The preliminary results of a 2025 state survey show that last year’s drought cost Vermont farms more than $15.9 million.

Most farmers said it was the worst drought they’d ever seen, according to the survey, which was conducted by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets and the Vermont Agriculture Recovery Task Force. The final survey is expected to be published by the end of January, according to the agency. Numbers are not expected to significantly change. (As of publication, the current public dashboard does not contain the most updated information from the survey.)

Respondents came from 200 farms across Vermont’s 14 counties, the majority from Addison, Orleans and Rutland counties. The results show 79,000 acres were impacted by the drought, a total swath roughly one and a half times the size of Grand Isle County. 

Farmers faced lower crop yields and insufficient pasture for livestock, according to survey responses. They had to pay to bring in additional feed and water. Some had to sell animals such as goats and sheep early because their food stores were scarce. When asked what resources they needed, most farmers responded that they needed financial assistance. Now, agricultural advocates are again asking the legislature for that help.

“Farmers cannot continue to bear the cost of these disasters without support from the state,” Maddie Kempner, policy and organizing director at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, or NOFA-VT, told lawmakers in the Senate Agriculture Committee last week.

Vermont’s latest drought forces a broader reckoning with how the state prepares for – and pays for – climate-driven agricultural disasters. As lawmakers again debate whether to create a standing disaster fund for farms, the losses documented in the survey sharpen a central question for the Legislature and the public alike: can Vermont continue responding to extreme weather events ad hoc after the damage is done, or should it establish a system that protects farms before disaster hits. 

Kempner asked lawmakers to back S.60, a bill proposed last session to establish a Farm Security Fund, a permanent well of money to provide financial assistance to farmers facing losses from weather conditions such as high winds, flooding, extreme heat, abnormal freezes, fire and drought. 

The bill, first introduced by Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, was passed by the Senate last year and ended up in the House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry, where it was expanded to include other working lands like forests. It lagged in the Appropriations Committee as the session ended. 

Removal of climate

Since then, House Appropriations added amendments to the bill that were presented to the House Agriculture Committee on Wednesday morning, including the removal of references to climate. The phrase “climate-based” was struck and replaced with the phrase “weather-based,” for example. 

“The committee asked for any reference to climate or climate change to be removed because they didn’t want to create controversy or discussion or debate on climate,” Michael O’Grady, deputy chief counsel for Vermont’s Office of Legislative Counsel, told lawmakers.

Climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, leads to more extreme weather events like heat waves, drought, flooding and wildfires.

“Our food system is really resilient and really robust in this state, but with the amount and frequency of weather and economic challenges that farmers are facing, they’re really taking the brunt of climate change,” Eli Hersh, a farmer who runs Honey Field Farm in Norwich, said over the phone.

Lindsey Brand, marketing and communications director at NOFA-VT, said on Friday, before the amendments were added, that her organization is hoping the House will pass the bill soon, moving it closer to a law this legislative session. NOFA-VT wants a $20 million fund, which Brand said would be the minimum useful number based on average losses documented on farms over the last three years.

“The losses from the drought are really devastating,” Brand said, emphasizing the impact not only on farmers but on downstream communities. “Farmers impact their local economy so much that when they experience big losses like that because of factors outside of their control, it’s really serious.”

About a quarter of survey respondents had crop or livestock insurance, but the majority did not have access to such aid. Many farms in Vermont, which are often small and have diversified sources of income, are not covered by rainy day funds like federal crop insurance programs, according to the proposed legislation.

Hersh said that in fields without irrigation access, he struggled to get a good harvest. 

“In most other seasons, we had never gotten dry enough for some of those fields to really start showing the lack of water,” Hersh said. Drought conditions made fall cover cropping challenging, which could impact soil quality moving forward, he said.

“There really is a need for the state to support the farming community with that safety net to ensure that you don’t just lose a couple dozen farms every time there’s a bad weather year,” Hersh said. “It starts adding up in terms of who’s left to grow the food for us.” 

Sen. Russ Ingalls, R-Essex, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, told advocates that farmers’ voices needed to be heard in the Appropriations Committee, where such disaster relief funds could be doled out by the state.

“You’ve already sold us,” Ingalls said.

Drought versus floods

The losses from the drought are similar to prior floods, according to Abbey Willard, agriculture development division director at the agency that managed the survey. The 2023 flood resulted in about $16 million in agricultural losses; the 2024 flood claimed farming losses totalling more than $15 million, she said.

These impacts build over time, according to the survey. Three-quarters of respondents were impacted by previous major weather events like floods, freezes, or wind storms, and the majority of those respondents were impacted by two or more events. 

But the impacts from the drought felt more obscured across the state than more visceral events like floods, she added.

“What’s hard and different about this drought versus the floods of 2023 or 2024 is that unless you’re growing crops or raising animals outdoors, or your industry is dependent on the climate, you may not be aware that we’re experiencing a drought in Vermont,” Willard said. “We have snow on the ground, we’re getting rain events and yet we still have agricultural businesses that don’t have enough feed for their animals.” 

Willard said a statewide disaster assistance program like the Farm Security Fund seemed reasonable, if only because it took so long for federal dollars to trickle down. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture allocated millions of dollars in block grant funding to support Vermont’s agricultural and forestry businesses impacted by the 2023 and 2024 floods, but it’s been more than a year since those funds were appropriated by Congress and they’ve yet to reach the state, Willard said.

The drought has continued into January for the eastern half of Vermont; most of Caledonia and Essex counties are still in a severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor housed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For the rest of the state, even if drought-like conditions are over, it will take time for the land to recover. 

In September, Agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts asked the federal government to declare a secretarial statewide disaster designation for the impacts of the ongoing drought in the state. 

By mid-January, the state had not heard back.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Drought cost Vermont farmers $15.9M .

On Wednesday, Valley Vista reopened the doors of its previously shuttered Vergennes facility and nearly doubled the state’s capacity for low-level substance use residential treatment services. 

The 27 new beds at the Vergennes location will offer less-intensive treatment for people who do not need around-the clock medical monitoring. These lower level services include recovery-focused counseling, peer support services, and aid to find housing and employment, Valley Vista’s Vice President of Medical and Clinical Services, Kevin Hamel, said.

Advocates have long identified a critical void of resources for people exiting inpatient treatment that need more support before returning to independent living to prevent relapse.

Already, Valley Vista has filled seven of the 27 beds at the co-ed Vergennes facility and added 13 new staff positions to operate the facility, Hamel said. There is no time limit on stays at the Vergennes facility so that people have time to build a foundation of support before moving to a sober living community or independent living, he added. 

“It’s really about giving them additional treatment towards addiction, while helping them to kind of just navigate the next steps of their life, and helping them to reintegrate into the community,” Hamel said.

Facing financial hardship, Valley Vista closed its Vergennes women’s facility in the spring of this year and consolidated services to its Bradford location, cutting 20 staff positions. The organization had stopped accepting methadone patients several months earlier because of the high costs of treatment. 

When the Vergennes location closed, Valley Vista’s co-owner said he recognized the potential of re-opening the facility for “step-down” services. 

Valley Vista still maintained a lease on the Vergennes property, so the Vermont Department of Health saw an opportunity to fill vacant space and expand Vermont’s recovery support infrastructure, Kelly Dougherty, Vermont’s deputy health commissioner, said. 

The Department of Health made offering both high and low-level recovery services a requirement for residential treatment organizations to receive grants this fall, Dougherty said. 

“We really wanted under the same sort of organizational umbrella — if possible — for people to be able to seamlessly step down to this lower level of care if they were receiving services in the higher level of care,” Dougherty said.

Valley Vista had been offering some low-level care at the Bradford location since October, but opening the Vergennes facility means that the organization has dedicated beds and space for people needing a lower level of treatment, Hamel said. 

Recovery House Inc. in Rutland County is the only other organization the state works with that provides residential treatment and has 28 beds for low-level recovery, said Dougherty.

To support the Vergennes facility’s reopening, Dougherty said the state directed $500,000 to Valley Vista through a federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration block grant for site set up and room and board payment. 

The state is also now covering lower-intensity substance use treatment under Medicaid at a higher reimbursement rate, said Dougherty, and allotted $500,000 toward Valley Vista’s Medicaid reimbursement for services and beds. 

Dougherty said that the state plans to track utilization patterns of the Vergennes facility before any plans to roll out more low-level residential treatment beds. But, she said the Department of Health is working with partners to address the continued gap in residential housing for sober-living communities.

The state’s partnership and local support has been valuable in reopening Valley Vista’s Vergennes location and expanding services to support the continuation of care in the state, Hamel said.

“We’re working within our community and with our allies to make sure that we’re able to really just provide this amazing opportunity for these individuals that are looking to just make a change in their life,” Hamel said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Beds are back: Recovery center reopens Vergennes location for people needing low level treatment.

The Taconic and Green School District is moving forward with plans to close two elementary schools serving Danby, Mt. Tabor and Sunderland students, despite residents in those towns voting in a non-binding referendum last week to keep the schools open.

During its Tuesday meeting, the school board voted 11-2 to close the Sunderland School and the Currier Memorial School in Danby, which serve grades K-6 and pre-K through grade 5  respectively.

Board members Ron Flynn and Rogan Lechthaler voted against closure. The board needed 10 of its 13 members to vote in favor of closure — a rule enacted during the 2017 merger and creation of the Taconic and Green School District under Act 46.

The Taconic and Green School District, part of Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union, oversees four elementary schools and an elementary-middle school for nine towns including Manchester. Both the Sunderland and Currier Memorial schools currently have fewer than 50 students and are expected to continue seeing enrollment declines, board members said.

The costs of keeping the two schools open, school officials said, have prevented the district from providing equal learning opportunities to all students. The district’s other schools each have 30 to 40 kids per grade and enjoy more robust programming than what the smaller staff at the Sunderland and Currier Memorial schools can provide.

Taconic and Green school board Chair Melanie Virgilio, of Sunderland, said during the Tuesday meeting that the board members who voted for closure believe “that this will really be providing the best next steps for our kids in our communities.”

“I know none of us here are doing this with a light heart,” she said. “I don’t know how best to appropriately apologize, or say that we’re excited. There’s a lot of emotions around this.”

Both schools will close on July 1. The remaining students at the two schools would transfer to the Dorset Elementary School, while the district would shift all of its 6th- and 8th-grade students from the Dorset School to the Manchester Elementary-Middle School. Middle school students at the Flood Brook School would remain at that school.

Teachers and staff at the two schools, meanwhile, will be “reassigned by seniority,” according to Randi Lowe, the superintendent of the Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union. She said in an email that “almost all, if not all, employees will have positions” in the district’s new configuration.

The vote to close the schools comes amid a tumultuous period of change for Vermont’s public education system. Act 73, the state’s sweeping education reform law, could soon transform how the system works and how the state pays for it.

The school redistricting task force is currently working to create no more than three possible map configurations to merge the state’s 119 school districts and 52 supervisory unions. The Legislature will consider those maps during their upcoming session in January.

In some areas of the state, Act 73 is already having an effect on how districts are structuring themselves. 

Danville voters will on Dec. 6 vote whether to shutter high school grades at the Danville School and switch to school choice after a resident petition was verified with enough signatures, according to Danville Town Clerk Michelle LeClerc.

That petition was partly spurred by fears that the Vermont Legislature was likely to pass legislation to restrict school choice for districts that close their schools — a sentiment that others have contested.

But in places like the Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union, the changes being considered predate the state’s new reform efforts.

Plans for a regional middle school have been in the works at the Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union for several years, while plans to close some of the Taconic and Green School District’s five schools have been in discussion for at least a year.

Still, the new law’s provisions for when to close smaller schools appeared to, at least in part,  motivate the board’s vote to close.

“We have no idea what the state’s going to do, and we can’t guarantee that closing these schools” would protect the school district and supervisory union from getting split apart,” board member Alex Wilde said Tuesday. “Not closing the schools is almost certainly going to let them just tear us to shreds.”

The board is committed to these plans, despite a majority of residents in the three towns voting in an Oct. 28 non-binding referendum against the two schools’ closure.

Just under 20% of registered voters in each town participated in the referendum, according to the results. Danby residents voted 148-46 to keep the schools open, while Mt. Tabor residents voted 22-6. The vote was closer in Sunderland, where 101 residents voted to keep the schools open, versus 73 who voted to close.

Lowe said that the results “were not unexpected and do not raise any additional concerns.”

“We are committed to a transition to new school communities that centers our students and their needs,” she said in an email.

During the Tuesday board meeting, several board members said they were disappointed in the low percentage of residents that voted. Some board members said much of the email correspondence they received in the days leading up to the vote were in favor of closing the schools.

“I don’t know where the ‘no, keep our schools’ emails were, but … it puts us in a tricky spot where the emails are saying one thing but the vote is clearly saying the opposite,” board member Jon Wilson said.

Still, most board members said they felt closure was needed. Wilson, who voted to close both schools, said Tuesday that he felt “like a villain doing that.”

“These schools both have long histories. We’re talking about the death of schools,” he said. But he voted for closure “because, as a school district, I don’t believe we can fulfill our potential if we keep those schools open. That’s sad to say and probably not making me any more friends, but that’s what I believe.”

On Tuesday, Virgilio said that further declines in enrollment at the schools were inevitable. When Currier Memorial School first opened in 1966, she said, there were 200 students there.

“That’s not there anymore,” she said. “I can’t see Danby growing exponentially in the near term, and I can say the same thing about Sunderland.”

While she remarked that these schools had “vibrant communities” in year’s past, she noted “that is not the reality of today, and I don’t see it going back, unfortunately.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Southern Vermont school board moves to close two elementary schools, going against residents’ non-binding vote to keep them open.

Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VTDigger.org.

The Vermont Department for Children and Families said Wednesday it was directed by the federal government earlier this month to pause food stamp distribution for November due to the continued shutdown in Washington, D.C. State officials said Thursday that they’re rushing to deliver stopgaps for food and heating assistance.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture informed Vermont and other states in recent weeks that it did not have sufficient funds during the shutdown to operate its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program through November. U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and Peter Welch, D-Vt. co-signed a letter Wednesday calling on the USDA to use tools the legislators say are available to protect the program past the end of the month. 

“Due to the current lack of funding, Vermonters receiving benefits are encouraged to plan ahead,” said the Wednesday release from the Vermont Department for Children and Families, which administers 3SquaresVT, the state’s nutrition assistance program.

The department said it could not provide further information on Thursday, and encouraged benefit recipients to “contact their local food shelves and community resources.”

As the federal stalemate wears on, state officials are focusing on how they can get funds to households relying on food stamps, as well as heating benefits, if the shutdown continues into November. So far, plans are not finalized, but lawmakers say state-funded stopgap measures for those benefits could be active by mid-November.

Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, who chairs the legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee, said she and her colleagues have been “doing everything we can to guarantee” that Vermonters are able to receive state funds to buy groceries.

“As someone who’s been on food stamps and gotten (heat assistance) dollars … I understand how scary it is to just read that everything’s going to be shut off without any information,” Kornheiser said.

The state’s Emergency Board — a body that includes the governor and heads of four legislative committees that manage public money — will be meeting to determine a solution next week, lawmakers said. 

Sen. Andrew Perchlik, D/P-Washington, who serves on the Emergency Board as the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he’s “confident that money will go out.”

What’s less certain, he said, is whether it will be the full amount of the original benefit, given the state has “little confidence” of federal reimbursement. Perchlik and House leaders expressed support Thursday for fully funded state coverage of 3SquaresVT.

Amanda Wheeler, a spokesperson for the governor, said Thursday that the Scott administration will be presenting a plan to the Emergency Board in the coming days that “we hope they approve.”

Kornheiser said she has also been working to ensure that Low Income Heat Energy Assistance Program funds, which provide support to Vermonters during the cold winter months, will continue as normal. She expects the program, which like SNAP may see an absence of its normal influx of federal money, to be paid out as normal using state funds.

Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, said the electronic benefit cards used to dispense the benefits are federally controlled, which adds to the complexity of the state’s challenge. 

“It’s not an unlimited amount of levers that we can pull,” Wood said. But like Kornheiser, she expressed cautious confidence about the state’s ability to get support to those in need, even if unusual means of dispensing funds become necessary.

Vermont’s 3SquaresVT program costs about $12 million each month, according to documents released last week by the state’s Legislative Joint Fiscal Office.

Ivy Enoch, the policy and advocacy director at Hunger Free Vermont, called the USDA’s messaging a “manufactured crisis.” In an open letter Thursday morning, Enoch’s organization called on Gov. Phil Scott to urge the USDA to keep SNAP benefits flowing into November.

“People are wondering how they’re going to buy groceries next week,” Enoch said, adding that the absence of federal cashflow will also hurt the state’s food vendors and broader economy.

“These are folks that don’t have the ability to simply plan ahead for an issue like this,” State Treasurer Mike Pieciak said Thursday. The vast majority of Vermonters who receive food stamps are older, have disabilities, or live in households with children, he said.

“We have the money,” Pieciak said, referencing the more than $100 million in total that Vermont set aside in May to fill gaps in federal funding. “We just have to have a plan.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont officials prepare state-funded stopgap as federal shutdown threatens food stamp funds.

When Michelle purchased her house in a small town near Keene in 2017, she thought she would never leave. Yet, less than a decade later, she was back to house hunting and saying goodbye to the wide porch and the basement apartment that she so loved in her New Hampshire home.

“I thought that we would be there for a very long time,” she told VTDigger. “I literally cried the day of the closing, and I had such a hard time just walking out that last day,” 

By February, staying in New Hampshire with her 18-year-old transgender daughter seemed far scarier than leaving, said Michelle, who moved to Vermont early this year. VTDigger is not using her last name to protect her and her daughter’s safety.

Two bills effectively blocking gender-affirming care in the state for any new patients under 18 were then working their way through the New Hampshire Legislature. In August, Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed them into law, making New Hampshire the first state in New England to set such limits. Even before that, though, in 2024, a ban on genital surgery for minors became state law.

One of the new state laws prohibits health care providers in New Hampshire from administering puberty blockers or hormone treatments to new patients under 18 — though patients receiving that care before January 1, 2026, can continue it. (It is still legal for adults to access this care in the state.) The second law blocks New Hampshire doctors from performing “breast surgeries” on minors.

But months before the state legislature passed the 2025 bills, Michelle and her family members saw the writing on the wall.

Anti-trans rhetoric was mounting in the state legislature and had only only gotten worse through the 2024 presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. They no longer felt at home in their dream house. 

When a neighbor posted an Ayotte for New Hampshire lawn sign, it felt targeted against them. Michelle said her daughter told her then, “Mama, I don’t feel safe in our neighborhood.”

“I was just devastated. I knew that what was going to happen this year was not going to be pretty, and I needed to get our family out of New Hampshire,” Michelle said. 

The night of the election felt like the final nail in the coffin, she said, with wins called for Republicans Donald Trump and Ayotte. At 2 a.m., her daughter texted her from another room, saying “we need to leave the country.” 

Instead, Michelle and her spouse immediately put their house on the market and started looking for homes in Massachusetts and Vermont. When she found the Washington County home she now lives in, she jumped. 

They moved to Vermont before Valentine’s Day. “When I looked across the street and saw a pride flag, I felt like this was it,” she said. 

Affirming care in Vermont

Michelle’s family is not alone in their desire to move to a state they perceive to be more accepting for trans youth. 

Beyond New Hampshire, bans on gender-affirming care for minors are active in 25 other states. All of these were effectively upheld in June by a Supreme Court decision that determined a Tennessee law blocking gender-affirming care is not unconstitutional, which health care providers expect to drive many young people across state lines seeking care. 

The tenor at the federal level has had a chilling effect on some larger health care providers who are also closing their clinics, even in states without bans. This past summer, Yale Connecticut Children’s Medical Center announced it was ending its gender-affirming care program in light of federal pressures, and Yale New Haven Hospital stopped providing hormone treatment to minors. Though Connecticut law still protects the care, the closures have de-facto cut the state off from local access to it. In Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Penn State Health similarly opted to end gender-affirming care for minors, cutting off a large portion of the state from this care. 

Unlike in some other states, New Hampshire’s law, which goes into effect Jan. 1, 2026, still allows providers to refer patients under 18 for care out of state. As a result, advocates and clinics in Vermont say they are expecting an influx of new patients either moving or traveling from states with more restrictive access to gender-affirming care for minors. 

“We are fortunate in this region that patients may seek care nearby in neighboring states for the time being, but that remains a hardship for many due to travel and insurance hurdles,” Keith Loud, the physician-in-chief of the network of pediatric care across Dartmouth Health Children’s hospitals and clinics, said in a statement to VTDigger about the new laws. Loud noted that gender-affirming care is broader than just hormonal therapies and surgeries, and that the Dartmouth Health patients will still be able to seek support from their doctors, for referrals or other therapeutic expertise. 

“There will certainly be an increase of families that are looking to move to places where there’s a different level of care, whether that’s (from) New Hampshire or whether that’s Texas or Indiana,” said Dana Kaplan, the executive director of Outright VT, a group that aims to support LGBTQ+ youth in the state.

“We’ve already seen that start, and we anticipate that it will only continue,” he said, “which is just another reason to make sure that in Vermont, we’re not backing down and we’re staying out in front as a national leader.” 

Vermont’s shield laws, passed in 2023, offer protections to providers and recipients of gender-affirming care and establish the care as an essential part of the standards of care a health insurance plan should cover. Also, denying a patient gender-affirming care would be a violation of the state’s anti discrimination laws, as Monica Allard, a lawyer with the ACLU of Vermont, told VTDigger.

University of Vermont Medical Center’s Transgender Youth Program remains the primary place in the state for young people to access gender-affirming healthcare. The hospital and the clinic have seen an uptick in inquiries from patients in other states, said UVM Medical Center spokesperson Annie Mackin. So far the clinic has mostly received calls from patients in New Hampshire, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, trying to make a plan for where they can go for care, Mackin said. 

The clinic is prepared to receive these patients when they do come, said Jason Williams, the head of communications for UVM Medical Center, in an interview. They should be able to see a clinician within a few weeks of scheduling, he said.

“We don’t think we will have to immediately change. We’ve got all the people and all the expertise,” Williams said. 

Patients at the UVM Medical Center’s clinic can meet with a therapist or psychologist or a pediatric endocrinologist to access hormonal interventions like puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy. For surgical care, patients are referred out of state, Williams said. 

PlannedParenthood of New England is also able to provide hormone replacement therapies to those above 16 years old. The population of 16 and 17 year olds who do seek gender-affirming care at PPNE are less than 1% of the provider’s patient population. 

Jessica Barquist, a spokesperson for PPNE, said that the provider has not seen a “significant influx” of patients into Vermont yet, but expects that it will come in January, when the New Hampshire laws go into effect. Because trans minors are such a small percentage of those the organization serves, Barquist said she expects the clinics to be able to easily accommodate the influx with their existing resources and schedules. 

The organization also runs a donor supported fund for gender-affirming care patients as a way to reduce barriers to care, Barquist said.

In addition to medical resources, Outright Vermont offers an extensive list of where to find items that young queer people may need, like chest binders or specialty providers, as well as places to gather with a supportive community.

Connecting young people with the health care that affirms their gender identity, that makes them feel seen and respected and even celebrated “is life altering,” said Kaplan, with OutrightVT. “It really is life changing.”

An ‘innermost sense of belonging’

The way Kaplan sees it, support for trans and queer youth that isn’t so explicitly medical is also crucial care. “There’s a continuous barrage of messages that target LGBTQ youth, telling them that they’re not valued, cared for, allowed to exist,” he said.

That support includes events like Outright’s summer camp and Friday night social support group, which aim to help kids connect both with their peers and with themselves, Kaplan said. Or the support could be information like resource toolkits for parents and family members or peer groups like a Gay-Straight Alliance club at school.  

“What we’re trying to do is really take that narrative (of difference) and say who you are is a superpower,” said Kaplan. “Through connecting to other people and realizing that there’s a larger community here and that there’s something joyful about being yourself.” 

Understanding their identity as a source of inner strength “creates a world of possibilities for young people,” he added. That sense of power and community can also be life-saving.

“Your innermost sense of belonging is the biggest predictor and a protective factor against suicide,” Kaplan said. 

Nationally, queer youth are four times more likely to to attempt suicide than their peers. In Vermont, 50% of trans youth and nonbinary people  “seriously considered” suicide in 2023, according to a 2024 survey by the Trevor Project, a percentage slightly higher than the national trend of 46%.

For Michelle and her daughter, those statistics hit particularly close to home. When her daughter was 16, she started experiencing chronic migraines that ultimately led her to shift to homeschooling.

“It was like a light went out, and she just started to get a headache that was just literally constant. Looking back, I know now it wasn’t just a typical migraine. It was a lot of internal stress that she wasn’t really able to express,” Michelle said of her daughter, who had not yet begun her transition at that time.

Nearly a year later, Michelle’s daughter attempted suicide. Soon after that, she raised the possibility of hormone replacement therapy to her mother.

“I obviously was all ears at that point,” Michelle said, describing still feeling raw from the experience of nearly losing her child. She doesn’t think that a person’s status as a minor should interfere with whether they can access gender-affirming care. 

“I’m not going to just say, ‘Well, I’m sorry, you’re 17’ and have her then go ahead and actually attempt suicide again and maybe possibly be successful in that attempt,” she said.

‘Room to do more’

Michelle’s daughter still struggles with her mental health and feelings of isolation here in Vermont but is buoyed by looking forward to her upcoming gender-affirming surgery next year, Michelle said.

As the family has settled into their new home, the harsh tenor of the national discussion about transgender people has only become more heightened. Michelle and her daughter both still feel a near-paralyzing anxiety over the rhetorical attacks on both trans children and adults. Many days, Michelle said, it keeps her daughter from leaving her room. 

Her daughter’s experience underscores a reality for many queer youth in Vermont, Kaplan said. Even though the state has strong laws and access to gender-affirming care and support, it can still be a lonely place to find yourself.

“In a rural state like Vermont or New Hampshire, isolation is a real thing. It can run really deep. It separates young people from each other, and it also makes it harder to access information and resources,” he said. 

“In Vermont, we are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place where there’s this sense of ‘Well, we’re so progressive. We are above and beyond so many other places. We’re not New Hampshire.’ I think that that can be a dangerous place for us to be,” he added. “There’s definitely room for us to do more.”

Those efforts to provide a deeper sense of belonging for queer youth in Vermont are currently overshadowed by the federal government’s efforts to limit access to gender-affirming care nationwide. Though care remains available, Vermont hospitals, clinics and providers are carefully tracking any proposed changes to federal regulations that might affect access and considering how to respond.

In spite of the challenges at the federal level, Michelle said she and her daughter have felt a broadly more welcoming atmosphere in the Green Mountain State. 

“It feels like there are more safe places in Vermont,” she said. “I’ve taken my daughter to have some piercings, and she felt incredibly welcome in the piercing studio. We went to have her first haircut in Vermont, and I literally took a huge sigh of relief when I walked into the stylist salon.” 

It was the first time she can remember that the place she was taking her daughter for a haircut felt completely safe, she said. “That’s really a simple thing for a parent, to be able to take your kids somewhere and get their hair cut.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont positioned to become gender-affirming care haven for New Hampshire families.

A family of five in Northfield has been without running water for 12 days.

When the spring water they rely on at their home trickled to a stop on Sept. 9 because of the state’s ongoing drought, Kelly Murch said she started to call around for options.

And with three children — ages 2, 7 and 11 — it’s been “a weird time,” she said. Like living in “Little House on the Prairie,” a TV series based on a book about a 19th-century homesteading family.

At first, their neighbor helped them out by lending a large tank and his truck. With permission from the town, they filled up four times at the spigot in the community garden and paid $5 per round. 

Murch and her husband ran a garden hose from the filled-up tank through a window to a big old water cistern in their basement, which is working well thanks to gravity, she said, even though it’s “not very elegant.” 

Then, on Wednesday, the town turned the water off in the garden, Murch said.

Town Manager Jeff Schulz said he regretted that the community garden spigot had to be shut down. The town needed to cut the access due to fears of tampering or unintended contamination, he said, something state regulators say is a real concern. 

“We need to protect the water system and should not allow for limited and unmonitored access to the system without a policy,” Schulz wrote in an email. “Thus far we have provided that resident with about 400 gallons of water and we do very much sympathize with the residents being without water.”

Luckily, Murch and her family were able to turn to a community member and friend for help. On Friday morning, they filled up the tank at a friend’s yard in town. 

“I was really concerned initially,” said the friend, Sarah Eath, “because we didn’t know where they were going to get water from. And I was worried they wouldn’t be able to stay in their house.” She is glad now it’s “more of a limited water than no water” situation.

Murch and her family have to be very mindful about their water use, Murch said. They are taking their wash to a laundromat, though it is time-consuming and expensive; saving gray water from dishes for reuse; and taking really short showers. All of it is particularly hard with a 2-year-old who is being potty trained, she added. While they were teaching her to flush before the water shortage, now they are telling her not to.

In Northfield for four years, Murch is grateful she has the support of friends and neighbors. But she is worried about others, particularly older residents, who may not be as lucky and are without water during what is being called a historic drought across Vermont and the Northeast. She’s also not happy the town hasn’t been more proactive about informing residents about the drought, water conservation and options for potable water. 

Murch, who worked as a disaster response instructor with the Red Cross in Washington state before she moved to Vermont, said she is shocked the town doesn’t have an emergency plan for drought in place and hasn’t better informed residents about the ongoing drought. 

“Water is just so essential, you know,” Murch said. “It boggles my mind the fact that there is not an organized effort to go door-to-door and check on residents, or out-of-town people who don’t have water and don’t know what to expect because they haven’t been notified that there’s anything going on.”

According to Northfield’s All-Hazards Mitigation Plan, updated in 2023, the town does have a municipal emergency response plan but flooding — not drought — is the major focus. The 2023 document does suggest the town “should consider what, if any, actions should be considered based off best practices related to drought, mitigation, state guidance, and risk.”

Montpelier and Barre are among communities that have issued water conservation alerts as a result of the drought conditions playing out across the state. As of Thursday, almost 70% of the state, including Washington County, remains in a severe drought, and 24% of the state is in extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. 

“So really being smart about reducing water use is a really big thing” for people in the drought affected areas, said Ben Montross, drinking water manager for Vermont. This applies to residents who are not having issues now because they could potentially be affected too, he said.

The state has received 398 reports of drinking water supply shortages or outages, mainly from private homeowners, according to Montross, who said this is the worst drought he has seen statewide in 12 years. Of these, 77% of the reports represent shallow groundwater meaning a spring or a dug well and 20% represent drilled wells.

He urged residents on community water systems to pay attention to notifications and guidance posted online by municipalities. Those who don’t have running water could also let their state representatives know, he said.

The state’s drought database maps at least six water outages in Northfield affecting residents who have private wells, reported between Aug. 25 and Sept. 1. Four of them are fed by spring water, two are wells.

Schulz, the town manager, said he has only heard from one — Murch. He encouraged all residents to call the town if they are facing a water scarcity problem.

On the job for more than 11 years, Schulz said he has never faced a situation where residents in Northfield have run out of water. He posted a brief advisory Monday on the town’s Facebook page asking residents connected to the town water system to be “mindful and conservative” in their water use.

“Northfield is fortunate that its water source consists of three very high yielding ground water wells and the wells continue to produce at normal levels,” the post states.

The town will discuss a policy and procedure to sell municipal water to residents or businesses at the Oct. 6 utility commission meeting, Schulz said, and address measures to ensure the public water system, which is highly regulated by the state, is protected. They will also discuss an emergency plan.

For alternate options, Schulz pointed to “a well-known source of spring water on Route 12A that is accessible to anyone at no cost” and private water haulers, which cost money. 

That public source on Route 12A is hard to access with large containers, and it is also flowing low currently, according to Murch.

Fresh well water is also available from an outside spigot at the Capital City Grange, according to Merry Shernock, vice chair of the selectboard.

Meanwhile, residents facing water shortages have been stopping in to buy water jugs, 5 gallon buckets and larger water containers at a longtime hardware store in town.

“I happen to have a spring still going, but I’m hearing about (other) people having issues,”  said Ray Fernandez, owner of Fernandez Hardware.

“Some of the basic stuff you can solve your problem with at the hardware store. For the rest, you have to wait for Mother Nature or wait for the drill company,” Fernandez said.

That’s another hard-to-come-by option in Vermont, according to Murch. She said she called about a dozen different contractors that dig wells in Vermont and found they are booked out months, through next year. Many of them are in Massachusetts or New York.

When she was poking around to find the cause of the water stoppage, she came across the state’s drought resources page created by the Agency of Natural Resources. She found there was funding available for residents interested in drilling a well, but there was an application deadline.

“We missed it by six days,” she said. “But we didn’t even know there was a problem until there was a problem.”

State officials said the Healthy Homes program — which predates the drought — closed on Sept. 3. They pointed to the Department of Environmental Conservation’s On-Site Loan program that does not currently have a deadline, and some other options that could help Vermont residents with water supply repairs.

Read the story on VTDigger here: When their spring failed, a Northfield family turned to a town spigot. Then it was shut off..

The SNAP-Ed program — which focuses on nutrition education and overall wellness for people on food stamps — will end Sept. 30, cutting off hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual grants that supported programming across all Vermont counties, including recipe demonstrations, meal kits and active-living guides.

The program’s elimination was part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping budget adjustments that passed on July 4 in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As the state’s food assistance network finds its way through a new landscape of shortfalls, officials worry more residents will fall through the cracks.

SNAP-Ed is an extension of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which has experienced a number of cuts across the board. Instead of providing funds for individuals to purchase food, SNAP-Ed’s much smaller grants focus on community education and initiatives to improve eligible households’ engagement with 3SquaresVT — Vermont’s name for the larger body of resources under SNAP. 

“Just providing food for people is not the whole answer to food security,” said Suzanne Kelly, who was the SNAP-Ed coordinator at the Vermont Department of Health for a decade until last month. Her former position, and another related role, will soon be discontinued.

“SNAP-Ed is sort of that extra bit of information to really make sure that people can access the food, can use the food, and can enjoy it over time,” Kelly said.

The program is deeply focused on health outcomes, she said, including prevention of chronic conditions and disease, and promoting wellness through nutrition and exercise.

Kelly is concerned about the immediate impact on Vermonters. 

“These are decisions that trickle down to the most vulnerable people in our communities,” she said.

Kelly referenced a SNAP-Ed needs assessment earlier this year that identified certain populations in the state with a disproportionately high need for food assistance, including rural Vermonters and people with disabilities. Outreach programs that meet people where they are geographically will be an especially big loss, Kelly said.

The end of SNAP-Ed has already had tangible effects in recent weeks, causing the imminent shutdown of a food pantry in Holland and contributing to the Vermont Foodbank’s recent staff cuts. Of the seven employees the food bank let go, three were specifically operating SNAP-Ed programs, according to Chris Meehan, the company’s chief impact officer.

Vermont residents received over $147 million in SNAP aid last year. The projected allocation for Vermont’s SNAP-Ed budget in 2026, which the Department of Health received May 30, was less than half a million. Five weeks later, Kelly learned that the program was canceled.

‘We’ll have to be really creative’

Meehan said the SNAP-Ed cuts will effectively end the Vermont Foodbank’s VTFresh program, which has reached every county in the state with initiatives to increase access and understanding around nutrition. The program provided a space for people to exchange knowledge about cooking, recipes and budgeting, and was often particularly useful for families, she said.

While the food bank employees who ran the initiative are no longer with the organization, the program’s existing resources will remain on the Vermont Foodbank website. VTFresh’s continuing presence, Meehan said, will be “more passive than active.”

Meehan is grateful for the infrastructure that VTFresh has left behind — it has been “transformational” for the food assistance network in the state, she said. 

Denise Walton, a Concord resident who is a lead volunteer at Sid’s Pantry in town, said VTFresh recipe materials had been invaluable in allowing her community to make better use of fresh foods. It’s common, she said, for people to ask questions about how to prepare food as they’re taking it.

“I think people want to cook,” said Walton, who herself is on food stamps. “They may not have learned, or been taught, or had the time.”

Walton said she would keep trying to provide resources to help people fully use the food they’re receiving — but that it will be more challenging going forward. 

“We’ll have to be really creative,” Walton said.

Vermont Foodbank’s situation is par for the course statewide at smaller food assistance providers.

The Vermont Garden Network will lose its dedicated nutrition educator, according to executive director T Hanson, one of only five staff at the organization. Come Alive Outside, a nonprofit which used SNAP-Ed funds to reach thousands of school-age kids in Rutland County with tips on how to stay active, has told its staff it may not have sufficient funds to pay everyone in six months, according to Executive Director Arwen Turner. 

Meanwhile, in Burlington, the People’s Farmstand will continue as a purely volunteer effort, according to founding Director Nour El-Naboulsi. There hadn’t been salaried roles, he clarified, but they had previously been able to offer staff — primarily farmers — a stipend for their time. The organization offers free fresh produce (both self-grown and donated) at weekly open events but has also been conducting educational outreach through its Veggie of the Month program. 

El-Naboulsi said the initiative features a combination of staple Vermont crops and “culturally relevant produce — things from Nepal, Somalia, Iraq (and) other places in the Middle East and East Africa.” The organization serves a relatively large proportion of immigrant and refugee populations, he said, and the program is designed to combine familiar food with information about how to prepare local produce.

With the loss of SNAP-Ed funding to the People’s Farmstand and sister organization Village Hydroponics, El-Naboulsi said he has had to reprioritize.

“We kind of lose the capacity to do supplementary education, recipe preparation, outreach,” he said.

‘A great return on investment’

Keith Robinson, a pediatric pulmonologist at UVM Children’s Hospital, emphasized a connection between SNAP-Ed and health outcomes for families. He’s the hospital’s vice chair for Quality Improvement and Population Health and built the provider’s screening platform for food insecurity.

“We are trying to go deeper and further upstream to make sure that we’re solving the root causes of food insecurity in Vermont,” Robinson said.

For him, nutrition education has been a big part of that work — that’s why the end of SNAP-Ed is such a blow, despite the small scale of previous funding.

“It’s gonna make communities potentially less healthy, and it’s also gonna create gaps in the systems that we need to have around families,” he said. “While the dollar value may not be great, the impact of those dollars is extraordinary.”

Robinson referenced a state report on SNAP-Ed last year, calling survey data that indicated diet and exercise changes for participants “a big deal.” Roughly a third of people who received direct nutrition education reported they ate more fruits and vegetables each day, and 20% said they exercised more, according to the report.

“That’s a great return on investment,” Robinson said.

Modifications and cuts to the SNAP program at large have been made in the name of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” — a narrative that Kelly disputed. 

“The strategies that are used (in SNAP-Ed) have shown outcomes — real outcomes,” she said.

A page addressing cost concerns on the USDA website references studies showing that for every dollar spent on SNAP-Ed and similar programs, 10 times that can be saved in future health care costs. The total nationwide cost of the program would have been $550 million in the 2026 fiscal year.

“It’s probably not the best idea to be cutting programs that are going to eventually help reduce costs way further down the line,” Kelly said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not respond to requests for comment.

A document briefly detailing SNAP overhaul from the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture called SNAP-Ed a program that has wrought “no meaningful change” for its target population. The committee cited a 2019 report from the Government Accountability Office that appears to primarily conclude that the effectiveness of the program is difficult to properly evaluate due to uneven standards of reporting from state agencies and a lack of coordination at the federal level. 

“When federal benefits get cut like this, we need to think about how to bolster connections in our community, and think differently about how to fill those gaps,” Robinson said. 

Jeanne Montross, executive director of Helping Overcome Poverty’s Effects, or HOPE, in Middlebury, said her organization has been seeing the effects of staff and program cuts elsewhere in the state’s assistance networks. Montross’ nonprofit is primarily funded by private contributions.

“It always ends up flowing down to HOPE,” she said of increased need in her local community.

Anore Horton, executive director at Hunger Free Vermont, said the state’s food assistance network “cannot in any way mitigate the loss of all of these different sources of funding.”

Any solution to a problem of this scale must be “collective,” Horton said, but must also involve significant new assistance from the state government. But in a situation this urgent, Horton said it wouldn’t necessarily make sense for the state to replace nutrition education funding.

Walton said Sid’s Pantry has also been increasingly relying on community support and donations.

“We’re very fortunate to have a little buffering like that,” she said, “especially for an aging community that needs healthy food and needs access to things out in the rural areas.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Loss of SNAP-Ed program leaves gaps in Vermont’s food assistance network.

WILLISTON — Kellen Cloud’s line of work has always been dangerous.

For the better part of the past two decades, Cloud has worked at Green Mountain Flagging, a company that stations traffic controllers at construction sites around the state. He recalled when a coworker had their body pushed by an impatient driver, and when another had to jump out of the way of a truck that would not slow down.

“You have to be a little crazy to do this job,” he said with a laugh, during an interview last month at the company’s headquarters in Williston.

In recent years, though, Cloud said his job has gotten noticeably more dangerous. People seem to be driving more recklessly than in the past, he said — something data suggests could be a lingering impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, data also shows more people are injured or killed in work zones today than a decade ago. 

It’s a concern that led Cloud, along with many others in the state’s construction industry, he said, to support a state plan aimed at bolstering speed enforcement in work zones using relatively new technology: automated cameras. 

The program, which Gov. Phil Scott signed into law in May 2024, would deploy cameras at a small number of highway work zones around the state over a period of 15 months. The cameras would capture photos of the license plates of cars going at least 10 miles per hour over the posted speed limit. After a review by a police officer, speeding drivers would be mailed a warning notice, and if they offended again, could face civil fines.

Under the law, the state was required to start a public outreach campaign about the use of the cameras on April 1, 2025, with a pilot taking effect July 1. But the program — which already exists in some form in more than 15 other states — has yet to materialize.

Vermont Agency of Transportation leaders have said they could not meet the pilot’s deadlines because no law enforcement agency has yet raised its hand to help out. Even though the cameras are automated, under the legislation creating Vermont’s program, a police officer must review the images the cameras collect and send out citations. 

That delay has frustrated some legislative leaders in recent months. They’ve criticized Scott’s administration for failing to implement a program the administration supported — especially when there’s often little consequence for speeding through work zones now.

That’s because while police officers typically park near construction sites with their cruisers’ lights flashing, they’re encouraged to remain at their posts rather than leave to chase down a speeder, several state officials said.

Joe Flynn, Vermont’s transportation secretary, said his agency is committed to getting the pilot program underway, even though it will be on a slower timeline than the Legislature dictated. He said officials are confident the cameras could change drivers’ behavior; data from Pennsylvania, for instance, shows speeding in work zones has dropped by 37% since that state first deployed a similar automated system five years ago.

“We just can’t see this being what we thought it would be,” Flynn said of the program as written in the 2024 law. “We need to just rework it. So that’s what we’re doing.”

But Cloud said that, for him and his colleagues, the safety improvements the cameras could bring are long overdue. Cloud is now Green Mountain Flagging’s operations director, training new employees regularly. He called the delay “frustrating” and “discouraging.” 

“It’s our job to protect,” he said. “Why aren’t we being protected?”

‘Pass a hot potato’

That a program using automated technology would be hobbled by concerns about human staffing seems counterintuitive. But leaders in the Scott administration have been adamant that unless lawmakers remove police officers from the process, the administration may not be able — or willing — to move the program forward.

The legislation states that a “law enforcement officer” has to be the one to issue citations for speeding through work zones, but it does not task a specific agency with that work. However, as the law was being finalized last year, according to Flynn, it was “starting to seem as though this was going to fall squarely” on the Vermont State Police, even though it wasn’t necessarily designed that way. 

During a House Transportation Committee hearing in May, state police leaders insisted they did not have the resources to help facilitate the program. Col. Matthew Birmingham, the director of the state police, said the agency had 54 open positions among its ranks of certified troopers at the time, or about a 17% vacancy rate.

“It just would not make any sense to me,” he told committee members. “There will be something that will have to be given up — and at this point I don’t know what that is because everything we’re handling is violent crime and crimes against people and potentially dangerous crimes like DUI and aggravated aggressive driving.”

Vermont Public Safety Commissioner Jennifer Morrison — whose department includes the state police — also pushed back on the idea the state police could take on the work. She told legislators the issue is “not one of our willingness to enforce traffic laws,” but rather “one of resource allocation.” To illustrate her point, she and the department’s policy director, Mandy Wooster, offered estimates of the amount of time it could take officers to review the violations generated by the pilot program each day. 

Wooster said part of the challenge would be officers needing to cross-reference the identity of the owner of a speeding car with a database of people who are members of the U.S. military, because soldiers and sailors on active duty can get extended time to pay or contest certain citations, such as speeding tickets, under federal law.

She told the committee that, when accounting for that database check, it could take seven or eight minutes to process each violation. She said the administration had been operating under an assumption there would be a maximum of 1,000 citations issued during a regular, eight-hour workday — which, when multiplied by the time to process each case, could result in well over 100 hours of officers’ time each day.

That’s in addition to extra time required if people who received a violation contested the ticket in court, which is allowed under Vermont’s law as written, Morrison noted.

“I’m not looking to pass a hot potato over to someone else,” the commissioner said. “But I’m very clearly signaling that we do not have the capacity to take this on as the sole owner of this project.”

Per the legislation, drivers would face no fine for a first offense caught on camera, an $80 fine for a second offense and a $160 fine for a third offense, provided those subsequent violations occurred within a year. A violation would not levy any points on a driver’s license, state officials have said. 

Not everyone agrees with the administration’s estimates, though. Rep. Phil Pouech, D-Hinesburg, the transportation committee’s ranking member, said Morrison and Wooster were relying on the “worst case scenario” and, in his view, exaggerating the amount of officer time the program would require. If 1,000 people were speeding through work zones every day, he contended, the state had a problem on its hands that warranted addressing immediately.

Pouech pointed to earlier testimony the committee received from a company that makes and operates automated speed enforcement cameras describing how it could take less than one and a half minutes to review each violation.

“The state police clearly just put up a giant smoke screen with their calculations of how much time this was going to take,” Pouech, who’s among the program’s most vocal supporters, said in an interview. “It seems like that was more of an excuse.”

In Pennsylvania — which Flynn said operates the closest example to what is being proposed in Vermont — a dedicated state police unit reviews all automated violations that carry fines, according to a report on the program. Last year, automated cameras were used roughly 2,500 times across 55 different roadway projects in that state. 

Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Sgt. Logan T. Brouse wrote in an email that it takes three minutes for officers to process speed camera violations in that state on average.

Flynn said that, even considering data from other states, he stood by the administration’s time estimates for the program in Vermont. Compared to Pennsylvania, Vermont is a far smaller state with more limited law enforcement resources, he said. 

When Vermont’s state police say they can’t help run the pilot, Flynn said, “I take it on face value — and I don’t question what they say about (their) ability to manage this, or not.”

‘They’re sitting on their hands’

At the same time, officials considered — and decided against — having another statewide law enforcement agency support the program. The Department of Motor Vehicles Enforcement and Safety Division, which is under the purview of the transportation agency, has a number of certified police officers on its staff. 

The “DMV Police” inspect commercial vehicles for safety and conduct their own highway speed enforcement, among other duties, Flynn said. Notably, the force is fully staffed, with Flynn estimating the division has 30 employees statewide.

But Flynn said he was hesitant to commit one or more of his officers’ time to reviewing and issuing citations. The small force’s time, he said, is better spent out in the field where it often backs up other law enforcement agencies, including the state police.

“It just seemed to really be overly burdensome to field forces who otherwise are already fully busy on a daily basis,” he said. “Where can you best use the really highly talented and trained resources that you have, when really, this is an administrative process?”

Flynn said he now plans to meet with leaders from another realm of law enforcement — the state’s 14 county sheriffs — to find out if any of their departments could support the pilot program, rather than a statewide law enforcement agency. 

Lamoille County Sheriff Roger Marcoux, vice president of the statewide association representing sheriffs, said last week he needed to learn more about the program before he could say whether he or his counterparts could take on the additional work. He said conversations about the program seemed like a priority for the state transportation agency. 

Sheriff’s departments already partner with state agencies for some jobs, such as transporting youth who are in the custody of the Department for Children and Families, he said.

However, he continued, “the state police don’t have a monopoly on the staffing issues. You know, I’m short people. And every sheriff’s department is short people.”

Morrison, in testimony to the Legislature earlier this year, suggested lawmakers could also find a way to reconstitute the program so police don’t need to be involved at all. One option could be having the company the state chooses to operate the camera system issue fines to violators, itself, she said. 

Flynn said his agency was working on bill language it could bring to the Legislature for the 2026 legislative session, which starts in January, to amend the program. In the meantime, he said the state would “plus-up” the number of officers stationed around work zones who would be tasked, specifically, with pulling over speeders.

Rep. Matt Walker, R-Swanton, chair of the House transportation committee, said he would consider any new language the agency presents next year. He said he’s concerned, however, that the timing is such that it could end up being a year from the program’s original effective date that cameras finally make it onto the roads. 

Walker said his committee did not have enough time before the end of this year’s session, which was in mid-June, to make any adjustments to the existing law. During a hearing in late April, he said that from a “sixth-grade social studies perspective,” he was frustrated the executive branch of state government wasn’t following a law the Legislature had passed a year before, regardless of what it was requiring. 

“And at the nine-plus month mark, we are finding out that it’s not going to happen,” he said at the time. “So that is a little bit frustrating.”

Walker’s counterpart in the Senate, Lamoille County Republican Richard Westman, said he also had concerns about the timing of the program, but noted the program has been a larger priority for the House. The Senate Transportation Committee chair said the state transportation agency was short-staffed and has challenges of its own. 

Pouech, the House transportation ranking member, had stronger words. 

“It passed. The governor signed it, and now they’re sitting on their hands,” he said. “I feel bad for the people who work out there. … We have a speeding problem all over the state, and here is a chance to do something about the construction zones.”

A need for more enforcement is what concerns Cloud, the longtime Green Mountain Flagging employee, the most. He said the state has already tried other solutions, like public service campaigns using digital billboards. None of those efforts seemed to have meaningfully changed drivers’ behavior, he said.

He does not think the cameras are the only solution to make drivers more aware of workers on the road, “but it’s got to start somewhere,” he said. 

“If it’s time for some enforcement, then it’s time for enforcement,” Cloud said. “Something has to make them pay attention.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont promised new tech to keep highway workers safe. It still hasn’t arrived..

The Holland Food Shelf announced Tuesday it would close its doors the last week of September, citing the loss of federal nutrition assistance funds and high rent costs as major factors in the decision. 

“We can’t do it without funding,” said Don Stevens, executive director of the pantry’s nonprofit operator, Abenaki Helping Abenaki, and chief of the Nulhegan band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation. “It’s not just us, right?” he added, referencing Vermont Foodbank’s recent cuts in addition to other struggles in the state’s food assistance network.

The food pantry has served residents in and around Holland, a town sitting on the Northeast Kingdom’s border with Canada, since 2021. This year, Stevens said, demand had reached a peak, with the pantry sometimes serving nearly 700 people per month. Now, as the organization winds down, residents and advocates are concerned its absence will leave a vulnerable and rural part of the state without enough support.

Stevens said he hopes the month of continued service will allow participants time to transition to other providers. His organization had started the food pantry to “help as many as we can,” he said. His team also has been purchasing food from local farmers and participating in gleaning efforts in the NEK.

The organization had lost several other federal income streams in the past, Stevens said, but the most recent decisive setback was the loss of $25,000 in SNAP-Ed, or Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program Education, grants starting next year. The money would have gone to food purchases, outreach, training and wages, but was eliminated with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4.

“(SNAP-Ed) has helped low-income Vermonters develop skills and understanding about how to access, use, and prepare nutritious food, and helped families eat healthy meals on a budget,” Kyle Casteel, a spokesperson for the Vermont Department of Health, wrote in a statement Thursday. 

“The funding loss is impacting important projects and initiatives that are carried out by valued partners across the state,” the statement continued.

The two paid employees of the pantry will be laid off, Stevens said. 

“We had no choice,” he said.

Abenaki Helping Abenaki is a nonprofit with the primary mission of providing programs and services for the Nulhegan band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation and “other native people,” Stevens said. That work will continue.

“We are still feeding our tribal community,” Stevens said, though the public food pantry will close.

The Holland Food Shelf has worked with Vermont Foodbank, which had recently been providing the organization with roughly 10,000 pounds of food per quarter, according to the food bank’s government and public affairs manager, Carrie Stahler. Before the end of pandemic-era nutrition assistance programs that lowered the cost of food for local providers, she said, the food bank had provided even more. 

The northern portions of Orleans and Essex counties are areas of the state that have proven especially challenging for Stahler’s organization to reach, she said, due to the distance involved in delivery and a relative scarcity of local organizations to partner with.

“One of the issues that we as a state struggle with regularly is service delivery to very rural communities,” she said.

Vermont Foodbank can’t work alone, Stahler said.

“Those organizations are absolutely critical,” she said of local food pantries like the one in Holland. “They are the ones who neighbors see and know.”

She anticipates that the Holland Food Shelf’s closure will force residents to drive farther for help  and put more strain on regional assistance providers.

Marci Diamond, a local resident who has volunteered at the Holland Food Shelf, echoed Stahler’s concerns. 

“It’s a very rural, very isolated community,” she said.

Diamond said many locals who frequented the organization were veterans, young families and sometimes farmers “who grow food, and still can’t afford to feed themselves and their families.”

Diamond also noted there was no grocery store in Holland. 

“Not everybody has the ability to drive,” she said.

Trevor Gray, chair of the Holland Select Board, said the town was in a tough position when it requested a higher rent from the food pantry. He said the operational costs for the building surpassed the income the tenants generated by over $30,000. 

Nonetheless, he said, the board was “extremely disappointed” that an agreement could not be made to continue the food pantry’s operation. He said he understood that Stevens’ nonprofit was under a great deal of pressure from federal cuts, but added that “it’s just unfortunate for the people that utilize that service.”

Stahler said relying on small local budgets for food assistance can be problematic. 

“There’s an overeliance on tiny community organizations to really fulfill the basic needs of their neighbors,” she said. “How do we fill that gap? … That is a really difficult question.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘We had no choice’: Holland Food Shelf to shut down amid federal funding losses.