Updated at 6:47 p.m.

It was an afternoon of unease across the state as local officials, business owners and residents waited to see what the after-effects of Tropical Storm Beryl had in store for their towns.

With the weather forecast still uncertain about which areas would be hardest hit with incoming rain, many spent the anniversary of last year’s catastrophic summer flooding preparing for the possibility of another inundation. Officials distributed sandbags, established shelter locations, relocated equipment and refreshed weather maps in what is becoming an all-too-familiar routine. 

Rutland and Windsor counties

As potentially damaging rain and thunderstorms rolled in from the west, Ann Kuendig, Pittsfield’s selectboard chair, said she was monitoring the weather and in touch with the town’s emergency management directors.

“We’re just watching and waiting,” she said.

Tropical Storm Irene cut off Pittsfield from the outside world. But last summer’s flooding spared the town, which lies along the Tweed River.

Some combination of “Lady Luck” and “flood hazard mitigation projects” likely led to the better outcome, according to Kuendig, who said the town had expanded culverts and addressed previous erosion.

In preparation for Wednesday’s weather, Pittsfield officials have spread the word of potential flash floods on local social media. The town’s newly renovated offices are available as a potential shelter, Kuendig said, and have already been used twice this summer as cooling stations.

Neighboring Stockbridge was taking a similar approach.

When asked how the town was preparing, Town Clerk Jill Gifford said: “Other than praying it doesn’t hit us again?”

Stockbridge’s emergency management team was on standby, according to Gifford, and the town had publicly shared information regarding the impending weather.

If necessary, the town’s meetinghouse was available as an emergency shelter, she said.

Addison County

The rain had just begun to fall, loudly enough to hear over the phone, when Laurie Cox, chair of the Ripton’s selectboard, told a reporter that she, too, was hoping the storm would spare her town. Ripton experienced two landslides after last July’s storm, one of which destroyed a person’s home. 

The town recently received its first payment from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Cox said, which covers only a fraction of what it has spent to repair damage to roads and other infrastructure.

Over the years, as water has torn at the town’s infrastructure, road crews have installed increasingly large culverts. With each new storm, the rebuilt parts of the road have been the strongest, Cox said.

The only thing to do, Cox said, is to assume that a typically small stream might become a “massive force of water, and be ready for it as best you can. There’s limited funds all around, so you just do the best you can.”

In nearby Middlebury, Assistant Fire Chief Myron Selleck said the department is ready and waiting for any storm impacts but is cautiously optimistic about the forecast.

The volunteer squad was already scheduled to hold a meeting at the department on Wednesday night, Selleck said, so the crew is ready to act if there’s a need.

“We may or may not get to go out back and practice ground ladder work,” Selleck said. “We may be out there in the field. We may or may not get to sit upstairs and have a business meeting, or we might have a business meeting with wet clothes on.”

Either way, Selleck said the town has been through worse than what the weather forecast currently predicts for Middlebury.

But down the street from the fire department, Steve Duboise, owner of the auto shop County Tire Center, said he’s feeling nervous. His business took on water last year, when a flash flood hit the area in August.

Water from higher ground in Middlebury typically runs toward his business, located near an underpass in a lower-lying section of town. Last summer, the underpass was full of water. Duboise said his business was not significantly damaged.

Duboise attributes the area’s susceptibility to flooding to improper drainage near his parking lot. There’s not a lot he can do to prepare for the coming rain, he said, so he’s hoping Middlebury doesn’t see flash flooding this time. 

Washington County

One year ago to the date, Alexis Dexter was smashing a screwdriver and hammer into the first floor of her downtown Barre City business, the Kitty Korner Café, as water seeped in from the flooded Main Street outside. If she could get a hole into the floor, she figured, the water would drain down into her basement, away from the 57 cats her business had available for adoption.

Dexter’s plan worked. By the time the rain stopped, the basement was filled with 10 feet of water. All of her business’s equipment down below was ruined, but the cats were safe.

On Wednesday, she joked that she should have left that gaping hole in the floor.

Outside the cafe, Dexter and her mother completed what has become a ritual for downtown Barre business owners before a heavy rain: lining their storefronts with sandbags.

Forecasts for the area were nowhere near as dire as they were one year ago, but tensions among business owners were high. Several had packed bags in case they had to stay overnight to watch over their businesses.

“We’re definitely trying to think positive, but can’t help but have a little bit of anxiousness, like everyone up and down the street,” Nelson Ace Hardware’s store manager, Annette Boisvert said.

“If we get a little bit of water, it’s going to be okay,” Linda said. “If we have inundation again, it’s not going to be a good year.”

For both the Nelsons and Dexter, climbing out from the financial hole of last year’s flood has been difficult. 

“I mean, half of my trauma right here is, we’re still paying off the things that we had to do last year,” Dexter said. “It’s just a nightmare. There’s a lot of businesses and a lot of people, people who live here in Barre, who, if this happens again, they can’t stay. There’s no money to put back into it.”

While talking, Linda continually knocked on a wood cabinet next to her and wiped tears from her eyes.

“All we can do is just keep knocking on wood and just see what tomorrow looks like,” Linda said.

In Montpelier and Waterbury, past experience has taught officials to be more pessimistic than what the forecast predicts.

Officials in the capital announced Wednesday morning that “out of an abundance of caution” it had made sandbags available for downtown properties to defend against flash flooding. 

In Waterbury, the National Weather Service announced Wednesday afternoon that the Winooski River could reach minor flooding stage by 8 a.m. Thursday, which would likely affect the fields behind the Vermont State Office Complex.

But Waterbury Municipal Manager Tom Leitz said that during the past two floods last July and December, the river ran about 3 feet higher than predicted. That would place flooding at a moderate level on the National Weather Service’s scale, and could affect properties on Randall Street, Foundry Street and U.S. Route 2 and cause field flooding from Waterbury downstream through Richmond.

With the forecast still in flux, Leitz said he’s encouraging locals to empty their basements and pack a “go bag” in case they need to evacuate.

“We’re hoping none of that is necessary, but we want to be smart,” he said. “We can’t change the river, but we can change how we respond to it.”

Kathy Murphy, co-owner of Stowe Street Emporium in downtown Waterbury, said “everyone is a little bit on edge,” especially due to the timing of the storm. Just minutes before the first rain drops started to fall, Murphy said, the Waterbury Congregational Church rang its bells at noon to recognize the resilience the community has shown since last July’s floods.

“I went outside, and I yelled and rang my angel bells too,” she said. “It was a way to say: ‘We made it. We’re moving onward and upward.’” 

Others are hesitant to celebrate recovery with another possible flood on the way.

“This is a different type of fear,” said Jenna Danyew, who lived in Waterbury when Tropical Storm Irene hit Vermont in 2011 and works in town. “It’s the fear associated with the one-year anniversary, and the fear of the strength of a hurricane. It’s difficult for everyone.”

William Woodruff, Waterbury’s public works director, said it’s important to be prepared, but it’s equally as important to think of tonight’s rain as “a possible flood event” and not a repeat of past floods’ damage. He said his team is providing sandbags to locals who want to barricade their homes and taking precautions around town, such as collecting trash bins and picnic tables that could get swept away in the water’s path. Otherwise, he said, “all we can do is wait it out.”

Chittenden County

Farther north in Richmond, Town Manager Josh Arneson said the town had shut off the pump to its well to keep the drinking water clean in case the Winooski river floods. He also said the highway department had “checked the roadside ditches and culverts to make sure they’re free of obstruction.”

“They’ve got everything fueled up and ready to go should they need to respond if there’s anything happening with road closures or any corrosion on the roads,” Arneson said.

At Burlington’s Intervale, located along the Winooski River and a chronic victim of flooding, Intervale Center employees have a pre-flood response plan in place for the land, which is leased out to seven small- to medium-sized local farms. That means moving or securing any infrastructure away from flood zones and harvesting what crops they can before rains and flooding events begin.

“Our community’s been on high alert with this weather coming for a couple of days already,” said Mandy Fischer, director of programs at the Intervale Center.

On Wednesday, employees were watching the rain forecast and refreshing hydrology maps. While action levels are not projected to be as high as they were last July, Fischer said the organization takes a more cautious approach and assumes higher measurements.

“We tend to add several feet to the forecast projection just because we know that these projections are usually low,” she said. “We’re planning as though it’s going to moderate to major, but at this point, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, so hopefully we’ll be doing this preparation unnecessarily.”

Lamoille County

The Lamoille Area Recovery Network, a long-term support group set up in the wake of last July’s flooding, was planning to host a one-year anniversary dinner at a church in Johnson on Wednesday night. But those plans are now off the table, at least for the time being, said Sarah Henshaw, the recovery network’s coordinator.

“We don’t want folks on the road,” Henshaw said around 4 p.m. Wednesday. As she and other local leaders agreed to postpone the gathering — which was also meant to connect Johnson residents with mental health service providers — “the irony and the sadness that we’re canceling it for the same reason that we were going to have the anniversary did not escape anybody” she said.

According to Henshaw, water levels in the Lamoille and Gihon rivers, both of which cut through towns in the heart of the county, are currently lower than they were in the buildup to last summer’s flooding. That means officials are less concerned about flooding from the rivers, she said, though they are worried about the impacts of runoff from the heavy rain forecast to fall overnight.

Town officials are preparing for “minor flooding,” and the Red Cross has preemptively deployed some resources to the town, according to Selectboard Chair Eben Patch. 

Swift-water rescue teams have been deployed to Johnson and Stowe in case they’re needed in the coming days, Henshaw said Wednesday afternoon. And churches throughout the county were preparing to provide temporary shelter space, she added.

Henshaw said she felt confident in the county’s preparation for the storm. But in conversations with locals on Wednesday, she’s heard a deep sense of fear.

“The folks that I’ve spoken to today — that were pretty badly impacted last year — are high-anxiety, super triggered,” she said. “Worried about everything.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Amid uncertainty about where floods could strike, towns prepare for the worst.

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

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its most significant decision on homelessness in decades: It ruled that municipalities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public places.

The implications for the court’s 6-3 decision are most immediate for the Western U.S.: The ruling undermines lower court decisions in that region that prohibited local governments from penalizing someone for sleeping outdoors if there were no shelter beds available.

But experts anticipate the ruling will influence homelessness policy nationwide, clarifying how local officials can respond to people sleeping outside. And it comes as cities and towns across Vermont grapple with a rise in unsheltered homelessness – and are bracing for more people to lose their shelter over the next few months, as new limits on the state’s safety-net motel voucher program kick in.

“I would expect that in the wake of Friday’s decision, there may be cities or towns that are considering taking another look at some of these policies,” said Harrison Stark, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Vermont.

The high court upheld a wide-ranging ban on sleeping and camping in public places like sidewalks, streets, and city parks in the small city of Grants Pass, Oregon, finding that the rules did not defy the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Such blanket bans on sleeping in public spaces appear to be relatively rare in Vermont, according to Stark.

Last fall, the small Northeast Kingdom town of Canaan considered such a ban. At the time there was no homeless shelter available in the region for the general population, although one has since opened in St. Johnsbury. At the time, the ACLU raised concerns about the potential ban’s constitutionality. 

The town tabled the ban and hasn’t revisited it since, said town clerk and treasurer Zachary Brown in an interview Tuesday. The town’s selectboard wanted to wait and see what the Supreme Court decided, Brown added. He said he could not comment on whether he anticipated the selectboard would take up the ban again in light of the Supreme Court case. Canaan’s selectboard chair did not respond to a request for comment.

Officials in towns that do have camping bans on the books, like Brattleboro, say they aren’t heavily enforced. Clearing encampments is expensive, said Brattleboro Town Manager John Potter, and town resources are limited. The town has directed attention to encampments that “have gotten out of control, are dangerous,” Potter said – such as areas where it’s difficult for first responders to reach. 

“The focus of the town has not been on encampments. The focus of the town has been on how to increase housing in the area so that fewer people are without,” Potter said.

While the court case was underway, the Vermont League of Cities and Towns advised municipalities to be careful about removing people from public spaces unless they had alternative spaces to direct them toward, said Josh Hanford, director of intergovernmental relations for VLCT and former commissioner of the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development.

“That’s just been our general guidance,” Hanford said. “Be cautious, be careful, understand that there is this pending court case.” At the same time, Hanford said, cities and towns could address public health safety concerns surrounding encampments.

That guidance isn’t changing significantly after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Hanford said. Stark, from the ACLU, cautioned that the court’s decision is fairly narrow – and cities and towns should consider other existing safeguards before altering policies on camping.

“It removed one specific check on government’s ability to criminalize sleeping outside, but didn’t address any of the other myriad protections for the unhoused,” Stark said of the court case. Those other protections include the right to due process, an individual’s rights to their possessions, and their privacy rights, among others, he said. 

Municipalities don’t appear to be leaping toward more stringent encampment policies. Dominic Cloud, city manager for St. Albans – which recently broke up an encampment – said the Supreme Court decision has been critiqued “because it authorizes a heavier hand. That’s not our game. Our game is to use a softer hand to the very last resort.”

Rutland City Mayor Mike Doenges said the city’s approach to addressing encampments – which involves deploying police officers to conduct health and welfare checks – is working well, and he doesn’t anticipate the court’s decision will change it. But once the city has more transitional housing set up, he said, it will consider what options the ruling might allow for enforcement.

“What can we do to work and get people from one situation to another?” he said. “How can we get them from camping, perhaps, into a transitional housing campus that will benefit their life and get them back on their feet?”  

The court ruling comes as many Vermont municipalities expect to see more unhoused people setting up camp over the next few months. As of July 1, participants in the state’s motel voucher program have their stays limited to 80 days in a year (though stays during the coldest winter months, from December through March, won’t count toward that limit). In tandem with that time limit, the total number of rooms in the motel program will be capped at 1,100 come mid-September. As of late June, there were over 1,400 rooms in use. Meanwhile, shelters across the state are generally full.

“Some households might exit their hotel or motel units on July 1st and preserve their eligible days for colder weather, while others may choose to stay in the unit and use their 80 days this summer,” Miranda Gray, deputy commissioner of the Department for Children and Families’ economic services division, wrote in a letter to municipal leaders last week. “While some households will move into permanent housing, it is also likely that some may camp over the summer.”

Burlington is anticipating seeing more people living unsheltered over the next few months as those new limits take effect, said Sarah Russell, the city’s special assistant to end homelessness and co-chair of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance. 

That’s on top of a stark increase in unsheltered homelessness the county has observed over the last year. Before the first major wave of motel program evictions last June, the county averaged about 60 to 80 people a month self-reporting as unsheltered, Russell said. After the evictions, those numbers skyrocketed, and have remained high. In June, the county tallied 265 people living unsheltered, according to Russell.

Russell does not expect the Supreme Court decision to change Burlington’s policies around encampments – which were shaped, in part, by a 2019 settlement in a case brought by the ACLU. The city bans camping in city parks specifically; when it removes an encampment, it must give its inhabitants adequate notice and store their belongings. Recently, the city moved toward providing basic services at some encampments, like water and portable toilets.

Russell described the city’s approach to encampments as “human-centered,” and said the city’s leadership is opposed to “criminalizing poverty and homelessness.”

“We know that when we do that, it makes it much more difficult for folks to enter into permanent housing, when they’ve had multiple low-level interactions with law enforcement or the criminal justice system,” she said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: As Vermont homelessness rises, US Supreme Court ruling gives towns more authority to punish camping.

For roughly the past two years, the state of Vermont has operated a program to help people like René Pellerin.

Pellerin, who lives in Waterbury Center, has dual sensory loss — he is deaf and has a condition that has caused his vision to deteriorate. To do many activities in his daily life, Pellerin uses state-funded support service providers: trained aides who drive him to social events, help him do outdoor activities and guide him when shopping at the store. 

But with the funding for that state program scheduled to dry up this fall, Pellerin and others fear that it will leave them without crucial support.

Without the program, “it would be much more isolation, staying home, using just a computer to send out communication, no social interactions, and I’d just be sitting around getting fat,” Pellerin said in an interview through an interpreter.

Vermont’s support service provider pilot program was funded by a two-year grant of $121,000 from the federal Administration for Community Living. 

The nationwide interpreting firm Vancro was awarded the grant to operate the program. According to Cory Brunner, Vancro’s vice president, support service providers received 268 separate requests for help in its first year. In its second, that number had increased to 470. 

Vancro’s program serves 32 Vermonters and has a short waiting list. 

Brunner, who lives in Vermont and is herself a support service provider, estimated that more than 30 other states have permanent state-funded support service provider programs. Clients of Vermont’s program are devastated that it might shut down, she said in an email. 

The program’s clients have ranged from teenagers to octogenarians and include people with vision and hearing loss for a variety of reasons — military service, medical conditions and age among them.

Pellerin, the Waterbury client, said support service providers have taken him to medical appointments, helped him shop at grocery stores and brought him snowshoeing. 

“It’s an opportunity to get out more,” Pellerin said. 

Nancy Wisner, a Pittsfield client of the program, has used the program for appointments and hopes to attend some local concerts. Wisner is legally blind and has some hearing loss but is not deaf. 

The program gives her the opportunity to socialize with more people, she said.  

“We’re social animals,” she said. “We need other people to survive, keep our mental health. That was proven during Covid.”

Fred Jones, the director of Vermont’s Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, part of the Agency of Human Services, said the initial intent of the grant was to improve clients’ “social integration.” Its ultimate goal, he said, was to combat the isolation experienced by people with dual sensory loss. 

“I feel like it’s been very, very successful,” said Jones, who is himself legally blind. 

But the grant money, which initially came from federal Covid-19 aid, is slated to expire by Sept. 30. 

Jones and other state officials are looking for other potential sources of money that could help extend the life of the program. Without an appropriation from the Legislature, however, it’s not clear whether the state will be able to continue to fund it after that. 

“We know it’s not a lot of people, it’s not a lot of money, but it makes a huge difference in someone’s life,” Jones said. 

Wisner echoed that sentiment.

Losing the program “would be a very, very sad thing for a lot of people,” she said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermonters with hearing and vision loss fear end of a pilot program.

Rick Weston owns a seasonal camp, deep in the forests of the Green Mountains, at least according to the town of Huntington. 

However, the four-bedroom, two-bathroom home would be considered a year-round residence in Bolton, on the other side of the town line just yards away.

So Weston is moving — 12 feet, to be precise. 

Work to lift the house 4 feet above the ground and move it with a network of temporary rails and large rollers began last week. 

By relocating his house on Happy Hollow Road, Weston can accomplish in a week what he has tried, but failed, to do through Huntington’s municipal permitting process over the past four years: get his house to be recognized as a year-round residence. 

Under Huntington land use regulations, the structure can only be used for six months out of the year because it is in the woodland zoning district. The designation is intended to protect environmentally fragile locations in high elevations and maintain “unfragmented forest land and wildlife habitat,” according to the regulations.

“I grew up here. This is home,” Weston said. “But these past few years, it’s just been discouraging. It’s a nightmare. I can’t build what I’ve worked for my whole life, can’t even live in my home.”

The 67-year-old grew up in Essex but visited the house at his grandfather’s Huntington camp almost every weekend to hunt, ski and help his family build Happy Hollow Road. Since he was 12 years old, he’s been planning to build another house at the top of the property that overlooks “the nicest view in the state.” 

After a career of building homes for other families across Vermont, Weston said he finally felt ready to retire and build that dream home in 2019. He just needed the money — and the health — to make it happen. Weston was diagnosed with throat cancer in the same year.  

He decided to sell his existing house on his family’s Happy Hollow Road property — originally built in the late 1960s and owned by various family members and other locals since then — to fund the new construction. But the house couldn’t be sold as-is in Huntington, real estate agent Jeremy Collins said. 

“No one wants to buy a house you can only live in for six months,” Collins said. He also said it’s “near-impossible” to get lenders to finance seasonal dwellings that are in areas as remote as Huntington’s woodland district. 

Bolton’s forest district abuts Huntington’s woodland district. However, Bolton’s district was designed to protect high-elevation areas from “undue environmental disturbance” while still allowing for “traditional uses such as forestry, outdoor recreation and compatible low density residential development,” according to Bolton’s land-use regulations. Year-round homes are permitted in the district, Bolton’s Planning and Zoning Administrator Kelly Diglio said.

With the year-round label, Weston said he can sell his house after three years of watching it sit untouched on the market. He said the sale will give him the financial foundation he needs to build his dream home on an adjacent parcel in Bolton. 

So, Weston began the process of requesting a conversion of his seasonal camp to a year-round dwelling — just like some of his Huntington neighbors have done over the years, he said. 

Weston said he attended meetings, filed paperwork and “did everything they told me to do” to move his case forward in the Huntington Development Review Board — all in between 32 rounds of radiation and eight chemotherapy treatments. All along, he said, his goal was to protect his rights to his family’s land so his grandchildren could learn to appreciate Happy Hollow the same way he did.

“There was no reason not to move forward with everything,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I think I can live in my house on a road I built?” 

In June 2023, the Development Review Board denied Weston’s conversion request, citing a land-use regulation passed on Town Meeting Day in March 2023 in which “conversions of seasonal dwellings to year-round dwellings are prohibited in the Woodland and Conservation Districts,” according to the board’s decision. 

Weston said he wasn’t aware of the policy. When he submitted the application in January 2023, regulations had an “absence of language prohibiting” conversion in the woodland district, said Weston’s attorney, Peter Raymond, according to minutes from the May 9, 2023, board meeting. 

But Huntington government officials said rules are rules. 

Yves Gonnet, the zoning administrative officer in Huntington, said the conversion policy is not a new rule and merely clarified a regulation already in place — that only camps are allowed in the woodland district. Any conversions previously allowed were made by administrators who “accidentally or erroneously” issued permits, he said. 

Adam Miller, Weston’s neighbor and a member of both the Huntington and Bolton development review boards, wrote in an email to VTDigger that “there is nothing unique about applying the current town zoning regulations to Mr. Weston’s seasonal camp.”

Miller said he compiled a letter of Happy Hollow residents’ concerns about how Weston’s plans would violate local regulations, which was jointly submitted by the neighbors to Bolton’s Development Review Board. 

Miller recused himself from all votes involving Weston’s property in Huntington and Bolton “to avoid any apparent conflict of interest,” he said. He spoke against Weston’s construction plans during a public comment period in Huntington “much like all other members of the public who participate because they have a perspective they believe would be helpful,” Miller said. 

Weston said he felt blindsided by his town government, especially Miller.

“It’s just not fair when these towns start playing God,” he said. “They’re supposed to work for the people, not against them.”

After these frustrations, Weston said, the $100,000 cost to move his house over the Bolton town line feels worth it. Late last week, the New England Building Movers started to slowly roll the house to its new location in Bolton. Weston said he’ll refurbish the house over the next three months so it can get back on the market as quickly as possible. 

Then, he plans to start construction on his dream home as soon as he has the money to do so. He said he already has the approval from Bolton to begin building. 

The race is on, he said, “just in case Bolton decides to change their rules, too.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Zoning in Huntington held a Vermonter back. So he moved his house to Bolton..

Officials from the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife are warning that a viral video showing two black bears in a Waitsfield backyard — one of which appears to be relaxing on a hammock — isn’t as cute as it looks.

Instead, it’s an example of increasingly common human-bear encounters in Vermont, which can turn dangerous for both bears and people. In May, a game warden euthanized a bear in Underhill after it repeatedly displayed aggressive behavior toward a person.

Noah Dweck, the videographer and homeowner, told VTDigger that he was sitting in his home office on Tuesday when he heard the chains of his hammock jingling in the backyard, and he knew immediately that it was “the bears.”

With his home situated in a mountainous section of the Mad River Valley, Dweck and his wife, Kristen, are aware that they live in bear country. They have taken a number of measures to keep bears away — a piece of context viewers wouldn’t know from the video, which the Associated Press published on Wednesday. Bears have tried to get into their dumpsters, which are secured with bear bars, Dweck said, and they’ve climbed into their truck bed.

Dweck said the couple keeps the garbage and recycling secure, does not use bird feeders, and takes care not to leave food in cars or outdoor areas.

“We definitely make sure that we don’t have anything that’s attracting them,” he said. “They’re just around.”

David Sausville, who leads the department’s wildlife restoration management and research section, said he was particularly concerned to see the Waitsfield bears’ apparent lack of fear when Dweck approached them and yelled at them to leave. Dweck said he was concerned by this behavior, too.

“I came out, and was like, ‘Hey!’ and they just kind of stared at me, which is what they like to do, because they’re so used to us,” he said.

After catching a video of the bear swinging in the hammock, Dweck said he used an air horn, which he keeps handy, to scare the bears away.

Sausville said the Fish & Wildlife Department has logged more than 400 human-bear encounters already this year, and he expects this year’s number to exceed last year’s 880 recorded encounters.

Department officials recently told VTDigger that, up until 2016, members of the department anticipated roughly 130 reports of bear encounters each year. In 2020, there were 1,700 reports, and in 2022, there were 1,400.

“There’s a lot of cubs that have been brought up, through the years, with these females that know where the food is, and now they’re out on their own,” Sausville said. “So we’ve got a whole generation of bears that have learned, ‘humans mean food,’ and that’s not a good situation.”

Sausville said bears are commonly attracted most by garbage and recycling left unsecured, bird feeders left up in the summer, grills and food residue outside and compost that isn’t handled properly and creates smells.

Although seeing a bear can be exciting, scaring the bear away and making it uncomfortable near humans will help to keep the animal safer, he said. He recommends using an air horn, yelling or banging pots and pans to scare the animals.

“There have been cases out west where they’ve shown, when those communities come together, everybody — the homeowners, the restaurants with their dumpsters, the trash haulers — they’ve actually reduced substantially the number of bear incidents,” he said.

Most of that success comes from small behavioral changes on the part of humans, he said.

People can report bear encounters and learn more about preventing bear-human encounters at the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department’s website.

Read the story on VTDigger here: After Vermont bear video goes viral, officials warn that such encounters aren’t harmless .

Cedulie Benoit-Smith is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program. 

Chickens moseyed around the yard of Karen and Brian Wiseman’s Worcester house on a warm May afternoon. But the free-range flock is only one piece of the couple’s homestead just down the road from the town center. The focal point of their business, Peaceful Harvest, instead sits inside a humid, metal-lined room in the barn out back: medicinal mushrooms.

The Wisemans grow and process seven species of mushrooms — none of them psychedelic — to turn them into an array of products: powders, tinctures, baggies of dried strips. Some products are blends of species. All of them, the Wisemans say, can boost immune systems, improve memory and energy and spur a range of other healthy body functions. They’re closing in on a decade in business, and their products line the shelves of over 30 co-ops and wellness stores across Vermont — and appear in shops in 10 other states.

“We just want to help and serve others and just help people with their health and their wellness,” said Karen.

She and her husband belong to a wave of mushroom-minded businesses that have opened nationwide in the last decade, part of what’s been termed the Shroom Boom. You can see it in Vermont too, where over a dozen outfits grow and sell mushrooms.

The Wisemans haven’t always lived like this. The homestead is the ever-fruiting result of a move from Dover, New Hampshire, around 12 years ago. The Wisemans moved to Worcester looking for a lifestyle that matched their morals — or, as they might put it, morels. 

“We need to get out of this whole corporate world and show up in the world differently and try to be the change we want to see,” Karen remembered thinking.

The corporate world they left behind had yielded wild success. For nearly 20 years Karen worked as a chemical engineer for a large biopharmaceutical company, while Brian worked in supply chain management. When the couple decided to start their family, they were comfortable financially, Karen said. Brian was able to be a stay at home dad in their large, seacoast house. 

But when the Wisemans looked at the world around them at the start of the 2010s, they thought, “Oh, our world is going to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly,” Karen recalled. 

“We didn’t want to participate in it anymore,” she said. “We wanted to get closer to the land, and honestly, we want(ed) to raise some chickens.”

So they moved to rural Vermont. They had no grand plans of starting what would become their farm, said Karen. Mushrooms came into the picture as a hobby: Brian had taught himself how to grow the fungi while in New Hampshire.

As they settled in Worcester, the couple wondered what role they could play in their new community, what skills or knowledge they could contribute, Karen said. “We at the time realized nobody was growing mushrooms year-round,” she said.

So they turned the hobby into a business. The Wisemans found it natural to transfer their skills to the clean, controlled, indoor environments that finicky fungi demand.

Karen completed a three-year certificate in clinical herbalism from the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism, which operates out of Goddard College’s campus in Plainfield. She was skeptical at first, she said, but soon came to appreciate how many ailments could be addressed by natural products, rather than those synthesized in a lab. 

Few small-farm families can support the lifestyle without at least one partner doing other work, and the Wisemans are no exception. Karen explained, “I don’t know of any farmers that farm where somebody in the family doesn’t have an off-farm job. Yeah, we can all hope that feeding ourselves and the kinds of work that farmers and agriculture does really becomes a true value to us again, where we value it like all the other garbage in society. But we’re not there yet.”

She works remotely with flexible hours in regulatory and compliance for a medical device manufacturing company. Brian works full time growing mushrooms. 

The couple now feels at home in Worcester. In fact, a neighbor helped build a sterile lab in the Wisemans’ home for his senior project with the Central Vermont Career Center.

The Wisemans handle all the steps of the mushroom-growing process at home. With the help of their barn and a second facility just down the street, the Wisemans grow, fruit, inoculate, process and package their mushrooms. Their kids are now old enough to help with the work, but this can be hard between track and theater schedules.

About 65% of Peaceful Harvest’s business is wholesale with local co-ops, said Karen. Hunger Mountain Coop in Montpelier is a proud carrier of Peaceful Harvest mushrooms. The co-op’s wellness manager Crystal Arellano said the market helps local producers get on the shelves even if it means the co-op gets lower profit margins. 

“The co-op is serving the community. That’s what we’re here for,” Arellano said. “And for our members, our producers, all of us, this is a center for us to share items. So we want to make sure that those companies have a place here and have a spot. And we also want them to keep their business at the same time. So, being able to highlight their items and give it at a price that’s reasonable for the customer too. It’s nice, because when people come into the store, they can look around and know that a lot of these things are coming from Vermont.”

The co-op features products from three other mushroom companies, Arellano said, but Peaceful Harvest is the only one to use both mycelium and mushrooms in its goods. Mycelium is to fungi what roots are to plants.

Additionally, Karen uses her training in clinical herbalism to teach in sessions hosted at places like Hunger Mountain. “I think most of us are pretty proud to recommend Peaceful Harvest: One because it’s local, and then two, we know how much thought has gone into each formulation,” Arellano said.

As the small business continues to grow its roots, the family has this to say, according to Karen: “There’s a reason our business is called Peaceful Harvest Mushrooms. We just want a simple, peaceful life that helps other people and that respects the natural world that we get to be a part of.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Leaving Big Pharma for mushroom farming, Wiseman family finds purpose in Worcester.

Gov. Phil Scott has allowed two of the session’s most consequential bills related to climate change to become law without his signature. One holds big oil companies accountable for the damage climate change has caused in Vermont, and another is designed to protect Vermonters from the impacts of more frequent flooding as a result of a warmer atmosphere. 

The first, S.259, named the “Climate Superfund Act” and modeled on federal Superfund law, requires the world’s biggest oil companies to pay for damages that their products have caused in the state by way of climate change. 

The law directs money owed to Vermont to be calculated based on those damages and the corresponding percentage of emissions that the company was responsible for between 1995 and 2024. Then, the money would be deposited into a Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program Fund, designed to pay for projects that protect Vermonters from climate change and help the state adapt to it. 

While several other states have introduced similar legislation, Vermont is the first in the country to enact such a law. 

Scott has said he would prefer that Vermont only move forward in the company of other states, rather than setting precedent and inviting almost-certain legal action from oil companies with deep pockets. The litigation process is likely to be expensive.

“Instead of coordinating with other states like New York and California, with far more abundant resources, Vermont — one of the least populated states with the lowest GDP in the country — has decided to recover costs associated with climate change on its own,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers on Thursday explaining his decision. 

“Taking on ‘Big Oil’ should not be taken lightly,” he wrote. “And with just $600,000 appropriated by the Legislature to complete an analysis that will need to withstand intense legal scrutiny from a well-funded defense, we are not positioning ourselves for success.”

Still, he said he understood “the desire to seek funding to mitigate the effects of climate change that has hurt our state in so many ways.” He noted that Attorney General Charity Clark and state Treasurer Mike Pieciak have “endorsed this policy and committed to the work it will require.”

He also found “comfort” in a measure that requires the Agency of Natural Resources to report back to the Legislature in January 2025 on the process, “so we can reassess our go-it-alone approach.”

Vermont’s effort to move forward on its own has brought the state national attention. Publications including The Guardian, The New Yorker and the The New York Times have covered the bill’s progress and potential implications, especially if other states follow suit.

An analysis from Columbia University outlines legal challenges that Vermont could face while defending the law. But supporters point to the growing field of science that is getting better at tracing changes in climate to human-caused sources. 

And, if Vermont wins the expected legal challenges, the state could receive a large amount of money, which would be funneled toward climate resilience projects, such as those that would help protect the state from future flooding. 

Ben Edgerly Walsh, a lobbyist for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said he expected the cost of damage in Vermont that could be attributed to oil companies to reach hundreds of millions of dollars and to “outstrip, by a couple orders of magnitude, any potential costs to defend the law.”

“What’s incredibly clear is these companies that are responsible for the climate crisis aren’t going to pay Vermont a dime unless we take an action like this,” he said. 

Scott also allowed S.213, named the “Flood Safety Act,” to go into law without his signature Thursday. The law establishes a new state permitting system for building in river corridors, sets new standards for wetland protection and increases dam safety measures. Its supporters stress the urgency of preventing many types of development that could be impacted by floodwaters or could worsen flooding downstream. 

Vermont has already seen more frequent and intense flooding in recent years, and climate change is expected to cause increased flooding in the state, which is particularly dangerous to Vermont towns located along the banks of rivers. 

Scott expressed strong opposition to the bill throughout the most recent legislative session and reiterated some of his concerns in a letter to lawmakers Thursday. 

“S.213 is another example of this Legislature’s practice of passing complex and significant policies without appropriate consideration of whether they can even be implemented,” he wrote. “Throughout the session, the Agency of Natural Resources’ subject matter experts repeatedly told legislators that the work required in the bill is not achievable in the timeline it sets.”

Secretary of Natural Resources Julie Moore had often said she wanted to make sure that Vermonters have enough time and input on the law. Her agency estimates that the permitting system, which would take effect in 2028, could apply to as many as 45,000 land parcels. 

“However, we also told legislators throughout the session, we support the goals and agree this work needs to be done,” Scott wrote in the letter. “Therefore, this bill will become law without my signature, but you can expect us to come back in January and propose a sensible timeline that is actually achievable and does this work correctly for the people of Vermont.”

In terms of the bill’s expense, Lauren Oates, a lobbyist for the Nature Conservancy who has advocated for the bill, said the status quo is expensive. 

“We’re spending tens of millions of dollars every year to help our either direct communities or our neighboring communities, as a collective tax base, recover from and respond to these events,” she said. “It’s costing us way more than we can afford.”

Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, said in a written statement that he believes, “in decades to come, S.213 will be seen as the moment Vermont got serious about preparing for the worst of climate change.”

“We came into this session with one mission above all else: meet the challenge of Vermont’s climate-related flooding issues head-on,” Baruth wrote. The bill, he said, “does just that, by addressing dam safety and high-hazard river corridors and by making wetlands and watersheds more resilient in the face of catastrophic rain events.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont set to become first state in the nation to ‘make big oil pay’.

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

A few years ago, when Corinne Cooper was considering leasing a lot at a manufactured home park in Berlin, she had some sense that the park had experienced minor flooding in the past. But, she said, she didn’t receive much information from the property owner when she asked if he had done anything to mitigate the risk. 

“I was naive enough to think, ‘Well, you know, I’m only planning on being there two or three years,’” she said. Within that window, floodwaters destroyed her home, when the Stevens Branch of the Winooski River inundated the park last July.

In response to last year’s widespread flooding, Vermont lawmakers have passed new measures intended to give prospective homebuyers, renters and manufactured home purchasers more information about flood risk when looking for their next home.

Vermont now joins a growing list of states that mandate flood risk disclosure for real estate transactions, as climate change fuels more extreme weather.

The new requirements have not yet been signed into law by Gov. Phil Scott, and are part of a sweeping land use and housing reform bill that the Republican governor has suggested he may veto. Yet the flood disclosure measures proved relatively uncontroversial throughout this year’s legislative session.

Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, one of the authors of the legislation, represents a town that is no stranger to floods. In the intervening years between Tropical Storm Irene’s destruction in 2011 and the historic floods of 2023, “there were a number of people who bought homes that had no idea that they were in a flood zone,” Stevens said.

“Those communities who were affected felt like this was something that was missing from statute,” he added.

The new measures require the seller of a property to tell a buyer whether the building is in a high or moderate-risk flood zone mapped by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The seller must also disclose whether the property flooded while they owned it – and if it faced damage from flood-related erosion or a landslide, issues that arose after last summer’s floods. Sellers will also need to reveal whether or not they maintain flood insurance on the property. And if a seller fails to tell the buyer any of this information, the legislation lays out a clear path for recourse.

Prospective buyers already have some avenues to learn about flood risk. When seeking to buy a home within FEMA’s so-called 100-year floodplain, purchasers pursuing a federally-backed mortgage will already learn from their lender that federal law requires them to take out a flood insurance policy. And the new flood disclosure requirements augment existing rules realtors follow to relay potential hazards to buyers. 

Peter Tucker, a lobbyist for the Vermont Association of Realtors, previously told VTDigger/Vermont Public that he supported the proposed disclosure measures but found them somewhat redundant, given existing realtors’ rules. Now, though, he recognizes that for buyers paying for property in cash – or the estimated 30-40% of the market not working with a realtor – the disclosure law will provide information they may not get elsewhere. 

“I think it becomes more important when you consider the entire marketplace,” he said.

That information may help homeowners better prepare for future flooding. A 2022 FEMA analysis found that states with stronger flood disclosure requirements often have higher rates of residents with flood insurance policies. Without flood insurance, Vermonters are left relying on federal disaster aid to recoup their losses – which rarely pays out as much money. 

The bill also requires that landlords disclose whether a rental sits in FEMA’s high-risk flood zone before a tenant signs a lease, and tasks the state Department of Housing and Community Development with creating a model form for property owners to use to convey this risk. The state would need to create a similar notice for lot leases in manufactured home parks. Flood damage to a manufactured home itself would need to be communicated to a buyer, too.

Cooper sees flood risk disclosure as a step in the right direction. And she hopes people will grasp the gravity of the information when they get it – even if their choices are constrained by Vermont’s acute housing shortage and skyrocketing prices.

“Just because something hasn’t flooded or flooded to a certain degree in the past doesn’t mean that it won’t in the future,” Cooper said. “I’m certainly not wanting anybody else to take those risks.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Lawmakers pass flood disclosure requirements for home sellers, landlords.

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

When Peter Stickney walks along his cow paddocks in the morning, he notes the scattered patches of greener grass across the pasture. He knows what this means: It’s where his cows have peed. 

So when the Rich Earth Institute, a Brattleboro organization focused on turning human urine into fertilizer, approached him to be a farm partner, Stickney said it was a no-brainer. 

Stickney manages the Elm Lea Farm at The Putney School, a boarding high school in the Windham County town of the same name. For the past few years, alongside six other farms in Vermont and the Northeast, Stickney has been receiving treated urine from Rich Earth Institute to spray across the farmland at Elm Lea.

The institute, its partners and others in the sustainability industry see the practice — dubbed “peecycling” in national headlines — as a cheap, easy and less-destructive method for fertilizing plants than synthetic fertilizer and as a way for people to rethink their views on whether human waste should really go to waste. 

“We’re doing something that is somewhat disruptive and asking for people to look at things differently, change behaviors a little bit, sometimes around where they pee and why,” said Jed Blume, the institute’s development director. 

For Stickney, it looks like this: Rich Earth workers haul a tank of treated urine to the farm on a big truck before filling a smaller tank that Stickney can tow across the farm with a tractor.

“I could very quickly see how much darker green the grass was,” he said. “Dark green grass is happy grass — it means it has lots of nutrients. It’s very simple from my end, and it’s very soon that the results are visible, tangible.”

Federal funders are on board. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program has given the group close to $325,000 since 2013 to explore urine’s role in fertilizer practices. “This is innovative research, and it could lead to something that could really help farmers in a sustainable way,” said Candice Huber, who oversees the program’s grants for projects in the Northeast pairing researchers and farmers.

The Rich Earth Institute is going on its 12th year now, and the process of collecting urine and getting it to farms has evolved over time, Blume said.

The institute says it collects urine from 230 donors, who use one of two methods provided by Rich Earth. Some donors pee into a funnel screwed to a jug, cap the container and bring it to a drop-off spot. Others own a specialized toilet with a trap installed in the bowl that connects to a separate plumbing line. Urine in the trap gets diverted to a tank that institute workers pump out once or twice a year.

Next, the raw urine is transported from the collection site to a treatment center either on or off a farm. Through storage or pasteurization, at certain temperatures, the urine is treated to use as fertilizer. “The Rich Earth Institute has developed a computer-controlled pasteurizer with a high-efficiency heat exchanger to sanitize urine quickly and energy-efficiently,” the site says. 

Finally, the urine is put on a tractor and put on crop fields.  

“There’s been an interest both economically and environmentally in finding more sustainable, equitable, environmentally friendly ways of producing fertilizer, and since our bodies are all little fertilizer factories, folks are starting to connect the dots,” Blume said. “There’s multiple incentives for practicing nutrient recycling both economically and environmentally … The plants like it.” 

Synthetic fertilizer is typically made of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and often produced through two processes, the Haber Bosch method and traditional mining. Treated urine, which contains all three of those nutrients, is a low-cost and sustainable fertilizer source, according to Rich Earth.

One of the biggest concerns people have about urine fertilizer is pharmaceuticals, said Blume, but after doing a six-year research study with the University of Michigan and the University at Buffalo, the institute found “the pharmaceuticals don’t really accumulate in crop tissue at significant levels … Having that research energized us,” said Blume. 

Blume said the practice is becoming more socially acceptable, too. “The global fertilizer industry has seen a lot of volatility with regards to pricing and sourcing,” he said. “Once you explain what the nutrients are, they seem to be really interested in a sustainable form (and) being able to access those nutrients affordably.” 

Along with its farm partner program, the institute wants to offer people help through programs like “Urine My Garden,” which teaches gardeners to safely turn their pee into nutrients for their plants at home. And the institute is putting together a manual for farmers to do the same at scale. “We’ve developed a culture of practice around urine recycling,” said education director Julia Cavacchi. 

Part of their pitch, to organizations such as the Lake Champlain Basin Program, involves almost philosophical benefits.

“We can actually start to think about, how can we as humans come to heal the Earth with what our bodies produce in a way that is generous to the land,” Cavacchi said. “It’s a hopeful space to be working with in terms of using our bodies to heal.” 

Kimmerly Nace had a similar mindset when she and Abraham Noe-Hays created Rich Earth in 2012. Nace remembers how her neighbors would show up to her home in those early days, containers of urine in hand.

“It’s a very hopeful project,” said Nace, who no longer works at the institute. “People begin to feel that something that comes out of their body that’s normally been used as a waste can actually have value in agriculture.” 

“Farmers have been really receptive partially because farmers don’t have any ick factor around urine — it’s not different than any other animal manure for farmers,” said Nace. 

Nace is now the executive director of Brightwater Tools, a spinoff company that makes the technology Rich Earth uses to separate the urine from wastewater. Currently, she is working at a national level to shift the wastewater industry more toward nutrient recovery.

“We really did intend from the very beginning to be disruptive. To really shake it up and say wait, what are we doing here?” Nace said, comparing urine reuse to windmills and electric cars. 

Most of the grants Rich Earth has received from the USDA program are called partnership grants. The awards are capped at $30,000 and go to projects where researchers team up with a farmer to test hypotheses. Researchers set up their projects “so that they understand the needs of the farmer and how their work can really work on a farm.” 

Rich Earth has had seven partnership grants since 2013, several at close to the max funding amount.

“They had a lot of projects from us, and they’ve all been involving human fertilizer and testing it on crops and assessing the feasibility and bio-acidification,” Huber said. “Every year there’s discussion about the safety factors, the ability of using urine, as far as people who would be interested in eating products that are grown with that.” 

Huber said the federal program has full confidence in the institute’s work: “They are very good with their research in the way that they put it all together, and it’s really very thorough. All the regulations are being followed through the state. Safety-wise we trust that process.” 

Thor Retzlaff is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Wasted*, a Burlington company that rents and sells water-saving porta-potties and toilets with eco-friendly features like bamboo toilet paper. 

Retzlaff believes in the mission behind the Rich Earth, which his firm works with.

More than a third of the company’s toilets divert urine from other waste. The company collects and sends it to Rich Earth for fertilizer. “We’ve been working with the Rich Earth Institute and Brightwater tools since the conception of our company,” Retzlaff said. “They very much inspired us to go and start this thing.”

Retzlaff, Brophy Tyree, and Taylor Zehren began the company after attending a virtual summit hosted by Rich Earth Urine in August 2020. Over the course of three days, Retzlaff said, “they essentially brought together the world’s minds to talk about how valuable piss is.” 

He and the other co-founders wanted to take what they learned about urine diversion and combine it with a catchy business model. “From there what we did was identify Vermont as the state that allowed us to turn pee into fertilizer, so it was an obvious choice to move our business to Vermont,” he said.

Wasted* toilets are easy to identify by their bright orange color.

Retzlaff said urine-based fertilizer will catch on as evidence of its benefits grows. “There’s been a lot of data aggregating in the past 15 years that essentially says, ‘Hey, this is not only more sustainable than synthetic fertilizer but it’s more productive, it’s producing greater results. It’s a localized way of retaining the nutrients in any given ecosystem.’” 

Or as Stickney, the farmer in Putney, put it: “It’s just the simplest thing in the world to do.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: The future of fertilizer? Pee, says this Brattleboro institute.