The supply chain became severely stressed as outbreaks of the Covid virus in some of the largest meat processing plants shined an unfavorable light on the nation’s consolidated food chain. As meat became more expensive, more people began to turn to higher quality, locally raised animals, and more farmers began raising beef cattle to meet the demand.

Slaughtering is the easy and quick part, Boyden said. It’s the disassembling and packaging of the animal that takes time and skilled labor. The rise in demand placed increased pressure on Vermont’s nine meat processors, two that are inspected by the state and seven that are overseen by the federal government, according to the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont.

According to its “slaughterhouse project,” which supports the creation of more processing plants in Vermont, NOFA claimed that current processors were at “almost maximum capacity, with farmers booking slaughter spots 18 months in advance.”

Competition from an increasingly consolidated and monopolized meat production and processing sector leaves small producers like Boyden with few options.

The Brazilian-born JBS is the world’s largest processor of beef and pork, slaughtering over 76,000 cattle a day, according to the company. It rose to power in its native country through a massive bribery scheme, according to the Wall Street Journal, and a $20 billion international acquisition campaign, according to the New York Times, both of which went unopposed by the administrations of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Just before Christmas 2021, the Lyndonville meat processor that slaughtered Boyden’s cows abruptly shut its door to him after an increasingly contentious relationship and, according to Boyden, food safety issues involving how the meat was being handled.

He found a new processor two hours away from his farm, just over the border in North Haverhill, N.H. Less than a year later, the owner of the plant and adjacent farm had died.

Boyden saw an opportunity to shore up the long-term sustainability of his beef operation in an increasingly competitive and costly industry, and he took it. He dubbed his new slaughterhouse and meat processing business MontShire Farms in acknowledgement of its cross-border business, and its biggest customer was now Boyden Beef.

“I saw the opportunity here, and it was kind of a calculated risk, but that’s what you do in business,” Boyden said.

Expansion

The facility Boyden was buying was just the kind the federal government and Tom Vilsack, secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, were looking to support with billions of dollars in new subsidies.

“When I bought this, I knew that there was going to be a really good chance of getting grant money, because they’d already announced the grant money coming down the road,” Boyden said.

Beyond MontShire’s direct-to-market store and sales offices, a large warehouse area encases a smaller, enclosed facility where cows and pigs are first slaughtered, butchered and processed into marketable parts. Earlier this month, Boyden was discussing measurements with an employee and contractor as they prepared to triple the facility’s capacity.

This expansion is being funded by a $2.1 million local meat capacity grant, one of 33 recipients that received a chunk of the $26 million distributed through the program nationally. In its description of the grant, the USDA identified MontShire as “the largest fee-for-service processing facility” in New Hampshire and one of just three still in operation.

Currently the facility processes around 50 cows and nearly as many hogs each week, though Boyden envisions a shift exclusively toward beef as it grows, meaning MontShire could handle around 300 animals a week after its expansion.

New Hampshire’s Executive Council has also chipped in $200,000 in grant money to cover the price of some particularly costly new machines to help facilitate the expansion. According to Boyden, though, the fact of his processing plant existing just over the border has helped its success.

“I was told by the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, ‘We’re not going to give you anything at all, but we’re going to make it easy to do business,’ and I can live with that,” Boyden said. “I’m afraid, in Vermont, we have a lot of mindsets of, instead of government trying to work with business, government is there to regulate business and put the hammer down first.”

Boyden also praised the culture of New Hampshire residents, who he claimed are more focused on job creation over complaints about smell or noise. Boyden sold off some of his land and now only grows feed for his own cows after a Vermont Agency of Agriculture-approved program to apply treated human waste to his fields was met with such fierce backlash by neighbors that he swiftly ended the practice in 2021.

Boyden isn’t a fan of every aspect of living free or dying, however, and said the two states could learn from one another. He pointed to the exorbitant energy costs in the Granite State, some of the most expensive in the country, and New Hampshire’s inability to bring costs down by encouraging free market economics instead of Vermont’s more hands-on regulatory approach. More grant money will fund 240 solar panels in one of his fields will help defray that expense.

While the federal government has subsidized MontShire’s expansion, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to a processor like JBS, which has received over $900 million in government contracts and was the recipient of $67 million in bailout funds, according to the New York Times, leading food industry analyst Austin Frerick to characterize Vilsack’s new funding of small slaughterhouses to “dumping a billion dollars on Ask Jeeves and wishing the company good luck against Google.”

Still, it’s keeping Boyden in business.

“Obviously, I’m very biased, I’m a recipient, but this is an example of the government working with businesses with a vision and making it work, and not just throwing money out there,” he said.

It may be in New Hampshire, but Boyden pointed out that most of the fat-marbled carcasses hanging in the meat locker were born in Vermont and spent most of their lives grazing on its hills.

“Boyden Farm is still in Vermont, and I’ll tell you, most of the cattle we do here are from Vermont,” he said. “I’d say three quarters, if not more, of all the cattle hanging in the bunker are from Vermont.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Cambridge farmer expands into Granite State meat processing.

This story by Aaron Calvin first appeared in the News & Citizen on August 29.

At first glance, the white house with blue trim and prominent bay window on Route 15 in Cambridge village appears to be no different than its neighbors, but it will soon be torn down and turned into an undevelopable space.

In late August, under clear blue skies with no recent rainstorms, the Lamoille River quietly meandered past the house and down a steep embankment. But when hard rain falls and the river swells, as it did in a particularly devastating way in July 2023, and then again to a lesser extent in December and on the anniversary of the July flood this summer, everything can change quickly.

Each time the Lamoille floods along this highway, it overflows onto the road and blocks off the Wrong Way Bridge that connects most of the village to the eastern section of town, making it impassable and, if the water is particularly high, flooding nearby homes.

The owner of the white house with blue trim, apparently now unoccupied, applied last September to have the property bought out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. According to paperwork, he had owned the home for 30 years, and flood insurance covered a $169,000 cleanup from the July 2023 flood.

The Cambridge Selectboard supported the buyout last October and, recently, federal funding for its purchase and destruction. It was one of the first homes in the county to be funded, with more set to receive funding soon, according to Sarah Henshaw, a coordinator with the Lamoille Area Recovery Network.

The white house with blue trim will be torn down and become empty green space, owned by the town and undevelopable, and its value as a taxable property removed from the Cambridge grand list.

A similar property next door also applied for a buyout. The homes on either side, places that were likewise damaged during the 2023 flood, are still occupied and their owners have decided to maintain them.

This contrast — homes abandoned after the flood and awaiting a buyout next to some of the most affordable rental properties in Lamoille County — is a common sight in neighborhoods hit hardest by recent flooding. The vulnerability of these areas and the need to enact flood mitigation measures runs up against municipalities’ desire to preserve their tax bases and some of their most affordable housing.

“It’s a lot of complex issues to balance at the same time as you’ve got folks who have been through a traumatic and life-changing experience,” Seth Jensen, deputy director of the Lamoille County Planning Commission, said. “It’s a tough situation for the individuals, and it’s a tough situation for the communities as a whole.”

Town transformations

Cambridge is supporting seven buyout requests, and six of the properties are in its namesake village, including the two along Route 15, and another just across the bridge between the Lamoille and Seymour rivers.

Three other properties being bought along the Lamoille River in the village would result in 25 rental units being taken out of the rental pool. The owner told the selectboard last October that she was tired of having to deal with the constant flood risk and recurring damage.

The selectboard has only refused to support one buyout request for a property in Jeffersonville and did so because it was not damaged in any recent flooding, board chair Jeff Coslett said.

“The selectboard considered each buyout request individually, and based our decision on whether the property owners incurred flood damage from the July 2023 storm and whether it was likely they would incur damage in the future,” Coslett said.

Wolcott is currently considering nine buyout requests, mostly clustered on School Street and along Route 15. Morristown’s two buyout requests — one on Route 15 near the Wolcott town line and the former Cady’s Falls Nursery on Duhamel Road — are being bought by the town with state funding and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, respectively.

Even Hyde Park, which emerged from the recent spate of flooding relatively unscathed, is considering one buyout along the Lamoille River. A Stowe property on Stagecoach Road situated along Sterling Brook had already been in the buyout process, and the town approved another application at a recent selectboard meeting for a property in Stowe Hollow along Gold Brook after the area was ravaged by two separate, intense rainstorms this summer.

Johnson was the town most impacted by the July 2023 floods, and though subsequent flooding was not nearly as dramatic, the buyout count ahead of an Aug. 30 deadline has risen to 15 properties.

Though one property on the application list is in the low-lying area of Route 15 near Willow Crossing Farm, most of the buyout requests involve village properties.

One of those requests comes from resident Tosh Gilmore, who has been homeless since her Lower Main Street property was destroyed. Pam and Rick Auperlee, who abandoned their 200-year-old home after 30 years on Railroad Street after it was inundated by 2023 floodwaters, are also seeking a buyout. Properties in vulnerable areas along the Lamoille River, including River Road West and Wescom Street, are also on the list.

Like Cambridge and Wolcott, the Johnson Selectboard has been supportive of residents seeking buyouts. Jensen noted that, unlike some other towns that suffered from the July 2023 flood — notably Barre — towns in Lamoille County were generally supportive of the requests, despite the potential loss of tax revenue, village utilities and housing stock.

“The reality is, once a community has, or once a property has experienced significant flood damage that really in and of itself impacts the grand list,” Jensen said. “The property becomes less marketable. If it’s damaged and not repaired, it depreciates, and so a buyout, from that perspective, can really be the best option for the homeowner and the community.”

Coslett said that Cambridge will continue to encourage housing outside of flood-prone areas as its development review board approves subdivision projects it deems permissible, while its town plan encourages balancing growth with maintaining rural character.

Expansion in Jeffersonville is particularly challenging due to a lack of a water source to allow the village to expand its municipal infrastructure to accommodate more growth, a problem the village is currently working with regional planners to resolve.

The Johnson Selectboard is working to encourage building outside of its vulnerable village with the grant-funded industrial park, and by expanding sewer and water infrastructure in town, Johnson town administrator Tom Galinat said.

“This is phase one of the future in Johnson,” he said. “As you start to sacrifice areas along the river, it then becomes clear where the future needs to be.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Property buyouts could reshape Lamoille County.

This story by Tommy Gardner was first published in the News & Citizen on August 8.

Emergency responders on Thursday recovered the body of a teenager who went missing while swimming in Morrisville near the village hydroelectric dam.

According to the Morristown Fire Department, the victim was Benjamin Clapp, 14, of Morrisville. Police say Clapp was with a friend when he went missing. A preliminary investigation indicates it was an accidental death.

Police say they responded to the B Street power dam just before 6 p.m. Wednesday evening after Clapp was reported missing.

Several police, fire and rescue agencies spent the next three hours searching the area for the victim to no avail, ceasing the search shortly before 9 p.m. They resumed the search Thursday morning and found the body at 9:33 a.m., police said.

The body was taken to the state Chief Medical Examiner’s office, which will determine cause of death.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Police recover body of swimmer who went missing in Morrisville.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on July 11.

A second investigation by the Department for Children and Families into the drowning death of a 3-year-old at Smugglers’ Notch Resort concluded after finding one minor violation.

Last month, the department ended a reopened investigation into an incident where Tate Holtzman died after falling into an underground cistern that feeds a splash pad at the resort.

The department found the resort violated a regulation that requires filing an incident report for “each accident, injury or medical emergency that leaves a visible mark, or first aid has been administered, even when medical treatment is not required.” The resort failed to file a report after Holtzman’s death.

The department initially found no violations in the immediate aftermath of Holtzman’s drowning, which occurred last July, but reopened its investigation at the request of the Holtzman family when the child’s father, former resort employee Zachary Holtzman, contacted the state and “pointed out several potential violations of state regulations, among them a requirement that outdoor play areas be free of hazards,” according to a Boston Globe report in May.

“The Holtzmans are disappointed by the Department’s response to this tragedy,” the family’s lawyer, Jennifer Denker of Boston law firm Meehan, Boyle, Black & Bogdanow, said in a statement. “They cannot understand why DCF, the agency charged with protecting children in Vermont, assessed no violations against Smugglers’ Notch relating to the unsafe conditions on its premises, which resulted in the death of their son Tate.”

“The family sincerely hopes that moving forward the Department will take a close look at modifying its own regulations in continued efforts to ensure the safety of Vermont children in licensed daycare programs,” Denker said.

Vermont State Police also found no criminal wrongdoing in the aftermath of the drowning. The Vermont Occupational Safety and Health Administration levied a negotiated fine against the resort for $21,850 after finding it violated multiple workplace regulations. VOSHA indicated that the resort put the lives of employees who tried to save Holtzman at risk after failing to include information about the cistern in its training and failing to properly identify the manhole covering the water tank.

The Holtzman’s told the Globe that they felt the day care center and summer camp program at the resort should have been shut down immediately. Denker and the Holtzmans also said that they wanted to avoid taking the resort to court and instead hoped the resort would work with them to resolve their concerns about safety.

“While nothing can bring Tate back, his family is hopeful that Smugglers’ Notch will accept responsibility for its role in their son’s death and work with them cooperatively to resolve their claims. Tate’s parents are committed to ensuring that no other family ever has to go through what they have,” Denker told the Globe.

So far, the resort has not indicated any changes would be undertaken because of Holtzman’s death. No one was fired or disciplined in the aftermath of the incident.

Resort president Lisa Howe said in December that it would never be known “why the bolts weren’t in the place where there were holes for the bolts,” but the Vermont State Police detective who investigated the incident told the Globe that, “Even without the screws, if that cover was secured the way it should have been, there’s no way that cover should have flipped up.”

Howe declined to comment on the results of the Department for Children and Families’ reopened investigation.

“If one person, just one person, at Smuggs did their job. Tate would be alive,” Zachary Holtzman told the Globe.

A petition for the resort to convert the splash pad where Holtzman died into a memorial garden garnered nearly 1,500 signatures, but resort officials have declined to comment on whether the idea is under consideration.

Editor’s note: Aaron Calvin’s partner works at Smugglers’ Notch Resort.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Reopened investigation into Smuggs drowning concludes.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the News & Citizen on June 13.

Should the herbicide ProcellaCOR be deployed to fight the milfoil infestation in Lake Eden?

That was the question in the Eden Central School gymnasium on Saturday as a crowd of lake residents and others gathered to ask four experts questions about the weed’s effect on Eden’s premier recreation site.

A panel organized by the Lake Eden Association brought together experts on the substance, application and permitting of the herbicide. They extolled its upsides and outlined potential safety risks while soliciting the public’s questions.

In the summer of 2022, the association discovered the presence of milfoil, a tenaciously invasive aquatic plant in Lake Eden. They sounded the alarm ahead of Town Meeting Day the next year about the seriousness of the issue and the importance of an early response.

Left on its own, milfoil quickly grows across the surface of a waterbody while it chokes out other vegetation and provides no shelter or nutrients for local aquatic life. Association members called the lake the “economic heart of Eden” and said lakeside housing generated 21% of the town’s property tax revenue.

The town approved spending $15,000 in both 2023 and 2024 to pull the milfoil by hand, employ vegetation-suffocating blankets and use divers to vacuum it up, with a lot of help from volunteers. The lake’s robust greeter program also monitors boat traffic in and out of the lake and ensures milfoil isn’t slipping through on vessels.

Still, milfoil, a plant that fragments into small pieces that can easily take root and grow quickly, has remained difficult to bring under control.

“Despite these very aggressive efforts to eradicate this milfoil, using all available non-herbicide methods, we find that we are just slowing the process,” said Colleen Brennan, a lake association member who moderated the event.

Now the dedicated volunteers on the lake association are investigating whether to deploy ProcellaCOR — an herbicide that specifically attacks milfoil and is the only one legally permitted by the state — in shallow, difficult to treat areas of the lake.

The assembled panel included Pat Suozzi, president of the Federation of Vermont Lakes and Ponds; Michael Lew-Smith, a botanist and partner at Arrowwood Environmental retained to study the milfoil problem on Lake Eden; Brendan McCarthy, a consultant at a lake management company with experience applying the herbicide; and Olin Reed, an aquatic biologist with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation with local roots in the Eden area.

Each one was of one mind about the use of the relatively new ProcellaCOR: The herbicide is effective, has a minimal impact on the water and surrounding ecosystem and, though available data is limited, doesn’t appear to have any long-term consequences.

Suozzi attested to its effective use in combating milfoil epidemics on Lake Iroquois in Hinesburg and in Addison County’s Lake Dunmore.

She also argued that use of the herbicide was more cost-effective than treatment without it, and reduced pressure on volunteer efforts to manage milfoil, though other mitigation efforts would still be required, and warned that “misinformation” spread about the herbicide threatened effective action.

In their discussions of the use of ProcellaCOR, Suozzi, Lew-Smith and McCarthy all talked about how any browning or adverse effects caused to other lake vegetation by the herbicide seemed to be temporary, and they said that the chemical treatment had no long-term effect on animal life or water quality.

Lew-Smith, in particular, said that while he “hadn’t seen enough data to know everything about” the herbicide, its effect seemed limited from what he’d observed.

ProcellaCOR was first registered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2018. It’s currently the only “actively permitted herbicide in Vermont,” according to information presented by Reed, and has been used 25 times since 2019 and in small areas of 11 lakes across the state.

McCarthy discussed the success his company has had applying it in New Hampshire and Vermont, and though he reiterated that it’s too new of a chemical to gauge long-term effects, he mostly focused on its efficacy.

Reed explained Vermont’s stringent rules for the application of herbicides in any body of water, which only allow it if there’s no non-chemical alternative available, an acceptable level of risk to the environment, a clear public benefit and a long-term management plan is developed.

Other divisions within the Agency of Natural Resources weigh in on the application process, which includes a public notice period before a final permit is issued.

Risk assessment

An internal 2022 memo published by an Agency of Natural Resources environmental scientist said that, according to its analysis of ProcellaCOR, “the potential for acute and chronic risks to fish, aquatic invertebrates, amphibians and other aquatic animals is considered low.”

But this April, the state permanently denied a permit to apply ProcellaCOR in Lake Bomoseen after a “great deal of public opposition” and united opposition on the town’s selectboard, according to the Rutland Herald.

Cynthia Moulton, a Vermont State University-Castleton professor of toxicology and ecology who formerly worked for the EPA’s pesticides division, published an editorial when the permit was first filed in 2022 claiming that ProcellaCOR “posed unacceptable risk and adverse effects to the nontarget organisms” and that “significant ecological risks alone should be enough to legally negate the permit request.”

The decision was appealed in May to the Vermont Superior Court Environmental Division, not by its original applicant, the Lake Bomoseen Association, but by an environmental engineer in Fairhaven who wanted to ensure the herbicides could continue to be used to battle invasive species in Vermont.

ProcellaCOR will be applied in Lake George in New York, but only after a May appellate court undid a New York Supreme Court decision that found the state had violated regulations regarding holding public processes when approving the permit.

The Lake George Association issued a scathing rebuke of the Lake George Park Commission, arguing the “risks of ProcellaCOR are too great to experiment with it in Lake George.”

During a question-and-answer period of the meeting, one Eden resident expressed concern about ProcellaCOR’s own admission of its environmental risks on its label. But Suozzi said that such a small amount of the herbicide is used that its effect on plants and animals will be entirely non-lethal.

Among anxiety about the potential risks of such a new herbicide was concern about what would happen to the lake if the milfoil wasn’t brought under control. Suozzi presented before and after images to demonstrate ProcellaCOR’s efficacy — a sickly green surface covered in milfoil paired with another showing nothing but clear blue water.

There was also the matter of eventual burnout among those currently devoting their time to fighting the milfoil battle without chemicals.

Correction: This story was updated to clarify the action taken by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on ProcellaCOR in 2018.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Eden residents hear from experts ahead of herbicide use in lake.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the News & Citizen on June 6.

Five years after founding Jenna’s Promise, Greg Tatro is stepping down as president and board chair of the holistic opioid addiction treatment organization.

He will remain on the board while his wife, Dawn Tatro, steps down from the board to take on a volunteer role in the organization named after the couple’s daughter, who died from an opioid-related overdose in 2019.

Taking over the leadership role will be current board members Kitty Toll, a former Democratic representative in Montpelier, and Lamoille County sheriff Roger Marcoux. They will take over as chair and vice-chair, respectively.

Additional members joining the board include attorney Christina Nolan, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate in 2022, retired judge Phyllis Phillips and Laraway School executive David McAllister. 

Amy Tatro will remain on the board. Gregory Tatro, the organization’s communications head, will now serve alongside current CEO Daniel Franklin. The interim co-directors will begin a search for a new executive to lead the nonprofit.

This executive-level reorganization signals a new phase for the center, which has expanded quickly in a half-decade and endured the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and devastating flooding that wreaked havoc on its infrastructure last summer. As it matures, Jenna’s Promise will shift from family-led to family-supported.

“We’ve gone from this startup phase to this vision of being something that can be a juggernaut — not in size, but in importance and power — to direct the conversation,” Gregory Tatro said. “We’ve made a lot of strides toward this, and with our new board leadership, the changes we’ve been making internally, Jenna’s Promise does feel like a changing organization. From the ashes of the flood, we’ve risen again, in this new form that’s better than before”

On its face, the organization seemed to rebuild quickly from the flood caused by days of intense rain last July. Having filled out several vacant buildings in the village of Johnson with its network of businesses and recovery residences over the past five years, Jenna’s Promise likely suffered the most out of any single entity outside of the town and village municipal governments.

Nearly inundated with water, the Johnson Health Clinic, which collaborates with Jenna’s Promise; the Rae of Hope recovery residence on the banks of the Gihon River; and the Jenna’s Promise Cafe, which took on some water in its basement; were all back in operation by the end of 2023. The Health Clinic, working out of Jenna’s House community center, began seeing patients within days of the flood.

Below the surface of the optimism and determination of this comeback was a battered organization. 

Tatro described splitting employees between those dedicated to furthering the Jenna’s Promise mission and those working to bring back what had been lost. The flood traumatized both employees and those they were trying to help, leading to widespread turnover from which they’re continuing to recover.

The flood not only directly impacted its businesses but arrested the momentum of the economic vitality Jenna’s Promise hoped to promote in Johnson, which the organization sees as central to its broader mission. A guiding concept of Jenna’s is to not just provide opportunities for employment to people in recovery but to improve material conditions in the entire community.

“One of our goals was to bring opportunity to this town and to unite the town to bring people from the university down to the village, to sort of bring the business and the nonprofit and the health community together, to be united as a community,” Franklin said. “It felt like the flood popped our balloon, and we’re still making our way back from that.”

Recovery expansion

Despite being waylaid by the flood, the political clout of Jenna’s Promise continues to grow.

This has been most clearly evinced by a $241,000 grant awarded to the organization by the Department of Corrections to work with women at the Chittenden Correctional Facility in South Burlington and other prisons transition out of the criminal-justice system.

Franklin called this a sea change within the Department of Corrections toward potentially less punitive and more cost-effective forms of addressing the cycle of incarceration for repeat offenders, many of whom also struggle with addiction.

“This is a really positive step in the right direction to give opportunities to women who might not otherwise have the opportunity to leave incarceration and go back into communities,” Franklin said. “Jenna’s Promise occupies a relatively niche space that makes us able to serve this population of people who have substance use disorders, people who are often survivors of sexual and domestic violence.”

Franklin has long advocated for recovery programs to be involved in prisons to address a system that often enables addiction and exposure to drugs more than it prevents or stops it. 

The partnership between Jenna’s Promise and the Institute for Trauma Recovery and Resilience has made the organization particularly well-suited to addressing addiction as one part of a range of issues rooted in deeper psychological problems.

“Our aim isn’t just to address the symptoms and after effects, but to get to the root of the problems in individual people’s lives, to get into the root traumas that cause someone to, in many cases, end up in incarceration, and to fall into substance use and to do other things to alleviate their misery, their physical health issues or their mental health issues,” according to Franklin.

Jenna’s Promise may only be able to house 17 at a time at the residences in Johnson, and its approach may be more resource-intensive than traditional jailing, but it gets better results than the usual approach, according to Tatro and Franklin, who claim their trauma-based approach has resulted in less recidivism and participants who are more self-supporting at the program’s end.

Franklin also said the ability of Jenna’s Promise to take on this partnership with the state was evidence of the organization’s maturation as its grown from a commendable “recovery village” experiment out of Johnson to proven program.

“There are 137 women incarcerated (Chittenden Correctional Facility) and others around the state, and every one of them is like Jenna (Tatro) and could have gone any number of paths like Jenna, so our motivation to help women like her and other people who had a lot of things go wrong in their lives really couldn’t be any stronger,” Franklin said.

Recovery politics

As it has grown, Jenna’s Promise has also captured national attention.

Gregory Tatro said that Jenna’s Promise had been working closely with the Fletcher Group, which houses and treats people experiencing homelessness and substance abuse disorder in southern Kentucky that has been doing “groundbreaking work,” and North Dakota’s Republican Gov. Doug Burgum is sending a team to learn more about Jenna’s and what elements might be implemented in that state’s addiction recovery programs.

Tatro, whose interest in politics predates the nonprofit’s founding, offered up the fact that he recently spoke with Vermont conservative and perennial office-seeker Gerald Malloy and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-California, in the span of one day as a testament to the organization’s bipartisan approach. He said putting Toll and Marcoux in leadership positions on the board was intentionally meant to put a liberal and conservative “unifier” in charge.

“Both (Khanna and Malloy) are saying the same thing, that this is an amazing program that can change how we talk and look at recovery,” Tatro said. “For us, the conclusion that we’ve come to is that to truly shift the conversation, we have to get changemakers thinking and talking about (addiction and recovery).”

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the organization agrees completely with all its supporters. Well over 200 opioid-related overdose deaths have been recorded each year since 2021 in Vermont, and while the official number may have dipped slightly in 2023, Franklin gently pointed out that the state’s count represents only a fraction of the actual deaths from drug use.

To prevent as many deaths as possible, Franklin and Jenna’s Promise have been committed to harm reduction practices, an approach meant to keep people safe embodied best by the vending machine that provides free naloxone, an overdose prevention drug, set up outside of the Johnson clinic.

“The harm reduction principle is that people can’t change overnight, and you can’t go from using substances to completely sober, so in many ways, our whole model is to create change over time,” Franklin said.

Republican Gov. Phil Scott recently vetoed a bill that would create a safe-injection site — or overdose prevention site, as Franklin called it — in Burlington, a place where illegal drugs could be used under supervision and with help nearby in an overdose hot zone. Franklin has advocated for such sites in the past.

Scott received the first Inspiration Award from Jenna’s Promise at the opening of the Jenna’s House community center in 2021 and has been a vocal supporter of the organization. Tatro argued that such sites are controversial even within the recovery community, and both Franklin and Tatro said the organization tries to avoid taking a stance on such issues.

“If we can all stay united, and all stand shoulder to shoulder — whether we’re left, right or in the middle, pushing toward this better future — that’s how we solve this problem,” Tatro said. “Substance use doesn’t care about your political persuasion, it doesn’t care if you live in a city, or a small town doesn’t care if you’re black or white, older, young or anything in between. The only way to address something that’s so indiscriminate is to do it in a way that’s indiscriminate.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that the Johnson Health Clinic collaborates with Jenna’s Promise, but is not part of the organization, and that the Clinic, working out of Jenna’s House community center, began seeing patients shortly after the flood.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Jenna’s Promise enters new phase.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the News & Citizen on May 30.

The acquisition and conservation of a 356-acre portion of woodlands in Eden will expand a broader 5,720-acre tract that has been conserved since 2010.

Greatwoods LLC and the Trust for Public Land are partners in the deal.

Greatwoods — a timber investor company with property located in New Hampshire, Vermont, New Hampshire, Oregon and Washington — approaches resource extraction in a conservation-minded way. It has been logging and sugaring the Eden tract surrounding its newest acquisition for over a decade but were unable to make it a truly intact forest until now.

“That property was kind of the doughnut hole, it was the only piece we didn’t own around us that we tried to pursue,” Greatwoods forester Adam Taschreau said. “That’s kind of the way we’re looking at acquisitions now with the real estate market as crazy as it is. We’re basically looking to expand our core land base, and that property is one of our core properties.”

The Greatwoods Eden property, now over 6,000 acres, abuts the Long Trail to the northwest and even dips into Johnson where it adjoins Butternut Mountain. It was originally conserved with funding from the U.S. Forest Service Forest Legacy Program, and this most recently conserved tract was done so with a $271,000 grant from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.

Along with requiring a more rigorous management plan, the easement guarantees the property is open to the public for recreation, according to Trust for Public Lands senior project manager Kate Wanner. Vermont Association of Snow Travelers trails cross through the property and, though there are no hiking trails specifically cut through the area, there are plenty of forest roads to allow access.

Wanner also pointed out that water quality benefits were something the trust kept in mind when pursuing conservation of the property. A third of the property is made-up of wetlands, and two-thirds of the property is considered riparian.

“Keeping this as forest and keeping it with strong protections are really going to help downstream to decrease flooding and increase water quality,” Wanner said.

Plugging the hole that lingered and fractured the forest block was a crucial step to ensure the integrity of the project, according to Wanner.

“If that piece had been developed, it would definitely have larger implications on the conserved land around it,” she said.

Greatwoods has reserved a 2-acre piece of the newly conserved portion of its forest from conservation, with no immediate plans to develop but with an interest in keeping its options open, potentially installing low-impact infrastructure if the need arises, such as a sugarhouse or collection site for the sap collected on the property, according to Taschreau.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Acquisition, conservation makes ‘Greatwoods’ forest whole.

This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the News & Citizen on May 23.

The chicanery in Smugglers Notch continues.

It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that, no matter what signs, fines or impediments the Vermont Agency of Transportation may put against them, some tractor-trailer truck driver will still end up stuck in the Notch.

The agency installed temporary chicanes on both the Stowe and Cambridge entrances to the Notch in May, delaying the opening of the road until last week.

The chicanes are low-height barriers that purposefully mimic the tight curves found at the summit of the road to ensure that the drivers who annually find themselves ensnared in the narrow passage, sometimes blocking the road for hours, will now find themselves obstructed in an area where they can more easily turn around.

That was the plan, anyway.

On May 16, two days after the Notch Road opened for the season, a tractor-trailer truck driver — despite the chicanes, despite the signs warning them to turn back, despite the threat of hefty fines — drove past the new barriers from the Cambridge side onto a road forbidden to big rigs.

How did the driver do it? Apparently by simply driving around the chicanes in the left lane, according to the Agency of Transportation.

Luckily, the truck didn’t get far before it was flagged down by Agency of Natural Resources employees who were on the mountain. So, technically, the driver and their truck didn’t get stuck. Transportation officials are also calling it a wash when it comes to gauging the chicane’s efficacy.

“We really don’t know if the chicane worked because the (tractor-trailer truck) didn’t encounter it,” said Todd Sears, deputy director of operations and safety at the agency.

Sears added that the system was designed during this pilot year to be adaptable and to allow the agency to alter it on the fly as it sees how the chicanes work in practice.

“We saw this truck do what it did, we sent investigators to the chicanes to see if there was anything that we could improve upon to better inform/deter motorists,” Sears wrote in an email. “Consequently, we made adjustments to signage, essentially making the route that the vehicle should take clearer.”

Sears led the project to install chicanes in the Notch after the agency spent years conducting traffic analyses and gathering data as the road’s stuck-truck problem grew through the 2010s as more truckers came to rely on GPS technology that routed them through the mountain passage.

In a letter to the Stowe Selectboard in 2021, Secretary of Transportation Joe Flynn said that 92 trucks had been stuck in the Notch since 2009, about 8.4 trucks per year. Twelve trucks were stuck in the Notch each year in 2013, 2014 and 2017.

Efforts from the state have been met with a decreasing number of stuck trucks. Just five were recorded in 2022 and 2023, and six in 2021.

While the agency considered multiple options for thwarting truck drivers before they entered the Notch, including strategically placed roundabouts and height-restrictive archways, Sears and the agency decided to test out chicanes, news which the News & Citizen broke last fall.

At a presentation to the Cambridge Historical Society in Jeffersonville before the Notch opened, Lamoille County Planning Commission planner Seth Jensen, who oversaw parking lot renovations in the Notch last summer, emphasized that, if the current iteration of the chicanes is successful, any permanent installation would be constructed with materials that are more harmonious with the area’s natural aesthetics.

From the outset, Sears has emphasized the prototype chicane’s malleability based on how the drivers interact with them. Though the chicanes have been altered after this first truck showed how easily they can be bypassed by a committed driver, Sears thinks it will prove to be an outlier.

“We are only less than a week into the Notch opening, and the chicanes are new, so it will take some time to assess,” Sears said. “We’ll be more ready to make an assessment at the end of the season. If we get data showing that a (tractor-trailer truck) made it up to the chicane, couldn’t make it through and therefore backed up and turned around, we’d consider that good news: The chicane was effective as designed.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Barriers meant to prevent truck stuckages at Smugglers Notch get tested right away.