Grow What’s Good Here

Vermont’s farms are not a heritage exhibit. They are businesses run by families, and they are closing because the markets for their product have eroded, the regulatory regime was written to punish rather than serve the people who steward our land, and the continued viability of farming has taken a backseat to special interests in our legislature. 

Three-quarters of Vermont is forest, and most of it is owned by people who need it to pay for itself. Policies drafted by special interests have contributed to conditions where wood products cannot be economically logged, trucked, milled, and sold. Vermont forests should remain family-owned and viable to the next generation as working forests.  

The cost and complexity brought on by overregulation have smothered rural economic activity and turned away workers. Permit delays, fees, and onerous mandates are making Vermont noncompetitive and leading job creators to choose friendlier states. 

A young family that wants to stay in the town it grew up in should be able to build a modest house on a modest lot affordably and creatively. Today the wastewater rules, the contractor rules, and the assessor make that harder and increase the barriers to home ownership generally. 

• —Create a wastewater bottom tier that includes permit-by-rule greywater systems for small dwellings with waterless toilets. Offer a codified pretreatment credit so approved treatment converts a mound site into a standard system. Add a 45-day deadline with automatic approval after it.
• —Extend the owner-builder exemption with written homeowner election recorded on the deed, to houses built by contractors below a defined annual volume.
• —Eliminate the rental cliff. Renting an ADU on an owner-occupied parcel should never reclassify the property as a commercial “public building.”
• —Reform manufactured home foundation criteria. Stop conditioning manufactured-home assistance on concrete slabs federal rules don’t require, and accept pier, helical, and gravel-pad solutions.
• —Assess at cost. Assess new owner-built residences assessed at documented cost, not market comparables. A family that framed its own house from its own timber should not be taxed as though they bought it finished.

Vermont’s farms and forests should belong to the people who work them. Instead, Vermont increasingly makes land out of reach: permanent easements that freeze a property in place, public acquisitions that remove it from the tax rolls, and a tax program meant for working land that now allows some owners to stop working it. Behind much of this is a small network of conservation organizations. They lobby for laws, receive public money, and hold easements that govern Vermont families’ land in perpetuity. Conservation that shuts out working people is not stewardship. These reforms keep Vermont’s land open, affordable, working, and in Vermonters’ hands.

Tax dollars exist to deliver services, not to finance advocacy. Vermont’s agencies distribute millions annually in grants and pass-through contracts to nonprofits, consultancies, and planning bodies that lobby the Legislature to expand the programs funding them and to further regulate the working people whose taxes pay them.

• —Provide sunlight. Create a public, searchable database of every state grant and pass-through contract including recipient, amount, purpose, and outcome — in one place.
• —Pass a lobbying bar with teeth. Federal rules already prohibit spending federal grant funds on lobbying. Extend the same standard to state funds by statute, with certification and clawback.
• —Institute zero-based rebid of agency grant portfolios: genuine on-the-ground service and conservation work continues and competes; organizational overhead and advocacy operations do not.
• —Reform the regional planning commissions to authorize only technical and support services, not a creeping layer of regional government.
• —Account for Vermont vendors. Before a state contract above a defined threshold is awarded out of state, the agency publishes a written finding on whether Vermont firms were solicited and could do the work. Prior affiliation between decision-makers and bidders is disclosed as a matter of course.
• —Generate an overlap audit. A chartered review of duplicated function across the regional planning commissions, the Land Use Review Board, and agency permitting: how many public bodies one project must satisfy, what each layer costs, and what can be consolidated or eliminated. Government is roughly seventeen percent of Vermont employment and has grown while the population shrank.

Montpelier writes law that disproportionately burdens rural municipalities that do not have fully-staffed town offices, available credentials, and necessary infrastructure.

• —Enforce a rural burden review. Ask three questions before a bill takes effect. Is there a documented problem, with actual instances, in the communities the bill would govern? Do the credentials it requires exist at the municipal level? Do the systems and infrastructure required exist? Fail any one and the bill carries a modified rural pathway or does not move in committee.
• —Create a small-town mandate cost test. Every bill and rule imposing a duty on municipalities should carry a fiscal note calculated for a town under 2,500 people, not a statewide aggregate. Above a cost threshold the State funds it, provides a shared-service alternative, or exempts towns below the size floor.

A citizen legislature only works if citizens can serve in it. A session running deep into May excludes the people whose living depends on the months it consumes including farmers, builders, and tradespersons whose working season is short. The same requirement governs testimony. An unduly long legislative session places added burdens on working Vermonters seeking to monitor legislative activity and testify.

• —Enforce a hard adjournment date of April 15. The session once ended in time for planting. Return it there, by rule and by discipline. A fixed, early adjournment is the cheapest structural reform available and the one that most changes who can serve.
• —Institute a cap on bill introductions per member. A shorter session is honest only if it forces prioritization.
• —Provide a problem statement on introduction. Every bill should state the documented problem it addresses and what existing law already covers.
• —Supply notice to towns. Plain-language summaries of municipal-impact legislation delivered to town clerks and selectboards on a schedule that lands before crossover and before Town Meeting Day while a town can still weigh in.
• —Encourage testimony a working person can give. Hearings on working-lands and municipal legislation scheduled outside the workday where practicable, with guaranteed remote testimony and posted witness notice.

take action and serve the Needs of rural vermonters

The candidate commitment.