Earlier this year, a consultant issued a report recommending sweeping changes to the state’s health care system — proposals that ranged from building more housing to cutting certain services at specific hospitals.

At a meeting of lawmakers and state health officials late last week, Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden Southeast, questioned Green Mountain Care Board Chair Owen Foster and Secretary of Human Services Jenney Samuelson on that report.

Of the scores of recommendations, Lyons, the chair of the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare, asked what would be the simplest for the Legislature to implement: “Which is the low-hanging fruit?” she said at the Friday meeting.

The officials’ answers — which included proposed reforms to hospital regulations, state emergency medical services and electronic medical records — now seem poised to form key planks of the health care agenda in the upcoming legislative biennium.

As Vermont’s population has aged, the state’s health care system has appeared increasingly unsustainable. Private health insurance premiums are among the most expensive and fastest-growing in the country. Many hospitals and other health clinics are operating at a loss. Appointments for primary and specialty care can be few and far-between.

Those challenges and others were brought to the forefront by the 144-page report issued in September by the New York-based consulting firm Oliver Wyman.

The report issued a series of recommendations that amounted to a broad redesign of the state’s health care apparatus. Hospitals should consolidate services at different regional locations, the firm recommended, and the state should invest in housing, emergency medical services and internet connectivity in rural areas of the state.

Now, legislators say they hope to follow through on at least some of those recommendations.

Lawmakers are already working on legislation to simplify the approval process for new health care facilities, Lyons said in an interview. That process, by which providers must apply to the Green Mountain Care Board for what’s called a certificate of need, is notoriously costly and time-consuming.

“There is a bill,” Lyons said. “I’m working on it with another senator. So we will have that.”

Lyons said she also expects to examine another problem identified by the consultant’s report: that hospitals’ and clinics’ electronic medical records systems are not always compatible with those used by other providers.

“I’ll probably put a bill in that gets the discussion started there,” she said. “Nothing that causes an explosion, I hope.”

Lawmakers are also planning to examine the state’s emergency medical services, a subject that was a topic of legislation in the last legislative session, said Rep. Lori Houghton, D-Essex Junction, the outgoing chair of the House Health Care Committee.

Last spring, Gov. Phil Scott signed a bill that bolsters emergency medical services training and increases funding for Medicaid reimbursement for EMS services.

So some reforms to the state’s emergency medical services system are already “in process,” Houghton said in an interview. But in the upcoming session, the topic is “something we’ll also focus on and see if we can make the transformation go quicker,” she said.

Houghton, who was recently elected House majority leader, will no longer chair the health care committee come January, due to longstanding practice that prevents majority leaders from being chairs. “But I think I can speak to what is going to be on the table,” she said.

The speaker of the House will appoint chairs once the legislative session begins in January, so it’s not yet clear who will lead the House’s health care committee. But Houghton mentioned Rep. Alyssa Black, D-Essex, the committee’s ranking member, as a possible successor.

Black declined to comment Tuesday, saying, “I have no knowledge that I want to pass on.”

The “low-hanging fruit” currently under consideration does not cover many of the recommendations from the consultancy’s report, however. Some of the report’s proposals — such as limiting how much hospitals can bill for care and ending certain procedures at some facilities — are either outside of the Legislature’s purview or would likely entail fierce and lengthy Statehouse battles.

Devon Green, a lobbyist for the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, expressed support for many of the proposals from Lyons and Houghton, including investments in emergency medical services and streamlining the certificate of need process. Some Vermont hospitals are already making changes in response to the report, Green said.

“Hospitals are here doing the work, and we want to work in partnership with other healthcare providers and our state leaders,” she said.

Lyons, of the Senate health committee, also wants to reexamine how health care is regulated in the state, echoing a bill she backed in the 2024 session that would have shifted some of the oversight powers of the Green Mountain Care Board to the Agency of Human Services.

“We’ll probably see some discussion about authority, regulatory gaps. You know, who’s in charge of what, where and when?” she said. “I don’t want to go back to the bill that I had put in (this year), but it’ll be a discussion.”

And as the cost of providing and paying for health care has grown increasingly unsustainable, Houghton said, the legislature needs to understand whether earlier health care initiatives, such as mental health urgent care and the Blueprint for Care program, for example, are actually paying off.

“There’s going to be a concerted effort to call people in and say, this is what we’re doing: We need to really understand how these programs are working, and then fixing them or changing them or scrapping them if they’re not working,” Houghton said.

But both Houghton and Lyons acknowledged that there is little the Legislature can do that will make care and insurance more affordable for Vermonters in the short term.

“I don’t have a silver bullet,” Lyons said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: In wake of landmark hospital report, Vermont lawmakers look toward health care reforms.

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

The faint smell of incense and a familiar scene of narrow aisles stocked with local food greet visitors to the Plainfield Co-op. The single 1,200-square-foot room in Plainfield village boasts a wood-paneled ceiling and can be thoroughly perused in minutes.

“It feels like a trip to the 1970s,” co-op board secretary Andy Robinson said.

Unsurprisingly, the storefront can be traced back to 1978 when early co-op members purchased the space — partly inspired by the back-to-the-land movement of the time. The business has been there ever since. 

But the old building has been showing its age. Now a recent move to address that reality has changed the trajectory of both the co-op’s future and that of another prominent local business: Plainfield Hardware. 

Co-op members voted by a 156–34 margin in June to purchase and relocate to the significantly larger 2,500-square-foot hardware store on Route 2 in East Montpelier, Robinson said, about 2 miles away. The store was up for sale, and in August the co-op bought it for about $2 million. The purchase included the business of the store and will see a merger of its workforce with existing co-op staff, said Robinson. 

The change comes at what seems to be a significant time for co-operative businesses in the region as another food co-op within a 30-minute driving radius, the Buffalo Mountain Co-op in Hardwick, has undergone significant changes. It moved in 2022 from a spot of comparable size to Plainfield’s to the building of the former Hardwick Village Market on Mill Street. Further back in time, in 2008, the Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier went through its own expansion.

Robinson said matters of necessity rather than preference drove Plainfield members’ relocation votes.

“It’s an old building, it’s cramped, it’s in a fairly inaccessible location,” he said, “and given the size and the amount of product you can put on the shelves and many other things, it has struggled to be profitable.”  

Angie Domino, who has worked for the co-op since 2010 and is currently its chief buyer, cited forces beyond the village to blame. She said the pandemic and the closing of Goddard College dealt blows to business. 

“Goddard College used to have a big part of the liveliness of this area,” she said. “When it was full, there were new students coming in with fresh energy, fresh ideas. They were shopping at the little shops.”

Robinson said the board first began looking for future locations two years ago, partly inspired by other co-ops expanding. A federal grant of about $30,000, handled by the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, paid for a chart of options for the co-op.

One option would have been to renovate — a solution that promised a setback in 2027 when the town plans to reconstruct Main Street. Somewhere during the process, Robinson said the hardware store came up for sale. The projected cost of buying the business, which includes a greenhouse and a deli, was $2.15 million.

Starting this past spring the co-op raised $475,000 in gifts and member loans, then received about $1.4 million from lenders. The co-op sealed the deal Aug. 7.

“I think we are part of a larger movement,” he said.

He said the Plainfield Co-op hopes to diversify inventory in a way that echoes Hardwick’s Buffalo Mountain Co-op, which expanded its inventory of more conventional products when it moved. Though the Plainfield Co-op hasn’t begun to sell products in the new location and doesn’t have a finalized date for its full opening, its leaders want to switch from a 70% to 30% ratio of organic to conventional products to a 60% to 40% balance. 

The ratio “will evolve based upon what members and customers actually purchase,” said Robinson.

Matt Cropp, executive director of Vermont Employee Ownership Center, said the Plainfield Co-op came into being in the ’60s largely because community demands for organic and health-focused foods. He compared the co-op’s current transition to Burlington’s City Market’s decision to move downtown and add more conventional products to its inventory in 2000. 

“When they moved downtown, the agreement they had with the city was that they would also stock conventional foods to sort of be able to be a grocery store that was more serving the needs of the whole city, not a subgroup of the city,” he said.

Transitions like those come with tradeoffs, Cropp said. The same goes for adding more co-op members, he said, which the Plainfield outfit is hoping to do with scaling up. 

“When you have an organization that has 10,000 members, right, and a board with like nine people, most people aren’t going to have personal knowledge of most of the board members,” he said. “And so there’s kind of a different relationship there, a bit more alienated and requires more intentional approaches to governance and community building, versus a smaller co-op that can kind of ride on the coattails of existing community social capital.”

Melissa Bounty, executive director of the Central Vermont Economic Development Corporation, worked with the Plainfield Co-op board on the move, which was one of the organization’s priority projects this year. She agreed there are tradeoffs when co-ops expand. 

“The higher that number (of active members) goes, the better increase of capacity and support and services you would have,” she said. “You also do have more complexity to manage, and I can see how that could create problems.” 

Robinson said the co-op board is looking into transportation arrangements to help locals get to the new store.

Some members such as Domino, the chief buyer, worry what leaving will mean for the vitality of the village, even while recognizing the co-op can’t thrive there anymore. 

Domino has lived in Plainfield on and off throughout her life and said she’s always felt a strong sense of community cultivated by local stores such as the co-op. In recent years she’s seen many of those businesses shutter, such as the River Run restaurant in 2011 and Red Store filling station not long after.

“What will happen if the co-op also closes and leaves the village?” she asked. “What will be left here?”

Robinson said he feels some of the same emotions, but he is also optimistic the new location can maintain the co-op’s values and provide an all-in-one shopping experience.

“I’m okay and happy with the move, and I have some nostalgia. This is not binary,” he said. “You can have both of those things going on at the same time, right?”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Plainfield Co-op balances nostalgia and growth with planned expansion .

Vermonters turned out in record numbers to vote in this year’s general election, largely without a hitch, Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas said Tuesday at a formal event certifying the election results.

Out of 522,600 registered voters in the state, 372,885 cast their ballots in last week’s general election, Copeland Hanzas said. That’s nearly 2,000 more voters than the state saw in 2020 — a contest that shattered previous turnout records.

However, voter registrations are higher this year, resulting in a lower turnout rate for eligible voters than in 2020. This year, Vermont’s turnout rate was 71%, while in 2020 it was 73%.

“I am as pleased with the technical administration of this election as I could possibly be, but I’m even prouder of the participation levels,” Copeland Hanzas said. “This is what participatory democracy should look like.”

That was despite concerns the state’s election administration office had this year as it took note of threats and violence against voting processes in other states, and saw a noticeable rise in confrontational language against Vermont’s town clerks and election staffers.

“After hearing a smatter of vitriolic anecdotes in the weeks leading up to the election — from clerks, from election workers — Election Day, itself, went largely smoothly and respectfully,” Seán Sheehan, the office’s director of elections and campaign finance, said Tuesday.

Sheehan went on to say that, “fortunately,” Vermont did not see attacks on ballot drop boxes or bomb threats, both of which occurred in other states this year. But leading up to last Tuesday, he said local election officials reported that people had entered their offices “screamed, in some cases” about “voting by mail or other things they didn’t like about the election, or some of the disinformation that had been spread around the country.”

Asked if any offices received threats of physical violence, Sheehan said some communications were “borderline,” and the Secretary of State’s Office was in “close communication” with the Vermont State Police and FBI leading up to last week. The office also provided town clerks and election workers with de-escalation training.

But on Election Day itself, Sheehan recounted, “We didn’t hear many incidents at all. We really heard overwhelmingly that people were respectful. So we were very thankful to Vermonters for that.”

One week later, Copeland Hanzas and representatives of the state’s three major parties — Democrats, Republicans and Progressives — certified Vermont’s statewide election results. When they gathered in the Vermont House chamber to conduct the formality, security at the Statehouse was increased, including the use of a metal detector at the building’s entrance.

Among the races certified Tuesday was that for lieutenant governor, which saw Republican challenger John Rodgers outpacing Progressive Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman. 

According to Tuesday’s canvassing report, Zuckerman received 165,876 votes to Rodgers’ 171,854 — a difference of just 5,978. But with neither candidate having secured more than 50% of the vote (Zuckerman received 44.5% to Rodgers’ 46.1%), the Vermont Constitution requires the Legislature to cast a final vote in January. 

Zuckerman conceded the race last week but dangled the possibility that the Legislature could override voters — though leaders of the Democratic and Progressive parties threw cold water on the idea. 

The certification of the lieutenant governor’s race, signed by Copeland Hanzas and the party chairs on Tuesday, made note that the Legislature would have the final word.

To Vermont Progressive Party Chair Josh Wronski, the outcome of that race highlighted why the party has long supported ranked-choice voting.

“We shouldn’t be punting decisions to the Legislature when you don’t have a majority support for any candidate,” Wronski told reporters after the canvassing process was complete. “We should just, through our ballot, get to a majority support through a ranked-choice voting process.”

Had ranked-choice voting been in place, Wronski hypothesized that Zuckerman would have clinched the election. He pointed to the 13,671 votes cast for Green Mountain Peace & Justice Party nominee Ian Diamondstone and said, “I can’t imagine that most of those folks would be voting for the Republican as their number two.”

But, Wronski clarified, “we have no way of knowing” whether that would be the case, and he said the Legislature should respect the popular vote and certify the election for Rodgers.

One down-ballot election mix-up, meanwhile, may still spur a revote in Bennington County. Late last week, the Secretary of State’s Office flagged a voter checklist error in the town of Pownal, which placed roughly 40 voters in the incorrect legislative district.

For the Bennington-1 House race, the results were close enough that those 40 or so voters who were incorrectly assigned to the Bennington-5 district could have made the difference: Democrat John Cooper prevailed over Republican Bruce Busa by just 25 votes.

“There were no other elections on either of those ballots that would have been close enough that those voters being placed in the wrong district could have made a difference,” Copeland Hanzas told reporters Tuesday.

Copeland Hanzas said she expected a challenge to the election outcome to be filed, and she said her office would recommend to the court that the court order a revote to be conducted by universal mail-in ballot.

Read the story on VTDigger here: A record number of Vermont voters cast ballots in last week’s election.

A new initiative from the University of Vermont hopes to address the shortage of mental health professionals available to support the state’s youth.

Known as the Catamount Counseling Collaborative for Rural Schools, the program plans to train and place 52 school counselors, social workers and mental health clinicians in rural schools throughout Vermont for the next five years.

Recent surveys from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found rising levels of depression and anxiety among Vermont middle and high school students. 

Despite this, Vermont lacks an adequate number of mental health professionals. In 2023, the state’s Workforce Development Board estimated a need for 230 more providers to meet growing demand. 

The new Catamount Counseling Collaborative for Rural Schools aims to address the gap. 

Through the program — funded by a $3.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education — University of Vermont graduate students are expected to contribute at least 25,000 clinical hours annually to support rural communities.

“Vermont mental health needs are pervasive and complex and they’re currently underserved and this is a way to reach them,” said Anna Elliott, associate professor of counseling.

Elliott, the principal investigator for the grant, has experience running a similar initiative in Montana, where she spent five years developing a program to support rural communities with mental health professionals. 

A key part of the program, Elliot said, is to encourage graduates to continue working in rural schools or mental health facilities after completing their training. She said she tailored the program to Vermont’s unique needs. This included analyzing various statistics from community needs assessments on issues such as suicide rates, substance use disorder and the stigma associated with seeking mental health services, ensuring the program aligns closely with the landscape of Vermont’s mental health needs.

“One of our primary goals in setting up the training program was attending to students’ reports that they often didn’t feel prepared to go and work in a rural environment,” she said. “Having an intensive and intentional training program that sets them up to really understand what they’re walking into and how to be prepared and how to ask for support incentivized students to stay, so we’re hoping to replicate that here.”

The program offers a stipend to those who remain in their assigned schools for at least one year, helping to ease potential barriers like securing a full-time job or finding affordable housing.

In Montana, Elliott said she noticed some graduate students couldn’t stay in rural schools due to limited funding for permanent positions. Other challenges, including housing and job security, also made it difficult for them to remain in these high-need areas.

“I’m taking the model that I did in Montana and integrating that in with the community schools model to not just say, ‘here’s a couple graduate students that will be here for a year’ but let’s actually take a systemic look at what’s happening in the school — what are the needs, resources, barriers and strength,” Elliott said.

To address these challenges, the program focuses on recruiting graduate students who already come from rural areas. By offering low-residency options, the program allows these students to complete much of their coursework remotely. This means they can stay at home rather than moving to campus, making it easier for them to balance their studies with their existing commitments.

“This grant provides significant opportunity to bring students into the helping professions who might not otherwise have access to this kind of specialized training,” said Danielle Jatlow, a co-principal investigator and social worker who coordinates UVM’s bachelor’s of social work program, in a press release from the university.

UVM faculty, including program co-leaders Robin Hausheer and Lance Smith, both associate professors of counseling, are starting outreach to rural schools. They hope to place graduate students in schools as early as this semester, according to the release.

“There are people and kids that are getting served this year that might not have been otherwise,” Elliott said in the release. “So that feels like everything.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: New UVM program brings mental health professionals to Vermont’s rural schools.

Following reports of wildfires and persistent dry conditions, the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation has stopped issuing debris burning permits for two weeks. 

This ban is in effect through Nov. 11 at 3 p.m., but the department could cancel it early if conditions improve.

Wildfire risk has fluctuated in Vermont between high, very high, and extreme over the past week, and dry weather, low humidity and strong winds have combined to create conditions that make wildfires highly likely to spread, according to a press release from the department. The lack of rainfall in the forecast and dry forest fuels further heighten the fire danger across the state. 

Many town forest fire wardens had already ceased issuing burning permits, and the statewide order aims to reinforce local efforts, according to Danielle Fitzko, commissioner of the department.

“We are also concerned with fire department personnel becoming strained and fatigued as they share responsibility for wildland fire response,” Fitzko said in the release.

Vermont Forest Fire Supervisor Dan Dillner emphasized the importance of limiting human-caused fires to reduce risk.

“It is critical that we reduce the potential for further human caused fires by putting this temporary ban on burn permits in place,” Dillner said in the release.

On Sunday, fire crews discovered a large forest fire that destroyed two camps near Morgan Hill Road in Barnard, which then spread to the surrounding woods, according to a Sunday press release from Vermont State Police.

The origin of the fire is believed to be related to the improper disposal of ashes from a wood stove. Police said the fire crews were still fighting it at 4 p.m. on October 27, and smoke may be visible for several days, according to state police.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont implements statewide ban on debris burning due to wildfire risk.

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

WOLCOTT— On Thursday morning, Margo Baker was gearing up to make meatloaf sandwiches for the lunch special at the Wolcott Country Store. She both works at the store, tucked between Route 15 and the Lamoille River, and lives upstairs in one of seven apartments.

So Baker has seen firsthand the limits of the building’s small septic system. The tenants can’t have a washing machine, she said, and without a laundromat in town, she has to lug her laundry to neighboring Morrisville or Hardwick. The country store can’t expand its offerings. The system is simply too small, said the building’s owner, Fred Martin. The leach field’s tight position next to the river means he can’t expand it, and recent flooding – which, this summer, brought water into the basement – has forced him to have the sewage pumped out. 

“The leach field is just backed up,” Baker said. “The septic’s just not big enough to support the store and all the apartments.” 

Meanwhile, the lack of a public wastewater system in the town of roughly 1,500 poses big hurdles to adding housing in the village.

“We have a former church that is closed, and the property owners had stated that they had hoped to put maybe four apartments in there, but they’re hindered by the lack of wastewater,” said Linda Martin, the chair of the town’s selectboard (no relation to Fred). 

But a new town sewer system is on its way. Last month, voters approved plans for Wolcott’s first-ever municipal wastewater system in its core village district. In addition to helping make more redevelopment in the village center possible, town officials hope the system – which will involve hooking up individual septic tanks to a common leach field located high on a hill – will help ease Wolcott’s flooding woes. 

The additional wastewater capacity could allow the country store to create a seating area where people can “drink their coffee, visit, maybe eat their lunch,” Baker said. Martin, the building’s owner, said the new system could let him add another apartment to the building, too.  

“It’s a benefit for the town, I think,” Baker said. 

A lack of municipal water and wastewater systems in Vermont’s small village centers has long inhibited development, standing in the way of projects as modest as a restaurant or small apartment building.

“If you want to have seats in a cafe, or, you know, offer restroom facilities for any sort of establishment – wastewater is the foundation for that,” said Victoria Hellwig, a regional planner with the Lamoille County Planning Commission, who has helped support Wolcott’s wastewater project.

But a fresh focus from both state and federal programs, like the Covid-19-era American Rescue Plan Act, has helped make projects like Wolcott’s possible. Town officials have lined up over $5 million in state and federal funds, which they expect to fully cover the costs of getting the new system up and running. Just this week, the town secured $750,000 in economic development funds from the Northern Border Regional Commission aimed at bolstering rural infrastructure to help support the project.

Town officials hope that the new community septic system will encourage the revitalization of underutilized buildings in town, which would, in turn, entice users of the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail to make a stop in town. A project to renovate an old schoolhouse into a cafe and meeting space is already in the works, said Martin, the selectboard chair.

The wastewater system buildout could also allow property owners to add sorely-needed housing on existing lots, Martin said, and allow buildings once dedicated to another purpose to be converted into housing.

A desire to encourage more housing growth amid Vermont’s acute housing shortage has propelled rural wastewater projects from Westford to Montgomery in recent years. But residents’ concerns that the new public infrastructure will fuel unfettered growth and congestion have mired some such projects in local controversy. 

Wolcott hasn’t been immune to that tension, either. A subset of residents forced a revote on the wastewater system, in part questioning the potential impacts of new development – and adding more development in the floodplain, according to reporting from the News & Citizen. Residents have also raised concerns around ongoing maintenance costs for the system. But the project was approved, again, during the second go-around at the polls. 

Flooding in recent years has caused issues for homes with leach fields along the river, including sewage backups. In the new system, waste will be collected from hooked-up properties to a pump station and then sent to a larger, community leach field at a proposed site near the town’s elementary school, on a hill. A Q&A page on the town’s website says the system will be designed to withstand a 500-year flood event, and engineers aim to avoid siting the new infrastructure in places at high risk of flood-related erosion. 

But navigating those challenges underscores a conundrum for Wolcott and many other Vermont towns. To avoid sprawl, state officials have long attempted to encourage infill growth and housing density in downtowns and village centers — but in many cases those town centers are situated alongside increasingly flood-prone rivers.

Wolcott has been hit hard by the flooding of the last two summers. Martin, the selectboard chair, said she is greenlighting nine buyouts – the majority in the village area, which the new wastewater system is primed to benefit.

That will deal a blow to the town’s tax base, she said, and will mean the town can’t bring in user fees from those properties to aid in the long-term maintenance of the new wastewater system. The system is expected to serve about 50 properties around School Street, mostly residences, according to the News & Citizen; that means losing even a small number to buyouts could bring future financial strain.

The buyouts still have a long, bureaucratic road ahead, but moving forward with them “breaks my heart,” Martin said. Some of the flooded-out residents are couch-surfing, have relocated to neighboring towns, or have left the state, she said. 

Still, she hopes building out the new wastewater system can help the town make up for the housing it’s losing.

“It’ll make a brighter, you know, downtown village center regardless,” she said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Wolcott poised to build its first sewer system, aiming for development and flood resiliency.

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

SOUTH HERO — Ethan Wagner has been fishing as long as he can remember, mostly as a hobby. So when the Essex High School senior injured his knee playing football, he joined the school’s varsity bass fishing team. And among his teammates, who all call him Wags, he’s found a new bond. “When you’re on the boat together all day, you find something in common,” he said. 

Wagner competed on one of 19 varsity high school teams at the Vermont Principals’ Association’s seventh annual Open Classic tournament last Saturday, hosted at the John Guilmette Access Area in South Hero. The tournament was the most competitive yet, said Jeff Goodrich, chair of the association’s fishing committee — with more “‘full bags’ and competitive weights” than ever before.

It’s part of a trend in a new co-ed sport that’s only seen growth since it was trialed in Vermont in 2018, inspired by New Hampshire high schools, and made official in 2019. 

Kids go out on the water in the early morning, then parade back mid-afternoon. Boats are pulled out of the water and teams go up to weigh in the six best bass, smallmouth or large, they caught that day.

On Saturday, 34 boats went out on Lake Champlain, with 19 varsity and 15 junior varsity teams making up two divisions. Each school can have one team in each division, four kids to a team. The teens took shifts, allowing two in the boat at a time while a coach or volunteer captain maneuvered it. 

Milton High School came out on top that day, weighing six bass at 24.33 total pounds. Burlington High came in second with a weight of 20.97 pounds, and Champlain Valley Union High came in third with 18.28 pounds. 

The teams spent the day fishing on the Inland Sea of Lake Champlain, a stretch protected from wind and weather by the Champlain Islands and the causeway between Milton and South Hero. 

In Vermont varsity fishing, anglers must weigh in live fish — so all boats are required to have live wells that maintain temperature and oxygen levels to sustain the bass while on board. Teams get point deductions for any dead fish. 

At every tourney, employees from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife collect the fish in larger live tanks to release them after they’re weighed. The state workers make sure the fish are healthy and redistribute them, said Paige Blaker, one of three state employees working last weekend’s event. That afternoon, the crew released fish across three to four locations along the Inland Sea, Blaker said.

Part of the sport is “being a steward of the environment and taking care of the water,” Goodrich said, hence the partnership with the fish and wildlife department, which doesn’t exist in adult tournament leagues. 

Anglers master a tactic called culling: They weigh their fish as they go, dumping the lightest overboard and constantly replacing the ones in their on-board well until they’re left with the biggest six they can find. 

“You can control a lot of things — but the one thing you can’t control is if the fish is gonna bite,” said Scott Green, the coach at Harwood Union High School. The team at Harwood, last year’s state champs, has 18 anglers, the most ever. 

How do they prepare for tournaments? 

“We make sure there’s no frays in our line,” said team captain Nathanael Conyers. 

At the Duxbury school’s last practice ahead of the Open Classic, Green set up cornhole boards and cut-up recycling bins on the lawn in front of the school — targets for the athletes to try to land their hooks on. The team was working on their line-casting skills in preparation for the tournament in a few days. 

The rod is an “extension of your hand,” and “your wrist dictates where it goes,” Green said. 

The team gets in two practices on the lawn during the week — due to the long drive to the lake — and one on the water every weekend. Like all school teams in the state, Harwood Union relies on local anglers and coaches to volunteer personal boats, paying for insurance and fuel. 

Other schools far from the lake, like Middlebury Union High School, practice on the water only a couple times a year, said John Fitzgerald, that team’s coach. Other than with those sporadic sessions, he helps his anglers by directing them to YouTube and online resources to learn about “different setups,” he said. 

Although the sport is co-ed in Vermont schools, girls are far outnumbered. Hailey Isham, a sophomore at Mount Abraham Union High School in Bristol, said she’s the only girl on her school’s team. She’s been doing the sport since she was a freshman and plans to participate all four years. 

The Harwood team has only had a few girls over the years, Green said. The Middlebury team had a girl on the team last year, though none this year, Fitzgerald said.

But Green said he’s happy to have girls on the team, and leaders in the sport emphasize it’s for everyone.

“It gets students an opportunity to be a part of their school community, wear the uniform and represent their school in a nontraditional fashion,” Goodrich said. 

Wagner from Essex High said he’s excited for the VPA State Championship on Oct. 5 and hopes his team will do better there than at the South Hero tournament.

“I don’t do anything in my life to lose,” he said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont high schools hooked on a new sport: bass fishing.

Close to 400 people working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency are delivering aid to flood-affected Vermonters, following President Joe Biden’s approval last week of a major disaster declaration for seven Vermont counties hit by the remnants of Tropical Storm Beryl in mid-July.

Alongside Republican Gov. Phil Scott and other state officials, FEMA’s Federal Coordinating Officer William Roy told reporters at a Wednesday press conference that the agency has already opened three disaster recovery centers — located in Barre, Plainfield and Waterbury — and a fourth, to be located in Lyndonville, is expected to open soon.

At the disaster recovery centers, residents will be able to meet with FEMA staff, who can help guide them through the application and documentation processes for seeking federal aid. Roy said that FEMA aims to open centers in all seven counties where people are eligible to receive individual assistance under Biden’s major disaster declaration: Addison, Caledonia, Chittenden, Essex, Lamoille, Orleans and Washington. Orange County was recently approved for public assistance, which reimburses municipalities and other public bodies part of the cost to recover public infrastructure.

According to Roy, 370 FEMA personnel are currently deployed in Vermont to aid in the state’s natural disaster recovery. As in the aftermath of last July’s floods, FEMA officers are going door-to-door to offer assistance to Vermonters in flood-stricken areas. Out of 375 Vermonters who requested that FEMA inspect their homes for flood damage, 235 inspections have already been completed, Roy said.

And as of Wednesday morning, Vermonters had applied for individual assistance, Roy said, and more than $1 million in grant dollars are “going out the door.”

However, the current disaster declaration only encompasses damage from the storm that hit Vermont between July 9 and 11. 

Scott announced in a press release late Wednesday afternoon that he had submitted a request for another declaration to cover the July 30-31 storm for Caledonia, Essex and Orleans counties. An initial federal assessment found that 85 homes were damaged or destroyed in that storm, while public infrastructure withstood more than $3.7 million in damages. The release also noted that the governor had requested a separate declaration last week for Lamoille and Caledonia counties, which were hit by an earlier bout of flooding that began June 22.

“It’s important to remember, while these federal and state resources are essential and will help, we know it’s not enough,” Scott said at the press conference. “It’s not going to make people whole, or cover all the costs. I know this repeated flooding has taken a toll on municipal and family budgets, especially for those who have been hit multiple times just in the last year.”

In an effort to help fill those gaps — at least for business owners — the state will relaunch last year’s Business Emergency Gap Assistance Program. The program offers interest-free grant dollars to business owners to help cover the cost of flood damage to their businesses, or to make up for lost revenues due to the floods.

Scott and legislative leaders earlier this month approved an additional $7 million for the program to help business owners recover from this year’s multiple bouts of flooding. That comes on top of $5 million that the Legislature greenlit for the program during the legislative session, Scott said Wednesday.

The application portal for businesses to apply to the state for BEGAP funds opens Thursday. According to Commissioner of Economic Development Joan Goldstein, businesses that qualified for the funding after last year’s floods may apply for 2024 funding, as well. Businesses, nonprofits, landlords and farms may receive grants for up to three physical locations per flood event.

Businesses hit by this summer’s floods have until Nov. 15 to apply for BEGAP funding. Those grants will cover 30% of net uncovered damages up to $100,000 per business location.

And businesses impacted by last year’s floods that could still use help can also apply for BEGAP aid by Sept. 30.

The federal Small Business Administration also offers low-interest disaster loans to businesses and homeowners impacted by the floods. Anita Steenson, a spokesperson for the administration, said Wednesday that the deadline to apply for those loans to help with repairs related to the early July flooding is Oct. 21.

Read the story on VTDigger here: FEMA gets to work helping Vermont recover from remnants of Tropical Storm Beryl.

Editor’s note: Interviews with Nicaraguan sources were conducted in Spanish and later translated into English.

Behind the customers ordering pastries at the counter, somewhere among the movement of bakers, cooks and delivery drivers for the Red Hen Baking Co. in Middlesex, two women from the northern highland region of Nicaragua prepared for the lunch rush.

Nereyda Urbina and Seydi Moncada, part of the 65-strong regiment manning the popular bakery and cafe, are among a large group of Nicaraguans who have moved to central Vermont through a special federal humanitarian program for residents of four conflict-torn countries. 

Both women started at Red Hen in the last year, cleaning floors and washing dishes. On a morning earlier this summer, Urbina worked in the kitchen preparing salads and sandwiches. Moncada brushed out bread baskets, readying them for the hand-shaped loaves they would soon carry. 

Red Hen is something of an institution in the area, its bread sold in grocery stores across Vermont. Owners Randy George and Eliza Cain have made a concerted effort to integrate the two women, paying interpreters to attend performance reviews, purchasing a business Duolingo for the rest of the staff to learn Spanish, and hanging up a flipboard with translations of technical baking terms. At a staff talent show in May, Moncada performed a traditional Nicaraguan dance. 

“I’m overwhelmed with joy that that’s our workspace, our everyday work environment,” said Cain.

In their short time here, the more than two dozen Nicaraguans — all from the region of Matagalpa — have taken up jobs baking, cooking, painting houses, teaching Spanish, and taking care of elderly and disabled neighbors. On the face of it, theirs looks like an immigration success story, of newcomers finding a better life in America and, in the process, becoming part of the communities that welcome them. 

But the federal program they have come under has a two-year limit. Unless it is extended, these Nicaraguans will have to pack up the lives they’ve built here in Vermont — and face returning to a country that no longer guarantees them any rights. 

Moncada, her husband, and their two teenage sons were the first Nicaraguans to arrive in the area under the humanitarian program. A university professor and researcher in Nicaragua, Moncada quit her job and applied for a spot within days of its announcement. 

Back home, her husband Omar Montalván worked as a mental health counselor and in human resources. Here, he is an all-purpose handyman, renovating kitchens, installing new decks, or painting houses. Though their jobs have changed, the opportunity for work the couple have found in Vermont has not ceased to amaze them. 

“Think about it: if I go paint houses on a Saturday and make $50 for two hours, that money goes a long way for my mom in Nicaragua,” said Montalván. 

By next April, if the program is not extended, the family’s time will be up. A decision looms about what to do next. Returning to Nicaragua, however, is out of the question, said Montalván.  

“When I left, I kissed my family and I told them: ‘No matter who dies, I’m not coming back.’”

From Matagalpa to Middlesex

What links the mountains of northern Nicaragua to central Vermont began more than 30 years ago, when an 18-year-old student from Middlesex came to live at the home of Urbina’s grandmother in the city of Matagalpa. 

Beth Merrill’s arrival in Nicaragua in 1992 — on a semester-long college exchange program — came soon after the end of more than a decade of civil war in the country. Her time in the neighborhood of La Chispa marked her for life. 

“It’s a really marginalized community. Taxi drivers don’t want to take you there,” said Merrill, who for years afterward would keep a home in both the Matagalpa region and Montpelier. 

Teaching first-graders at the local school, Merrill was shocked by the lack of educational material. Chief amongst them: the absence of books to teach children to read.

“A lot of the kids said they needed a library,” said Merrill.

Years later, having collected donations in central Vermont, Merrill bought a plot of land in Matagalpa and built one. In 2002, the library of La Chispa was born, and alongside it Planting Hope, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the educational opportunities for children in the area.

Building preschools in local communities, driving a book bus to remote villages, offering cultural exchanges between Vermont and Nicaragua — Planting Hope soon became much more than just a neighborhood library. As the organization ballooned, Merrill realized that she needed someone who could direct things in Nicaragua full-time. And she knew just the woman for the job: Mercedes Guerrero. 

“Mercedes was very connected and vibrant and a community organizer at such a young age,” said Merrill. 

Guerrero describes herself as being “de pilas puestas” — a Spanish expression that literally translates to “having your batteries on”, meaning someone who is full of vigor and initiative. 

“We had a limited budget, but we did so many things,” said Guerrero, who arrived in Montpelier with her husband and daughter in July 2023.

As the director of Planting Hope, Guerrero established a network of host families in the nearby town of San Ramón. Those host families took in the generations of Vermonters who participated in the organization’s service-learning program. Through it, Merrill estimates that over 1,000 people from central Vermont traveled to Nicaragua. 

When their help was later needed to sponsor Nicaraguan families —  a requirement of the humanitarian program — many of them responded.

“It speaks to Vermonters. People have bent over backwards to make things work,” said Merrill, who herself sponsored Moncada’s family from San Ramón. 

‘Humanitarian parole’

Planting Hope might have conceivably kept growing. But in 2018, after sweeping anti-government protests were followed by a brutal police crackdown, Nicaragua took a markedly authoritarian turn. 

“You could hear the shots from my house, and the next day we saw them dead on the streets, just laying there,” Urbina recalled. 

One of the main targets were foreign nonprofits, who the government accused of “undermining national integrity”. American organizations are particularly despised by President Daniel Ortega, who denounces them as part of the long history of U.S. interference in Nicaragua, from the Marine Corps occupation of the country from 1912 to 1933, to U.S. funding of rebel Contra militias in the 1980s. 

On May 24, 2022, the day after throwing a party for the neighborhood kids to celebrate the library’s 20th birthday, Planting Hope was officially included in the list of hundreds of NGOs shuttered by the Nicaraguan government. Police seized the library for the government. To this day, the building stands disused, empty of books, shelves, computers, and children. 

“What we will always have is the desire and the willingness to keep working for our people,” said Guerrero, who found herself suddenly unemployed. 

Getting a job usually depends on your standing with the ruling Sandinista party, according to other Nicaraguans interviewed for this article, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals should they have to return. Having worked for an American organization can brand you as unwanted, they said, and subject you to close scrutiny by the authorities. 

Between the 2018 government crackdown and the 2022 disbanding of Planting Hope, more than 250,000 Nicaraguans fled the country. 

On January 5, 2023, in the face of historic and sustained migrant encounters with Border Patrol at the U.S-Mexico border, the Biden administration announced the new program to allow nationals from four politically and economically unstable countries — Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela — to live and work in the U.S for two years. 

Called “humanitarian parole”, the idea was to provide a safe and legal pathway for migrants fleeing turmoil in their home countries, and ease the pressure on the border. But one requirement proved a major obstacle: the need for applicants to have an American sponsor commit to supporting them financially. 

Thomas and Kristen Dunn provided that crucial sponsorship support for Guerrero and her family in Montpelier. The Dunns had hosted Guerrero for a month in 2007, during a cultural exchange put together by Planting Hope.  

Last fall, three months after Guerrero arrived, Urbina followed with her husband and two sons, sponsored by Nathan Suter and Morgan Lloyd, who had visited Nicaragua in 2016 as part of one of Planting Hope’s service-learning trips. Suter and Lloyd moved Urbina and her family to an apartment they own in Montpelier, and have not charged them rent. 

Urbina remembers rushing home to tell her family after receiving an email from Suter and Lloyd offering to become sponsors: “I didn’t think twice when I saw it, I said ‘Yes’!” 

‘The most beautiful thing’

Life in America has been a vast improvement for both Urbina and Guerrero’s families. Firstly, in an economic sense: Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, according to the International Trade Administration. 

“Here, you have a chance. If you work, even if you don’t make much, you can pay rent and buy groceries,” said Guerrero, who worked as a Spanish teacher last year at Montpelier’s private Pacem School. 

But most important for the two women, as mothers, is what living in Vermont means for their children. 

Guerrero’s 7-year-old daughter Valentina has nonverbal autism. When the Nicaraguan government closed the nonprofit that provided care for her, Guerrero finally made up her mind to move to the United States. 

“I saw that her behavior began to regress,” said Guerrero. 

At Union Elementary School, Valentina has access to an occupational therapist, as well as swimming lessons, both of which Guerrero said have benefitted her enormously. 

And at Urbina’s house one morning, as her sons gathered in front of the TV and flicked on a baseball video game, she said she had lived something very similar. 

Her youngest son, Maynor, 14, was born with a form of cerebral palsy. Because he did not learn in the same way as other students, the teachers in Nicaragua did not let him move up the grade levels. Instead, he was sent to a school for kids with all sorts of disabilities.

“But here, all the teachers were open to getting to know him, to figuring out ways to help him,” said Urbina. 

Her son’s inclusion has extended outside of the classroom, too. In Montpelier, Maynor has played soccer, basketball, and most importantly, baseball. 

“I tried signing him up in Nicaragua, because he loves baseball. But the second I mentioned that he has a disability, they didn’t want him,” said Urbina. 

The crack of a bat, then the holler of a virtual crowd, sounded from the TV. The brothers laughed and cheered on the little pixelated batter running for first base. 

“The most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to him is the acceptance he’s had here,” said Urbina. 

Venezuelan bellwether

So what chance do Nicaraguans have of staying in the country?

According to Astrid Montealegre, an immigration lawyer and advisor for the Nicaraguan American Human Rights Alliance, there are essentially three options: a family petition, a work visa, or seeking asylum. 

But if a Nicaraguan person had a family member with permanent legal status in the U.S, they would have pursued that option before ever coming to the country with humanitarian parole, according to Montealegre. The other options, work visas and asylum claims, are complicated and expensive processes, with lawyer fees generally ranging from $3,000 to $5,000 per person. 

None of the Nicaraguans interviewed for this article were pursuing any of these three options. Instead, they all hoped that the Biden administration would extend the parole program. 

Montealegre agreed: “The most viable option for most Nicaraguans would be the establishment of a temporary protection status, practically an amnesty.” 

An extension would be in line with the Biden administration’s carrot-and-sticks policy, hardening border enforcement while simultaneously normalizing the status of noncitizens already in the country. Montealegre believes that Venezuelans will be a bellwether — they were the first beneficiaries of humanitarian parole in October 2022, and as such, will be the first ones to have their two-year stay expire. 

If the Biden administration does not extend the program for Venezuelans, Montealegre said it is highly unlikely they do so for Nicaraguans. The result, she feared, could be “hundreds of thousands of migrants suddenly cast into limbo”, with no legal basis to stay but unwilling to return to the countries in turmoil they left behind.  

That could spell disaster if Donald Trump is reelected in November, according to Montealegre, because the former president has repeatedly vowed to deport millions of undocumented migrants. 

“We don’t know what will happen with Trump, he can do any crazy thing,” said Montealegre.

Guerrero puts it more bluntly: “If Trump wins, a la mierda. He’s going to kick us out.”

In the meantime, Republicans in Congress have repeatedly challenged the president’s parole authority. A Texas-led coalition of 21 Republican-leaning states took it to the courts, arguing that they were suffering financial harm from having to take in paroled migrants — though that lawsuit failed. And on Aug. 2, the Department of Homeland Security “temporarily paused” the program after concerns surfaced about fraud amongst financial sponsors.

“We haven’t come here to be a burden to the government, we’ve come here to work, to pay taxes,” said Guerrero. 

One year on in Vermont

Arriving home with Valentina from a summer camp one afternoon, Guerrero sighed. Her daughter buzzed about the kitchen, dragging toys and laughing, a ceaseless blur of motion and energy. 

Guerrero’s family had just reached a year of living in Vermont, but it was not an anniversary they would happily celebrate. 

“It’s horrible. They’re such mixed emotions. I want to see my family back home,” said Guerrero. 

Guerrero said they did not apply for asylum — though she believed it would have been granted — because to do so would have meant essentially renouncing on ever going back to Nicaragua. The thought of never seeing her parents again, or her friends, or her house in her native San Ramón, and the mangos and bananas she could pick from the trees in her garden, was too difficult to stomach. 

“Valentina,” Guerrero called, suddenly. “Do you want to put on your dress? The one abuela made for you?” 

Valentina nodded. And for a moment, as her mother slipped her into the traditional Nicaraguan folk dress in the blue and white colors of the Nicaraguan flag, Valentina became quiet and still. 

“Beautiful,” said Guerrero, kissing her. “Beautiful.” 

On a hill above Montpelier one recent evening, on the field of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Omar Montalván tried desperately to defend a soccer goal from the shots raining down from his two teenage sons. It was an all-star “Dad” performance, full of laughing taunts at his kids if they mis-kicked a ball, lots of pointing to his injured calf if they scored on him, and improbable yarns about sporting glories in his younger days. 

After work, if the weather’s fair, Montalván likes to take Dylan, 15, and Denzell, 14 — his and Moncada’s children — up here and kick the ball around for a couple hours. 

“I’m a family man, you know? The free time I have, I like to spend with my family,” he said. 

Having been here now longer than a year, Montalván is proud of how his family has adapted to America. After scoring plenty of goals with U32’s junior varsity soccer team last fall, Dylan was quickly promoted up to the varsity squad. Denzell was a star during the track and field season in the spring. 

The first to arrive, the Montalván family will also be the first whose two-year parole will be up. Considering the future, Montalván became thoughtful. Sometimes, he said, in the middle of a long, heavy work shift, or trying to find sleep at night, so many doubts assailed him at once that he despaired of ever making sense of things. 

“Sometimes I feel nostalgic. What am I doing here? This isn’t my country. I don’t speak the language.”

Across the darkening field, his two boys chased each other, shouting and running tirelessly after the ball. 

“But then I think of them. You do it for them. For their opportunities.” 

Montalván looked around at the fading outlines of the houses that faced the college green. 

“I like it here. The people are very close with their community, like at home. But if we can’t stay…”

He smiled: “I feel good. I feel ready. Whatever comes our way, we’ll be ready.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Nicaraguans made central Vermont home in the past year, but they may not be able to stay.

As floodwaters swept through Vermont earlier this month, communities sought to share and receive emergency updates as quickly as possible. Some turned to town Facebook pages, some exchanged observations with neighbors at the general store, and some waited for official updates to get the information they needed to stay safe. 

Clear, timely alerts “could be imperative for life safety,” said Brett LaRose, the operations and logistics chief for Vermont Emergency Management. In an emergency, he said, every second counts.

When Vermonters waste time making calls and scanning social media platforms in search of updates they can trust, they have less time to prepare for flooding events and, eventually, to recover from them, according to Jason Van Driesche, chief of staff for the communications platform Front Porch Forum.

“People need good information right away so they can get back to whatever they have to do to deal with the emergency,” he said.

Though a statewide alert system — Vermont Emergency Management’s VT-ALERT platform — disperses location-specific information via text, email, phone calls and a mobile app, it doesn’t have a broad reach. 

Just under 64,000 people have registered for VT-ALERT, according to LaRose. “Pushing out awareness about the VT-ALERT notification system is an annual priority,” he said. “I would like to see a much larger number.”

When registering for VT-ALERT, Vermonters can select what municipalities they want to receive notifications for and what categories of notifications they want to receive — including health alerts, weather warnings and more. It’s more granular than the Wireless Emergency Alert system that the state uses, which delivers urgent threat-to-life and missing person notifications to most phones without a registration process.

But many towns, specifically those in rural Vermont, don’t have enough staff to regularly send updates to state officials who run VT-ALERT, or to run a branch of the system entirely on their own. And even if they did, many of their residents aren’t subscribed to VT-ALERT.

Washington County, with just 19% of residents enrolled in the VT-ALERT system, nonetheless has the highest rate of participation of any Vermont county. In rural Essex County, which has the lowest percentage of VT-ALERT subscribers, only 226 people have signed up out of around 6,000 inhabitants.

Town officials sometimes use other virtual platforms that have a wider reach.

Front Porch Forum has about 235,000 members in Vermont, Van Driesche said — almost four times the number of VT-ALERT subscribers. Even though crisis communications have never been “front and center” in the company’s mission, he said, announcements about road closures, emergency shelters and more have become more common as town officials use the platform as their megaphone during crises. 

But even Front Porch Forum posts take time to craft and distribute to subscribers — time that town officials might not have at the height of an emergency. 

‘Friends and neighbors’

In the Addison County town of Bridport, locals often report emergencies to Pratt’s Store, according to Corey Pratt, the general store’s owner. Pratt, who is also a member of the volunteer fire department, said that when news about flood damage came in during last summer’s historic storm, and then again earlier this month, he was among the first to know.

“We find out almost immediately when something’s wrong,” he said. “We really find that we’re a first response to it.”

He said he often calls in his reports to town officials.

Addison Town Clerk Cheri Waterman, whose office is 10 minutes down the road, said she had heard important flood updates through word of mouth and Facebook. The washout of Route 17 on July 11 made its way to her “3rd, 4th, 5th-hand” in a system of what she calls “local intel.”

Pratt said he isn’t always prepared to be a de facto public official. People call him about everything from “a lady with a cat stuck in her tree” to genuine emergencies, sometimes instead of calling 911, he said. 

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” he said, laughing. But when push comes to shove, he’s always willing to help out. “They’re not just our customers — they’re our friends and neighbors,” he said.

Other rural towns rely on networks similar to Addison’s “local intel,” but create community forums on virtual platforms rather than in the general store.

In the Northeast Kingdom town of Lyndon, town officials use Facebook as their main avenue to communicate with residents, according to Assistant Town Clerk Denise Montgomery. In the wake of this month’s floods, posts have ranged from boil water notices to instructions for how to report flood damage. 

But the Facebook page only has 490 subscribers — less than 10% of Lyndon’s population. Another Facebook page, which announces general information for a broader area including nearby St. Johnsbury, has 4,600 subscribers. Those platforms are how residents can stay informed, Montgomery said, both during emergencies and otherwise.  

Lyndon leaders don’t send updates to the state officials who run VT-ALERT, according to Montgomery. “We just don’t have the time to get on board (with VT-ALERT) right now,” she said, considering the energy and resources it takes to recover from the floods — especially in Caledonia County, which saw the most rainfall during the July 10 storm.

For most town officials in Canaan, this month’s flooding was their first major emergency, according to Town Clerk Zachary Brown. The Essex County town was relatively unscathed in last summer’s floods, but “we paid for it this year,” he said wryly.

Brown, too, largely communicated with his constituents via the town Facebook page, and its website. Though he felt confident that the community was generally kept informed, the town’s staff members were nonetheless pushed to their limit.

Small towns like Canaan have just enough capacity to run day-to-day operations, he said. So, “in an emergency, no one’s actually prepared.”

“We rely on volunteers stepping up,” he said.

Brown said the town hadn’t previously signed up to operate VT-ALERT locally, but given the events of the last few weeks, he plans to change that.

Town leaders aren’t alone. State lawmakers also report feeling overstretched when it comes to updating community members about emergencies.

Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, said that she has become a source of emergency information for her constituents. During the pandemic, she began releasing updates and resources via email and Front Porch Forum. “I heard from a lot of constituents that I was really the only one that provided them with information,” she said. 

“I take that really seriously, as part of my responsibilities as a state senator,” she continued, “especially in times of crisis.”

These means of communication all take time and money. At the moment, Hardy said, it feels like a public service that’s being privately funded.

Sen. Andrew Perchlik, D/P-Washington, agrees with Hardy that the model must change. He said relying on under-resourced individuals in rural communities is not a sustainable model for emergency communications, especially when volunteer emergency management directors have limited bandwidth and little professional assistance.

And while there are three regional coordinators for Vermont Emergency Management — responsible for connecting local officials with the department’s resources — Perchlik said they are spread too thin to be substantially helpful on a local level. “It's hard for that coordinator to be that much of a resource for all those little towns,” he said.

“I don't have good answers,” Perchlik said, acknowledging the lack of funding for more professional staff in such small towns. He mentioned the possibility of audible sirens, of the kind that some local fire departments still use, to alert the public of possible threats.

Sirens could potentially reach additional people, especially in areas where cell phone networks are weak. A December 2022 report from the state Department of Public Service found that AT&T had the highest rate of call reliability, with just 55% of Vermont's buildings — including homes and businesses — located in areas where all AT&T calls go through successfully.

‘Only so much time’ 

Montpelier’s communications coordinator, Evelyn Prim, said the city is exploring all avenues of emergency alerts, including a city-specific alert system.

“People are busy. They have lives. They don't have time to read every newsletter,” Prim said. “So it’s all about having many systems in place so that people have options and don't have to spend time wondering what to do when an emergency strikes.”

Prim said VT-ALERT is Montpelier’s “first line of defense” in emergency situations, largely because it has the widest reach of any of the city’s communication platforms, with about 10,000 subscribers. For hyper-local alerts, she can choose which subscribers within the region will receive messages. That comes in handy during floods, she said, when just a few feet in elevation can change how much a household is at risk. 

“We have hills and waterways and low-lying areas and such a diverse landscape,” Prim said. “With (VT-ALERT) we don't have to constantly bombard everyone with things that don't necessarily apply to them. We can target it.”

According to LaRose at Vermont Emergency Management, this is the best possible solution. “Nobody knows their communities better than the people that work and live in them,” he said. While state officials can issue local messages through the VT-ALERT system without input from town leaders, those messages are more targeted and timely when generated from within town lines.

But Prim also relies on other platforms, including Front Porch Forum, Facebook, Instagram and Notify Me — a messaging system run through the city’s website — to make sure residents can access emergency updates regardless of what technology they have access to. 

Crafting accurate and efficient posts on each of those platforms takes time, Prim said, and wouldn’t be possible without a full-time communications administrator like her. Even so, “there’s only so much time in the day when you’re a department of one,” she said.

But having access to an alert system — and the staff to run it — is just the first step, she said. Cities also need residents who are willing to sign up to receive messages, and that engagement is never guaranteed.

Towns without communications departments have to get creative, according to Waterbury Municipal Manager Tom Leitz. When floods left many Waterbury homes and businesses underwater in July 2023, the town didn’t even have a Facebook page to communicate with its residents, he said. He started one a week later to start sharing information about flood recovery resources. 

“We saw a need to fill that gap,” he said. “You need to have access to information to know how to respond to an emergency like this.”

For the past year, he’s looked for an alert system that would best fit Waterbury’s needs. He said he found it in a system called TextMyGov, a platform also used by Middlebury.

“The great irony,” he said, is that he wasn’t able to schedule his training for the system until July 10, 2024 — the day the rain that fueled this summer’s floods began.

He said the town will start rolling out the new system by the end of the month. Leitz opted for the system because it facilitates communication from town officials to residents, and vice versa. Once enrolled, residents can make reports to the town — including everything from flagging mundane problems such as potholes to sending crucial updates about flood damage, he said.

The platform will allow Leitz to get emergency updates to residents instantaneously, rather than hoping they find his messages in a stream of non-urgent Facebook or Front Porch Forum posts “about garage sales and missing pets.”

The system will eat into the town’s budget with its $5,000 annual operating fee and will add more to Leitz’s already overflowing plate of town responsibilities. But “it’s worth it,” he said, to keep locals informed and safe.

Preparing for the future of emergency communications

Town officials interviewed by VTDigger — even those with formal alert systems in place — said they still rely on some unofficial communication platforms, such as Facebook and Front Porch Forum, to send alerts during emergencies. 

But some worry that informal platforms won’t always meet their needs.

For example, while public officials can use Front Porch Forum for free, they are limited in how much they can post “in order to keep the conversation centered on neighbors,” Van Driesche said. According to the company’s terms of use, Front Porch Forum can “set limits on the maximum number and/or size” of posts and “may reduce or eliminate the ability of selected categories of public officials to post on (Front Porch Forum) for a period of time before an election.”

Van Driesche said Front Porch Forum “typically exempt(s) any posting related to a significant emergency from those limits.” And Front Porch Forum staff members publish emergency alerts from town officials as soon as they come in, rather than waiting to post them in the typical evening newsletter, according to Chloe Tomlinson, the company’s community division director.

But Prim, in Montpelier, said Front Porch Forum staff didn’t consider her flood alerts this month to be related to a “significant emergency,” so she had to take steps to limit how much each city official was posting.

Hardy said that, at the moment, she can only post on Front Porch Forum twice a month — which isn’t enough to address locals’ concerns about flood recovery.

The Addison County senator chairs the Senate Government Operations Committee, and said she worked to address issues of emergency preparedness in the last legislative session. Act 143 provides for a number of improvements to emergency communications — including reviews of existing systems and expansion of their accessibility — as well as more cooperation between VT-ALERTS and the state’s Enhanced 911 Board.

That law took effect on July 1. “Obviously, they weren't able to do anything in those 11 days (before this year’s flooding) to make any improvements,” Hardy said.

LaRose said that after the passage of Act 143, a task force was assembled to improve the state's emergency preparedness, including its alert systems. The goal of the group, he said, is to “find solutions to be able to communicate with all people that live in the state of Vermont.”

This includes people with limited internet connection, people whose first language is not English, and people who are hard of hearing, he said.

Hardy said expanding accessibility is important but emphasized that it’s only a start. “It's not an issue that we could solve just by passing a bill,” she said.

Some cities are taking the state’s lead and are reforming their communication systems now to prepare for the future. 

“It's really important in this day and age of a changing climate to figure out the right way to distribute urgent information,” said Robert Goulding, public information manager for Burlington’s public works department.

Although there was no need to send alerts in Burlington during this month’s floods, the city is constantly expanding its understanding and use of VT-ALERT so it is prepared for future crises, according to Goulding. Burlington was “fairly limited in rapid and effective communication” before 2020, but now alerts “reach pockets in milliseconds,” he said — about 20,000 pockets to be precise, meaning almost half the city’s population.

It’s all to ensure that Burlington is prepared, he said. 

“I imagine, as floods become more dire and rainfall becomes more intense, that we are going to unfortunately have more use for (VT-ALERT),” he said. “Luckily, we have a tool like it in place.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: As Vermont’s weather worsens, emergency communications aren’t reaching all of its rural residents.