A coalition of residents, municipal workers and lawmakers from Barre and Montpelier on Tuesday made a plea to Vermont legislators, who are barrelling toward a Friday deadline to advance the state budget: Please, they asked, approve $3.5 million to Washington County’s two largest cities to elevate 20 flood-prone homes.
“These are cost effective ways to keep people in homes here in Vermont,” Barre City Manager Nick Storellicastro said at a Statehouse press conference Tuesday afternoon. “And it’s cheaper to do it this way than to build a new house. We can save homes much more effectively than we can build new ones.”
It’s a question that lawmakers and community members are reckoning with months after last summer’s catastrophic floods, and more broadly, as the state stares down a future of more frequent and fiercer climate catastrophes: Should Vermonters build back their homes where they are located currently, oftentimes in a floodplain? Or should they pick up and move to higher ground?
In Barre, according to Storellicastro, the latter simply isn’t an option. “We don’t have much of a choice,” he said, because at four square miles of hills and valleys, “we don’t have a lot of other places to grow.”
But homes can be rebuilt safely in the floodplain, Storellicastro asserted. They just need to be lifted higher, hopefully outside the reach of future floodwaters.
He pointed to Barre’s recently constructed City Place on Main Street. While the rest of downtown Barre was slammed by floodwaters in July, Storellicastro said there was “not a drop” of water damage in City Place.
“Why? Because it was built to flood resilience standards,” he said.
Barre officials are asking the state for $1.5 million to elevate 10 flood-prone homes. Seven miles up the road, Montpelier officials are requesting $2 million to raise another 10 houses. (The cost difference between the two cities’ estimates, officials said on Tuesday, is due to factors particular to each home.)
The cost averages out to $150,000 to $200,000 per house, officials said on Tuesday — cheaper, they argued, than the cost of building new homes from scratch. And with the state in a housing crisis that long predates the summer floods, Vermont can’t afford to demolish the homes it already has, they argued.
Why should the state pay for it? According to Montpelier City Manager Bill Fraser, Vermonters whose homes were destroyed can’t wait the years it could take to get a helping hand from the feds. Officials told stories of residents still living in unsafe conditions — homes without floors, walls ripped down to the studs.
“The concern here is the time and pace of FEMA money, federal money. … It takes a long time — years,” Fraser said. “We are asking for a very relatively small amount of state money that can be granted to the communities or directly so we can move this quickly.”
Even that “relatively small” $3.5 million is a tall order, the coalition conceded, in a year during which state budget writers are rummaging through the couch cushions for savings, trying to cut $15 million from the fiscal year 2025 budget. (In the 2024 midyear budget adjustment, the Legislature already appropriated $1 million and $750,000 in flexible flood recovery grants to Barre and Montpelier respectively.)
The last thing that cities like Barre and Montpelier want to see, Storellicastro said, are residents driven out of town due to the disaster.
“These are the people we should be fighting for to stay in Vermont. They want to be here,” Storellicastro said. “And we have to meet them halfway.”
— Sarah Mearhoff
In the know
The Agency of Transportation is asking lawmakers for permission to spend $2 million on land in Berlin where it wants to build a new central garage, after the agency’s existing facility nearby for maintaining snow plows and other vehicles was damaged in last summer’s floods.
Joe Flynn, the transportation secretary, told the House Transportation Committee on Tuesday that the central garage was inundated with several feet of water from the Stevens Branch and Pond Brook, both of which it butts up against. VTrans lost at least six vehicles and “an inordinate amount of tools,” he said. Keeping the facility where it is, he added, “would be foolish.”
Flynn noted that, earlier this month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would essentially pause the process of reimbursing VTrans for damages at the garage until the agency can show that it has a plan to move its central maintenance operations elsewhere.
The agency considered several other build sites that the state already owns, he said. But its top choice is a parcel just off Interstate 89 that sits adjacent to a Vermont State Police barracks. There could be benefits, Flynn noted, in locating state services so close together.
VTrans officials said they would buy the land using existing money in agency reserves.
Lawmakers could greenlight the purchase by adding language to H.868, which is this year’s T-bill, said Rep. Sara Coffey, the Guilford Democrat and House Transportation chair, on Tuesday. But, she said that addition might not happen until the bill hits the Senate. Later in the day, H.868 passed the House by voice vote, and it is primed for final approval.
— Shaun Robinson
On the move
The House Education Committee on Friday passed its miscellaneous education bill, H.874, which includes $1.9 million to continue funding community schools.
The vote was split across party lines, with the committee’s three Republican members voting “no.”
Rep. Terri Lynn Williams, R-Granby, read a statement to her fellow committee members explaining her vote against the funding.
“Community schools are awesome,” she said, but to her mind, the $1.9 million wouldn’t help enough schools.
The House Committee on Ways and Means will now take up the bill.
—Ethan Weinstein
The Senate unanimously passed S.55, a bill that sets new ground rules for the public’s access to public meetings in the post-pandemic era.
The version moving forward requires that meetings of all state-level bodies with control or jurisdiction over budgetary, legislative or quasi-judicial matters be hybrid, that is, provide both an in person and online option for attendance and participation. However, local bodies with those powers are allowed to meet entirely in person or provide a hybrid option, a reversion to the pre-pandemic status quo.
Advisory bodies on both the state and local level have the option to meet however its members prefer, either in hybrid form or entirely online or in person.
Additional new requirements in the bill include the procedure for calling an emergency online-only meeting following a local incident and new training requirements for municipal officials, among others.
The bill is scheduled for third reading in the Senate and then will be sent to the House.
— VTD Editors
Visit our 2024 Bill tracker for the latest updates on major legislation we are following.
On the hill
Vermont’s congressional delegation drew down about $75 million in earmarks for projects across the state from the first round of 2024 federal spending bills signed by President Joe Biden earlier this month, they announced on Monday.
The earmarks — known more formally by the term “congressionally directed spending” — are set to support some 60 projects from Burlington to Bennington and St. Johnsbury to Townshend. The funding allocations were included in six of the 12 appropriations bills that Congress needs to pass by the end of the week to avert a government shutdown.
The delegation would have additional earmarks to announce once the remaining six bills passed, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Monday.
— Shaun Robinson
What we’re reading
Vermont’s statewide incumbents are facing little competition so far in campaign fundraising, VTDigger
Few people have made their way to state’s last minute temporary shelters, VTDigger/Vermont Public
Vermont towns use tax sales to collect late payments. But critics say the process lacks guardrails, Vermont Public