On the very first day of summer, many of Vermont’s top politicos gathered on the Statehouse lawn for a cheeky kind of bill-signing ceremony. They were there to celebrate H.217, which will inject more than $120 million annually into Vermont’s child care system, getting enacted into law.

Gov. Phil Scott had vetoed the bill — he objected to the 0.44% payroll tax that will partially fund the measure — but lawmakers overrode him by comfortable margins the day before Wednesday’s photo op.

And so, since the governor would not sign it, the children would. A large-scale printout of the bill was propped up on a tripod, and, after the speeches wrapped up, Senate Majority Leader Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, stood at the ready, colored markers in hand.

“Anybody who is under four feet tall, please come forward,” her colleague, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, instructed the small crowd of lawmakers, lobbyists, advocates and their children. “We have markers for you. You have to finish the job today.”

Advocates and Democratic lawmakers, who had made child care one of their banner priorities for the session, had reason to celebrate. Taking into account regular federal funding and the state money Vermont already spends on prekindergarten vouchers, the measure will roughly double the public dollars spent on early childhood education in the state. Just weeks before, the wonky online outlet Vox had declared the new law would make Vermont “a national leader on child care.” 

But in America, the bar is low. The U.S. is an outlier among rich, industrialized nations in how little it invests in early childhood education. And advocates and experts alike say that while Vermont’s new law will make significant progress, it will not, by itself, actually fix a broken child care system.

“This is a great downpayment on a child care system that works for parents and providers. It is not the full investment,” Elliot Haspel, a national expert who testified before lawmakers about the bill, told VTDigger.

“If all there ever is, is $120 million — maybe a little bit more — if we ask ourselves 10 years from now, ‘What’s the child care system in Vermont going to look like?’ It’s not going to look radically different than it does today. It’s going to be moderately more affordable. It’s going to be moderately better paid,” he said.

The problem of child care is simple math. Because it requires very low adult-to-children ratios, it is enormously labor-intensive to deliver. But because most families must pay out of pocket for the service, providers set their tuition far below the true cost of care. The result is prices that families still struggle to pay — and wages that leave child care workers unable to make ends meet. Basic benefits, like health insurance, remain out of reach for much of the workforce.

Vermont’s new child care measure is designed to mitigate that problem in two ways: by dramatically expanding which families are eligible for child care subsidies, and raising the rate (by 35%) at which the state reimburses providers who participate in the subsidy program.

The new subsidy system will be enacted in several phases, but by October 2024, families making up to 575% of the federal poverty level — that’s $172,000 for a family of four — will be eligible for partial subsidies. That will extend state aid to an estimated 80% of families, offering help to a greater share of the population than any other state in the country.

“The fact that Vermont has the subsidy going up to over 500% of the federal poverty level makes it very unique,” said Diane Schilder, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

But how those new subsidies actually impact a family’s bottom line will depend on whether, or how much, a provider chooses to raise their tuition to match the state’s increased reimbursement rates. If providers increase their prices at the same rate as reimbursements, the new subsidies were designed to basically hold families harmless — not make out-of-pocket costs much cheaper.

And while Vermont will extend help to more families than anywhere else, one state has it beat when it comes to how many families will receive entirely free care. New Mexico, where voters in 2022 approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to child care, offers no-cost care to anyone making up to 400% of the federal poverty level (that’s $120,000 a year for a family of four). A family making that much in Vermont will still pay estimated co-pays of $1,000 a month. 

Advocates and, in a 2021 law, legislators themselves set the goal that families receiving state aid would not pay more than 10% of their household income on child care. This year’s measure “does not achieve that,” Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, the chair of the House Human Services Committee, matter-of-factly told VTDigger. 

“We are in fact raising the cost of child care in the state because we are addressing something that has gone unaddressed — which is payments of fair wages to people in the early care and learning sector,” Wood said.

But the new subsidy structure will nevertheless provide a dramatic improvement in affordability to one set of families: those with more than one child in care.

“The second child is free. If you have a second child, you don’t pay (another) copay. And I think that is something that is not widely understood,” Wood said. “That could make a huge difference.”

On the other side of the equation, Vermont’s latest measure may not necessarily raise workers’ wages as much as advocates had hoped. H.217 significantly raises reimbursement rates — but not by as much as was recommended in a study commissioned by lawmakers and completed this winter. That same report found that Vermont faced a funding gap of up to $279 million to meet its child care goals. This year’s bill invests a little less than half of that.

The new law also doesn’t require providers to raise wages, although it does state that lawmakers may do so in the future, and a report on child care worker wages is due back to the Legislature in January 2026. For Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, that’s a key part of this year’s unfinished business.

“I think the workforce question is another one that remains open,” she said. “Will this be enough infusion to really solve the workforce problems that we’re seeing in early childhood education or will we continue to struggle to find high quality people to take these jobs and stay at these jobs?”

Hardy also advocated strongly, at the outset of the session, to move Vermont to full-day pre-kindergarten. She was unsuccessful, but the bill does create an “implementation committee” tasked with setting out a plan for getting Vermont to full-day, publicly funded prekindergarten for 4-year-olds by July of 2026.

Most stakeholders agree that the 10 hour-a-week voucher Vermont currently offers to the families of 3- and 4-year-olds for prekindergarten isn’t enough. But setting aside the question of finding additional funding, changing the system might still be tricky politically. 

The vouchers have become a key source of revenue for private child care providers, who are anxious that expansions in public school-based prekindergarten programs could mean an exodus of staff to better-paid settings, and who argue that schools don’t offer the year-round care that families need. But further investments in a mixed-delivery system also make certain lawmakers nervous in light of recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that complicate the guardrails states can impose on such vouchers.

As Vermont contemplates further work on early childhood education, Schilder said lawmakers need to think seriously about how to help providers navigate the complicated patchwork of state and federal programs that currently fund the sector, including by building out state-level capacity to smoothly administer such programs. And she also argued Vermont will have to think seriously about how to meet the needs of parents who work nights and weekends.

“If you have a fully funded system that provides full day care, it doesn’t necessarily meet the needs of the more than a third of young children who have parents who work non-traditional hours,” she said. 

Like Haspel, she’s also emphatic that while Vermont should celebrate what it has done, this measure invests only a fraction of what’s needed. To offer a child care system that looks like what’s generally offered elsewhere in industrialized nations, she said, a low-end estimate of the state’s total spend would have to approach $700 million.

“This is making a dent and not necessarily addressing the entire problem,” she said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s new child care law makes the state a national leader — but falls short of the movement’s goals.

As predicted, lawmakers on Tuesday easily overrode Gov. Phil Scott’s veto of H.217, a bill set to invest well over $120 million annually into Vermont’s ailing child care sector, enacting the measure into law. 

The only surprise, at the end of the day, was how quickly it all happened. The House voted early in the day, 116 to 31, to override Scott. (It takes a two-thirds majority to override a gubernatorial veto.) And as of early afternoon, the plan remained for the Senate to take up the measure on Wednesday, followed by a noontime celebration with advocates, parents, and child care workers on the Statehouse lawn. But as the whirlwind day wore on, the upper chamber decided to conclude its business ahead of schedule, and voted 23 to 7 to override Scott.

“The child care bill which we overrode today is, I believe, a historic achievement,” Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, told his colleagues after the vote.

He encouraged senators to attend the event with advocates, still planned for Wednesday. “It will be, I think, a joyous celebration,” he said.

The child care legislation is intended to help mitigate twin problems in the labor-intensive sector: poverty wages for many workers, and sky-high prices for families.

Starting on Jan. 1, 2024, the state will reimburse child care providers at a rate 35% higher than they did this year — enabling them to significantly raise wages.

Currently, families living at or below 150% of the federal poverty level are not charged a co-payment to receive a full subsidy from the state. The bill would eliminate co-pays for those making up to 175% of that metric, increasing that threshold from $45,000 to $52,500 for a family of four. And the bill would extend partial child care subsidies to families up to 575% of the federal poverty level — $172,000 for a family of four.

The bill is the culmination of nearly a decade’s worth of advocacy from Let’s Grow Kids, a well-funded nonprofit that has led the charge on child care in Montpelier. But the cause was also strengthened by the Covid-19 pandemic, which underlined both the sector’s fragility and importance to the state economy, and a new Democratic supermajority in the House and Senate, which moved aggressively to enact several new expansions to the social safety net. 

But while Democrats and Progressives universally supported the bill, votes did not fall entirely on party lines — a few Republicans and independents also backed the measure.

“This is a historic, celebratory moment for Vermont, one that child care advocates, parents, employers, and lawmakers have been working towards for years,” Aly Richards, CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, said in a statement. “The 2023 Child Care Bill will change the lives of thousands of Vermonters and is a monumental step forward for our state in addressing the ongoing child care crisis.”

The bill will be funded in part by a new 0.44% payroll tax, which is why Scott objected to the legislation. The Republican governor has long supported additional investments in early childhood education, but has always drawn the line at raising taxes to do it. The draft state budget he presented to lawmakers in January included $50 million to boost child care subsidies, a proposal legislators incorporated into their own financing mechanism. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Lawmakers override Gov. Scott’s child care veto.

Sugar-makers Arnie Piper and George Cook had two very different seasons. 

Piper’s Umbrella Hill Maple, a 10,000-tap operation that he co-owns, had its worst season on record. Cook and his wife Dorothy’s 175-tap farm had its best. Their properties are only 6 miles apart, both in Hyde Park.

“People ask me how my season was and I say, ‘Relaxing.’ That’s not what you want to say,” said Piper.

“I cannot complain at all. I feel very fortunate,” said Cook. “The weather cooperated, the trees cooperated and we were able to take advantage of the runs.”

The two starkly different experiences are the perfect microcosm for a roller-coaster sugaring season.

That is exactly what Mark Isselhardt, University of Vermont Extension maple specialist, means when describing this year’s sugaring season as “microclimate dependent.” In general, northern farmers were hit harder than their southern counterparts due to temperature differences. But Cook’s and Piper’s situations typify the erratic nature of turning sap into syrup.

Both producers put out taps and boiled the earliest they ever had. But Piper’s taps dried up within the week, while Cook’s kept flowing.

After two boils on Feb. 17 and 20, Piper wouldn’t see another until March 20. His taps froze up because of a drop in temperature and a snowstorm, causing him to be out longer than the usual week in between boils. At that point, half the season had gone by.

Cook, on the other hand, boiled 20 times, the most he ever had and higher than the typical 15 boils per season. He harvested 65 gallons of syrup, 10 gallons more than the previous year, and got an efficient 0.37 gallons of syrup per tap — 13.5% higher than Piper’s yield. 

The biggest difference, despite size, in the two sugarbushes is elevation. Piper’s sits at around 1,400 feet above sea level while Cook’s is roughly 750 feet. 

Cook’s also faces southwest and sees sun in the early morning through the evening. After the two friends compared notes, Piper estimated that Cook had three to four more hours of sap collection each day because of the small degree of difference between the two locations.

“The temperature was off almost every day by a couple of degrees for us,” said Piper. “If it had been something like three degrees warmer six hours earlier, we would have had a good run. It’s a couple of degrees that will kill you.”

‘Challenging to compare’

In Vermont, 2023 maple syrup production totaled 2.05 million gallons this year, a 20% drop from the previous season, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. But fear not, pancake lovers; the decline comes after a record-breaking 2022 that now appears to be more of an outlier than the start of a trend.

“It’s really challenging to just compare it to one year unless that year you’re comparing to happens to be average, which last year was not,” said Isselhardt, the UVM Extension maple specialist.

Compared to the 2021 season, 2023 marked a 300,000-gallon increase in production. But compared to the five year averages, he said, this year’s yield is just 2.5% more. 

Those numbers “seem pretty typical in an industry that is prone to quite a bit of variability,” he said. “It doesn’t take a whole lot of sap flow days that just don’t present themselves because of the weather and then have people be struggling.”

In a standard six-to-eight-week season, producers could make upward of 20% of their crop in only a few days if they get a plentiful sap flow from their maple trees. But conditions have to be “really right,” and a few degrees might be the difference between a successful year or a dry one. 

Last year had a favorable stretch of warm weather throughout the season that kept the sap flowing, leading to a historic crop. But this year featured a historically warm January, followed by a cool stretch February through March.

Like Piper, many producers reported their earliest harvests and boils on record, but the taps dried up soon after the cold weather set in. By the time April rolled around, it got too warm too fast, and many sugarers ran out of time to reach their targets, according to Isselhardt.

Future remains unpredictable

The variability, even within a town, makes it difficult to model future climate outcomes, particularly without consistent data collection. 

The survey used in previous years to collect maple syrup yield data was roughly four pages long, but a low response rate and a growing industry caused the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make changes before sending out this year’s form. 

Experts noticed production numbers across North America and Canada were being severely underreported, maybe in the ballpark of 25%, Isselhardt said. The discovery came after they compared over 10 years worth of USDA data and the numbers that syrup delivery companies reported they were moving over the same period.

Isselhardt and his UVM colleagues were enlisted to help make the process more producer-friendly. Alongside the USDA, they brought the survey length down to two pages. Though it will never be perfect, the recent data is a step in the right direction, he said, and hopefully will paint a more accurate picture over time.

Though he remained positive about the current state of Vermont’s maple syrup industry, which provides almost half the total maple syrup production in the United States, Isselhardt acknowledged several factors pose a threat to sugar-makers. 

A key one is storms that bring high wind and ice, which damage maple trees and thin out sugarbushes. 

The other major factor is the “existential threat of climate change,” but those worries are more difficult to grasp because of the peaks and valleys that define sugaring, he said. 

“It’s just too dangerous a game to try to say this will happen and that will be the effect,” he said. “It’s really hard to characterize, which makes the work of predicting and modeling how future climates might impact (the industry) really, really challenging.”

Isselhardt also said that worldwide demand for maple syrup has been increasing as consumers desire more natural products. The main way producers have kept up is with more advanced technology, which allows them to get a better vacuum seal on the tree tap to maximize the extraction potential of any given tree. Over the last 25 years, yields have actually increased, he said.

“There’s way more people in the world that have never had maple than have, so the opportunities are there when they get a taste,” he said.

Piper, also vice chair of the Vermont Sugar Makers Association, remained upbeat about the industry’s past season and future prospects.

“I think that if you’re in agriculture, not just sugar, you have to be optimistic,” he said. “You have to think, ‘Hey, it’s always going to be a good hay season. It’s always gonna be a good sugar season.’ And when it doesn’t, then you just kind of figure out what to do next.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Though maple syrup production dipped this year, experts and producers aren’t worried.

On May 22, Newport’s mayor stunned the city when she announced her resignation just 75 days after taking office. At that evening’s city council meeting, Beth Barnes read aloud a letter alleging that she had been “intimidated and bullied [and] commanded not to do certain things” by fellow council members and the now-retired city manager, Laura Dolgin. 

Barnes was Newport’s first new mayor in 14 years and, to some, represented an injection of new energy and fresh ideas in a city still trying to recover from the EB-5 investment fraud scandal, which left an entire block gutted and dashed hopes of reviving the local economy through promised new development. 

Commonly referred to as “the hole,” the remnants of demolished buildings sit on Main Street at the very center of downtown Newport, fenced off and overgrown with trees. Finding resolution for what many residents consider an eyesore and a reminder of the city’s unfulfilled promise has remained a hot button political issue.

Frustrations have reached a high boil in recent years, with other previous abrupt resignations from the city council. At public meetings, accusations frequently fly between council members and exchanges with members of the public have become increasingly hostile. 

Pam Ladds, a Newport resident who regularly attends council meetings, said Barnes is not alone in feeling bullied. “All of us have experienced abuse from our city officials in the past, which consists of raised voices, temper tantrums, name calling, threats,” she said. 

But some former city officials point the finger elsewhere.

Paul Monette, who was Newport’s mayor from 2009 to 2022, puts the blame for the tone of meetings on some of the residents who attend. “These vocal people, you know, they’ve made it personal.” He added, “A huge, silent majority were concerned about the people who go to the meetings [who] they feel have become abusive under the guise of free speech and transparency.”

Julie Raboin, who served on the council from 2017 to 2019, attributed the hostilities to the former city manager. 

“It became apparent that [Dolgin] was not interested in public input,” Raboin said. “Once people started feeling that [they were] not being listened to, they got angry. And then that just became the status quo. People spoke louder and louder, trying to be heard.”

‘People will want to see you fail’

At the root of Barnes’ premature departure appears to be a fundamental disagreement over the role of the mayor. 

Sitting at her dining room table last week, Barnes spoke to VTDigger in her first in-depth interview since she resigned. 

One of four candidates for the post and the only woman, Barnes campaigned on a promise to “Reenergize Newport,” prioritizing engagement with the community, a solution for “the hole” and protections for Lake Memphremagog, which borders Newport. “We hadn’t had a mayor or a city council that was actually visible, actually out in the community,” said Barnes, who moved to Newport from California a decade ago. “And to me, that’s what being a mayor means.”

It was Barnes’ first time serving in public office, but she recalled feeling optimistic that with a little guidance her “enthusiasm and energy … would be able to win the day and change the town.” 

Barnes recalled eagerly jumping into her new role, attending a virtual training session hosted by the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, organizing community hikes and reaching out to mayors in neighboring cities. Ahead of her first council meeting as mayor, she studied videos of past council meetings to learn word-for-word how the former mayor had run them. (The mayor is a member of the city council, which also has a president.)

But almost immediately, Barnes began to encounter gestures of disapproval. 

In one of their first meetings, Dolgin, the city manager, said to her, “People will want to see you fail.” (Dolgin told VTDigger she had “wanted [Barnes] to brace herself emotionally, so that she would be prepared for people to give her feedback that was uncomfortable.”) 

When Dolgin and the council learned that Barnes had reached out to the various department heads to introduce herself, she said she was told she was acting outside the bounds of her role as mayor. 

“I was sent an email [by Laura Dolgin] telling me that I was forbidden to meet any department heads, that Ms. Dolgin would arrange a meeting with all of them with her present,” Barnes said. “But I was not to meet with any city employee one-on-one.”

The substance of the request, if not the tone, is understandable, one national advocate for the city manager form of government said. The city manager is supposed to be the conduit between the city council and staff, according to Jason Grant, director of advocacy at International City/County Management. 

“How [councils] engage that could be different” from one city to another, he said. “What you don’t want is any official contacting any official as they wish without agreement of the council.”

In another case, Barnes contacted Dolgin to get caught up on the status of “the hole.” 

“Her response to me was there’s no urgency on this. And I felt like there was an urgency. I was the new mayor. And I just wanted to be brought up to speed on what was happening,” Barnes said.

When Barnes arranged a meeting with Michael Goldberg, the court-appointed receiver charged with handling the funds from the EB-5 program, council members and the city manager again chastised her by email, she said. 

“The mayor cannot conduct city business without the council’s consent,” Dolgin wrote in an email obtained by VTDigger. “You are running out ahead of long-term projects that require sensitivity and I am concerned your rogue and unbridled interference will cause damage for the city.” 

“Stop diminishing our roles by overstepping yours,” council member Chris Vachon added in a subsequent email. “Get trained in your roles and responsibilities.” 

Barnes said she resigned before the scheduled meeting with Goldberg.

Council member Clark Curtis declined to speak with VTDigger for this story. Council members Vachon, Kevin Charboneau and John Wilson did not respond to voicemails or emails requesting comment.

The dynamic between the new mayor, the city manager and the rest of the city council came to a head in two executive sessions in May that Barnes says violated Vermont’s open meeting laws.

Executive sessions are meetings held without the public present. State law limits discussion during those sessions to predetermined advertised agenda items that meet specific exceptions to the requirement that public bodies conduct business in public. Barnes would not disclose what exactly was said, citing fear of legal repercussions. 

“I walked in and there was another physical agenda,” Barnes said. “I have it, but I cannot show it to you because it would be a violation. They crucified me. Every single step I had made in that two months was picked apart.”

Barnes said the executive sessions were directed by the city manager. “Laura led the charge. Always. And (the other council members) fell into lockstep.”

‘A shock to my system’

Dolgin was Newport’s city manager for almost eight years before retiring on June 2 and leaving her home in the neighboring town of Derby. She told VTDigger her retirement was unrelated to city politics. 

In a phone interview from Virginia, where Dolgin now lives, she described her interpretation of the charter. 

“Newport is a city manager form of government,” she said. “The mayor is mostly ceremonial and facilitates the meeting, sets the agenda. There’s a clause in the charter that says the mayor is ultimately responsible for the finances and that sort of thing — but that’s ceremonial because it’s the city manager’s responsibility.”

Still, city managers are not elected officials, but rather are appointed by the elected officials on the city council. In Newport, the manager may receive a salary of up to $105,000, according to a recent posting for Dolgin’s former job. The mayor receives an annual stipend of $2,000, while council members are paid $1,750. 

Dolgin declined to comment on Barnes’ allegations of bullying, only referring to them as “sensational.” She would not comment on the executive sessions, citing confidentiality and the concern that Barnes might be preparing a lawsuit. 

The state largely leaves municipalities like Newport to interpret and enforce charters for themselves. 

A 2014 guide produced by the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged, “There are a number of situations in which two or more officials have potentially conflicting authority. This can cause confusion, particularly when the officials are not communicating well with one another.” 

Newport’s charter, which was last updated in 1966, is vague about how the mayor and the city manager should co-exist. 

It states that the city manager is the “administrative head of the municipal government under the direction and supervision of the Council,” while the mayor is the “Chief Executive Officer of the City.” There is notable overlap in the way the roles are described, but the city manager’s role is commonly considered administrative, while the council and mayor are responsible for directing policy. 

“The value of [a city manager form of government],” according to Grant of International City/County Management, “is that it forces dialogue.” Since the council must have a majority vote when making policy decisions, “no one individual should be able to dictate their will.” 

At that level, the city manager role is advisory. In theory, Grant said, “city managers actually have no power to drive decisions. City managers cannot vote. They can be [fired] at any time. The idea that the city manager is driving [decisions] assumes that the city council has decided that they have no power, which is false.” 

Monette, the former mayor, said he had worked well with Dolgin. “You go out and you talk to people. You promote the community. But I would never get involved with the day-to-day. That’s why you have a city manager to do that.”

Melissa Petterssen, who served on the council for four years, saw the matter in simple terms: “[Dolgin] was a strong personality. [Barnes] couldn’t handle that.”

But former council president Raboin described Dolgin as “a very controlling figure” and said council members faced enormous pressure to conform to the recommendations Dolgin made to them. 

In response to the allegations of bullying, Raboin defended members of the council, several of whom she had worked with, saying, “The pattern of communication had been in place for so long that I don’t think they realized the level of dysfunction that they were all participating in.”

Barnes admits she was unprepared for the way the city manager and the council interacted with each other and the public. “I know that Newport has always kind of had its own M.O.,” Barnes said. “I just had never been so close to it. And it was a little bit of a shock to my system.” 

‘An open slate’

Today, Newport is left without a mayor and without the city manager who played such an outsize role in the city’s politics for the past eight years. With the council recruiting applicants to fill the city manager position and a special mayoral election slated for August, the city is left in a state of uncertainty.

Monette expressed concern about the “very, very negative impact” Barnes’ resignation has had on the community. “I hear it kind of doesn’t make Newport look good around the state,” he said, adding that he thinks there is a “silent majority, who are very disappointed in [Barnes] with what happened. They think this is a step backwards.”

Others strongly disagree. They see the moment as full of promise. Newport resident Pam Ladds called it a “growth point,” adding, “What happened is shining a light on what needs to change. You can’t cover wounds up — they don’t heal.”

Barnes wants to see the city look forward and take advantage of the new engagement her resignation has prompted. 

“More people are coming to the city council meetings. Oh my gosh, it’s been standing room only. That never happened before,” said Barnes. “I don’t think it’s about me anymore. I think it’s about the people mobilizing in a really good, positive way.”

Others agree that the potential is there for the city to shake off old habits and enter a new, more cooperative phase. 

“There hasn’t been an opportunity like this in a decade where there’s such an open slate,” said Raboin. “This could be the start of a whole new era of positivity and growth and co-creation of the city that everybody says they want.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: A new mayor’s abrupt resignation sparks debate in Newport.

A former distillery owner and church leader in Barre has apparently gone public as an online persona who espouses neo-Nazi ideas in a radical Lutheran fascist podcast.

After a group of anonymous anti-fascist researchers linked Ryan Woodie Dumperth to the online account “Treblewoe” late last month through a variety of online records, Treblewoe appeared to confirm the connection on June 1, posting pictures of Dumperth and referring to getting “doxed” on the pseudonymous account.

Digging deep into Treblewoe’s posts on Twitter, Gab and other social media websites, the researchers found details of the user’s personal history that matched Dumperth’s and linked the voices of the two to support their claims, among other evidence.

Dumperth, 46, did not respond to phone calls or emails last week and this week requesting comment. Online records indicate he still lives in Barre.

Dumperth founded Old Route Two Spirits, a Barre distillery that was purchased by Connecticut-based John Fitch Distilling Company in 2020. He also served as vice president of the Williamstown Lutheran Church, but left that post after an April 2022 election, according to the church’s current president.

Under the Twitter handle “Treblewoe,” the person who appears to be Dumperth disseminates a unique brand of Lutheran facism. He hosts a podcast, Stone Choir, with fellow Lutheran fascist Corey Mahler, the subject of a Rolling Stone exposé earlier this year. The story ran with the headline, “He Believes Hitler Went to Heaven — and Wants to Take Over the Lutheran Church.”

Online, Treblewoe’s hate runs the gamut of bigoted beliefs, from pseudoscientific race science and obsessions with patriarchal power structures to general conspiracies about a Jewish cabal running the world.

Alongside his hatreds, Woe, an alternate name used by the same account online, purports to be an extremist member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a traditional branch of Lutheranism with about 1.8 million members.

As allegations of hateful, alt-right and neo-Nazi members of the church have come to light — such as those involving Dumperth’s alleged Podcast cohost Mahler — the church’s president, Matthew Harrison, earlier this year condemned the “radical and unchristian ‘alt-right’ views” of some of the church’s members.

In Vermont, Dumperth founded Old Route Two Spirits, which produced gin, rum and other spirits. The business received a boost from the Barre Revolving Loan Fund and the Vermont Community Loan Fund, which together approved a $100,000 loan for Old Route Two.

According to Will Belongia, executive director of the Vermont Community Loan Fund, Old Route Two’s loan has been paid off. Belongia said VCLF was “totally unaware” of Dumperth’s beliefs and would not have supported the loan if it was aware of the allegations.

Adam Overbay, who founded Old Route Two alongside Dumperth, said he first was alerted to his former business partner’s apparent beliefs after Dumperth’s photos appeared online linked with Treblewoe.

“It’s obviously very gross,” Overbay said of Dumperth’s alleged online presence. “Weirded out gives a pretty good sense of my emotional state by it. It’s something that’s kind of alien to me.”

According to Overbay, he and Dumperth knew they had differing political beliefs, but Dumperth never made any “overtly racist” comments to him. The two have kept in only sporadic touch since Old Route Two Spirits was bought out in 2020, Overbay said.

When John Fitch Distilling Company purchased Old Route Two in 2020, Ryan Dumperth ceased involvement, according to Shawn Jacobaccio, president of John Fitch.

“The John Fitch Distilling Company supports an inclusive community that works toward making the world a happier place, free of judgement and hatred,” Jacobaccio wrote in a statement. “We like nice people who prioritize helping others. All others.”

In an interview, Jacobaccio said he first heard about Dumperth’s alleged beliefs earlier this month. John Fitch is still paying Dumperth for some of Old Route Two’s inventory, he said.

Up until last year, Dumperth served as vice president of the Williamstown Lutheran Church. In an email, Jim Stone, the congregation’s president, said, “The Church’s Leadership and I have become aware of the online activity and are in the process of gathering all the information.” In response to a further request for comment, he wrote, “Ryan has left the church on his own and does not represent Williamstown Lutheran Church.”

Tax documents show that Dumperth served as a director of the Barre Area Development Corp. in the fiscal year ending June 2019.

Online, Dumperth is perhaps most known for his podcast Stone Choir, which has claimed to attract 30,000 unique visitors. The podcast cohosts describe themselves as bringing a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod perspective to world affairs. “We’ll probably make you nervous, sometimes make you angry, and never leave you bored,” the show claims.

In practice, though, recent episodes are spent disparaging Martin Luther King Jr. and discussing unfounded allegations that leaders of the LCMS are pedophiles.

Dumperth was first linked with the Stone Choir podcast late last month, when an anonymous group of anti-fascist researchers called Machaira Action sought to connect Dumperth with the online handle “Treblewoe.”

Almost immediately, Treblewoe seemed to affirm the connection. On May 31, the online account posted that he had been “doxed” — online terminology for having one’s identity exposed publicly. The following day, Treblewoe posted a meme that included a picture of Ryan Dumperth that had not been publicized. He referred to the picture of Dumperth as “show(ing) my face.”

In the comments, someone asked “who’s the guy on the left,” referring to the photo of Dumperth.

Treblewoe replied: “me.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Former Barre distillery owner unmasked as neo-Nazi podcaster.

Lives are being transformed in the building trades space at Northwest Career & Technical Center in St. Albans where Ross Lavoie and Steve Allard spend two hours every day teaching carpentry and more to 90 students. 

“These students are learning with their hands and with their brains,” Lavoie said. 

“The more ways you learn something by touching it, doing it, seeing it, feeling it, that’s how you’re really going to drive those points home, as opposed to sitting in a traditional classroom,” he said.

The students mainly come from three high schools: St. Albans’ own public high school, Bellows Free Academy; Missisquoi Valley Union Middle/High School in Swanton; and Bellows Free Academy Fairfax. Students also come from Project Soar Elementary/High School, an alternative school in St. Albans Bay.

Lavoie and Allard both graduated from the program where they now teach. But Lavoie said today’s students face social and economic challenges he did not have to face in high school, such as substance abuse and poverty.

Lavoie said he teaches accountability to students who have never been asked to be accountable. “They have to tell us where they are, dress appropriate,” he said. He talks with them about the importance of driving sober. 

Lavoie also tried to teach his students to become better citizens by getting involved in their communities, and he takes his students into the community to do work for nonprofit organizations.

“Our goal is to work for people that can use our help and our free labor the most, and make their money go further,” he said.

So, his students have built housing, remodeled the local soup kitchen, worked on projects at Hard’ack, the local nonprofit ski hill, and worked on blighted homes in the city of St. Albans, he said. 

Steve Wunsch, who taught both Lavoie and Allard when they were in high school, has come out of retirement to help them teach today’s future carpenters. The Covid-19 pandemic made a lot of parents and students reevaluate college educations, he said.

Lavoie said his graduates are in great demand.

Juniors and seniors can sign up for a co-op work-based learning program that lets them work on job sites part time, or even nearly full time, during the school day, provided they have met their academic requirements. 

“They already have a career before they graduate, and they’ve been getting paid to do that,” Lavoie said.

Vermont’s most promising jobs

Students are drawn to the carpentry program because they realize there is good money to be made in the building trades, Lavoie said. 

Carpentry is one of Vermont’s most promising jobs, according to the McClure Foundation and the Vermont Department of Labor — defined by them as jobs that pay more than the median Vermont wage of $22.50 an hour and have the greatest number of openings. 

To draw attention to the opportunities, the organizations are spotlighting the four occupations with the greatest number of projected openings through 2030: bookkeepers, carpenters, nurses and teachers. 

VTDigger’s Promising Jobs series is taking up the torch to look more closely at how people are getting into those four careers. Today, we look at carpentry. Yesterday, we covered teaching. And coming up, we’ll dive into bookkeeping and nursing. 

“In Vermont, there is a career and education pathway for you,” said Tom Cheney, executive director of Advance Vermont, a nonprofit that aims to connect Vermonters with careers in the state. There are promising jobs that are trained for through apprenticeship. “It doesn’t just require college,” he said.

Advance Vermont posts Vermont’s most promising jobs on its website, where people can find out about 500 careers in Vermont and can see what training they need to land a job in one of those careers. 

Through 2030, Vermont can expect 4,460 openings for carpenters, the report estimates. Over the course of their careers, carpenters can expect to make a median wage of $23 an hour, more than $47,000 a year.

The carpentry profession is a good fit for people who like to work with “your hands or with machines to make, fix or build things,” according to a brochure from the McClure Foundation.

A limited supply of carpenters

High school career centers are one avenue for learning carpentry. 

Mary Ann Sheahan, who runs the Vermont Talent Pipeline for the Vermont Business Roundtable, worked with general contractors to identify a credential of value in the trades that is now being taught at every career technical education center in Vermont. It is called the National Center for Construction Education and Research core credential. 

“It’s the first skill set for anybody who works in construction,” Sheahan said. “It includes things like basic safety, construction math, hand tools, power tools, blueprint reading.”

At some career centers, even though the programs are much smaller than the one in St. Albans, there is still plenty of room for interested students. In Rutland and Springfield, for instance, there are still a few openings for next fall’s classes.

But other programs, such as those at the Center for Technology in Essex, are oversubscribed. At the Cold Hollow Career Center in Enosburg Falls, there’s plenty of student interest in carpentry classes, but for several weeks, Nate Demar, director of the center, struggled to find someone to teach them next fall.

“We lost our amazing Construction Teacher because he can make a lot more money in the private sector,” Demar wrote in an email. By last week, Demar reported that he had finally found someone to teach the six students who have applied to enroll next fall.

If a candidate has a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent and no teaching experience, the starting salary for a carpentry teacher at Cold Hollow  is $45,000 a year, and if a candidate is certified to teach the national curriculum and has 20 years in the field, it is $64,000, Demar said.

Lavoie said it is hard to draw carpenters to teaching because they make so much more 

working in construction. “We have some students, even some students almost right out of this program, making what we make in a year,” he said.

But money is not everything, said Lavoie, who appreciates the school hours and summer vacation, which allows him to be home with his young children. 

The shortage of carpentry teachers restricts the supply of carpenters in Vermont, to the point where Ryan Ahern has to bring them in from out of state.

“We can’t find commercial framers to build large projects,” said Ahern, director of field operations at ReArch Company, a contractor in South Burlington. “We’re bringing people up from Boston to do this work.”

Other paths to carpentry

Someone who graduates from a career technical education center with a core construction credential could get hired by a contractor, but would not have all the skills to work as a carpenter, Sheahan said. 

So Vermont Talent Pipeline approached contractors to ask how people coming into the field with this credential could get more skills so they could become independent carpenters. 

Together, they put together an 18-month apprenticeship program; Sheahan said that experience boosts the average wage by about 50%. 

And, apprenticeships are one way that employers can attract employees.

Ahern hosts apprentices at his business through a program that recruits and trains carpenters over 18 months. The program teams up incoming apprentices with foremen and skilled carpenters in the field with pay starting at $19 an hour. 

“They start with basic tool skills, like keeping all the fingers on their hands,” Ahern joked. “They’re learning plan-reading. They’re learning framing. They’re learning some finish carpentry.”

Associated Builders and Contractors sponsors the apprenticeship program, which is taught by ReSOURCE Vermont. Young people starting out in the trades get Wednesday afternoons off to go to class at ReSOURCE Vermont, and a mentor on the job checks that they can actually do what they are supposed to be learning. Over 18 months, the apprentice graduates from laborer to carpenter’s helper to carpenter.

Here’s the pitch, Sheahan said: “We’re going to hire you even if you have just basic skills and we’re going to teach you how to become a carpenter over the course of 18 months. It could be that you’re starting at $20 an hour and when you’re finished, you’re going to be $30 an hour.”

A quicker route is the Construction 101 class at ReSOURCE. The six-week construction program is designed to get students jobs when they finish. 

Students spend four weeks in the woodshop, gaining credentials for working with power and hand tools. Then there’s a job fair, and the last two weeks are spent working with employers who came to the job fair. 

“At the end of the sixth week, ideally, you’re talking contracts,” said Maggie Robinson, program coordinator at the ReSOURCE Burlington site, running construction and weatherization programs. 

Ry-An White, who lives in Shelburne, took the class. He is now building basement doors and hatches, putting up drywall and reframing damaged sections of homes for the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity weatherization program. 

He started at $18 an hour. Now, after less than a year on the job, he makes $21.75 an hour. 

Someday, he hopes to be able to build his own home. 

Advice to young people

Ahern, at ReArch, said demand is high for people who are interested in getting into carpentry. “If you’re ambitious and you’re looking to get into this business, it’s an awesome time,” he said.

He offers some advice for high school students considering carpentry.

“You gotta like the physical aspect of it,” Ahern said. “There’s a certain hardship (to) this business, especially in Vermont, with the cold, and you have to actually like physical work.”

Ahern advises students interested to start out with internships while they are still in high school.

“I’d advise against going to work with the uncle down the street,” he said. “If I was 18 years old, I would spend six months with two or three of the best (employers) around, and then take a pick.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Promising Jobs: Tech centers and apprenticeships teach carpentry skills and more.

Students of color at Peoples Academy and Peoples Academy Middle Level in Morristown have endured longstanding racist harassment and bullying, parents say. 

A group of families has been in touch with district officials in the past weeks over multiple incidents at the school, according to parents and administrators. But the allegations were made public at a Wednesday meeting of the Lamoille South Unified Union school board, where a parent said her children have experienced “profound systemic racism” at the schools. 

“Our BIPOC community of students are missing not days, not just weeks, but (sometimes) collectively over a month of school, due to anxiety, fear, and a feeling of (being) unsafe in the building,” said Cassie Baronette, the mother of three students of color at Peoples Academy and Peoples Academy Middle Level. 

Baronette declined to speak in detail about specific incidents, citing her children’s privacy, but said they had been targeted by “overt and horrifying racism.”

It’s not clear exactly how many families have experienced similar incidents. In correspondence shared with VTDigger, Lamoille South Superintendent Ryan Heraty mentioned meeting with at least six families to discuss concerns about racist incidents. 

Baronette declined to be interviewed on the record. VTDigger spoke with three other people who said their children or relatives have had similar experiences at the school, either during the current school year or in the past. 

“It’s been very bad,” said Carol Rogers, whose child attends sixth grade at Peoples Academy Middle Level. 

Her son has experienced verbal abuse, racial slurs, and even physical violence at the school and on the bus, Rogers said. He has missed months’ worth of academic material, Rogers said, because he often dreads going to class in the morning. 

“I’ve heard about it in other states, but I really never thought that it would be this bad in Vermont,” Rogers said. 

Amy Gates, whose daughter graduated from Peoples Academy four years ago, echoed those concerns. Her daughter also experienced racism at the school, she said, but she acknowledged she did not know the specific details.

“Four years later, she still can’t talk about some of the things that happened there,” Gates told school board members last week.  

At the board meeting, parents asked for more targeted district policies — and more robust enforcement — to prevent racist abuse at school. 

“Racial harm is being reinforced and perpetuated by our administration, because there is no clear separate policy for dealing with this specific type of abuse,” Baronette told school board members. “Your bullying, hazing and harassment policy does not adequately address this.”

Peoples Academy serves students in grades 9-12, and is physically connected to Peoples Academy Middle Level, which operates grades 5-8.

In an interview, Heraty, the Lamoille South superintendent, acknowledged “that there are situations that are happening in our district, specifically at that one school — Peoples Academy Middle Level — that aren’t OK, that we need to be talking about openly,” he said. 

The district has organized equity initiatives since 2020, when officials commissioned a report on the experiences of students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities.

That report, released in 2021, drove home the fact that some students in the district felt “a lack of safety, both social-emotional safety and physical safety.” Racist harassment often went unnoticed or was chalked up to “misunderstandings,” the report read, leaving students of color feeling they had little recourse to respond.

“It is increasingly clear that there is direct harm being caused to students with historically marginalized identities while attending schools in (the district),” the report said. 

In the wake of that report, the district formed an “equity subcommittee” that meets monthly. This year, Heraty said, the committee has focused on hazing, harassment and bullying in middle school. 

But changing the school’s policies is easier said than done, he said. In Vermont, school policies on harassment and bullying are usually, if not always, based closely on model policies released by the Vermont School Boards Association.

Those policies are “written by attorneys very carefully to adhere to the legislation that was approved by the state,” Heraty said. “So I think for us to change or revise those policies is very difficult.”

At the meeting Wednesday, the chair of the Lamoille South school board, David Bickford, thanked parents for bringing the concerns to the district. 

The board would discuss the district’s equity initiatives “to see if the kinds of safeguards that you’re asking about and asking for are incorporated in them,” he said. “And we will review them in light of this conversation.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: At Peoples Academy, allegations of ‘systemic’ racist bullying.

One morning this winter at the Expeditionary School at Black River, tenth grader Zach Taylor was trying to solve a computer problem.

Ahead of an upcoming open house for parents at the Ludlow school, students in a physical science course were programming small beeping computers called Arduinos to perform simple functions. Taylor, a Mount Holly tenth grader, had instructed his Arduino to function as a thermometer. But the device had presented him with a challenge.

“What I’m trying to do right now is change it because right now it’s in Celsius,” Taylor said. “I’m trying to” — he paused as the device suddenly emitted a high screeching sound — “get it to Fahrenheit.”

That class — a group of roughly a dozen students engaged in creative, self-directed projects — embodies the hallmarks of the Expeditionary School, an unusual, grades 7-12 independent program in Ludlow.

The roughly 15-student school, which operates in the now-shuttered Black River High School building, offers a unique program: Each student creates a “Personalized Learning Map” and can choose to take courses such as electronic music production, yoga or computer science. Since opening in 2020, the school has prized hands-on, self-directed learning and works closely with students’ families; in some cases, students’ relatives volunteer at the school in lieu of tuition.

But the new institution is in a difficult spot.

The school has spent the better part of two years in a thus far unsuccessful bid for state approval. Without that approval, the school cannot accept public tuition money, cutting it off from a key funding source.

Now, the school is staring down a new hurdle: a moratorium on all new private school approvals, effective July 1, written into the state Legislature’s budget bill. 

Gov. Phil Scott vetoed that bill last month. But if lawmakers succeed in overriding that veto — or if a new budget contains the same language — the moratorium could force the school to close its doors.

“That’s a question that, as a board, we have to discuss,” said Gary Blodgett, the chair of the school’s board of trustees, in an interview.

‘Full local control’

Like much of rural Vermont, Ludlow, a resort town in the shadow of Okemo Mountain, has faced years of slow declines in school enrollment and rising educational costs.

Following the passage of Act 46 in 2015, the state of Vermont offered incentives — and penalties — to convince small rural school districts to merge with their neighbors. After Ludlow joined a new unified district with the neighboring town of Mount Holly, the public Black River High School shut its doors in 2020.

By that time, however, a group of community members had come up with a different plan: to open a private, or independent, school in the Black River High School building.

The idea was to create a school “whose independent status will allow full local control,” its board of trustees wrote to the Chester Telegraph in April 2020 — one “whose vision and mission arise directly from our community, from its character and needs,” where students would have “true freedom to learn based on their passions.”

The Expeditionary School opened in the fall of 2020 with 15 students and one full-time employee, the head of school. In July 2021, the school applied for state approval.

Administrators said they were told that the whole process — which includes a site visit, recommendation from the Agency of Education, review by a State Board of Education subcommittee and final decision from the state board itself — could take six to eight months.

Instead, agency staffers did not visit the school until March 2022, and a report summarizing that visit was not released until August, a delay education officials attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic.

That highly critical report outlined a series of problems: student documentation was missing, the school did not require “formal lesson plans,” staff did not coordinate with students’ home districts to provide special education, and the school lacked key policies around mandatory emergencies and school safety.

What’s more, according to the report, the school had not been audited, and administrators’ bid for a line of credit from a local bank had been rejected.

“The Independent School review team cannot recommend initial approval, at this time, for the Expeditionary School at Black River due to identified deficiencies in the school’s program,” the agency wrote. “The review team also questions whether ESBR has the financial capacity to remain viable.”

‘This approval system is flawed’

But, in a December response clearly laced with frustration, Expeditionary School leaders rebutted those claims. The school had corrected many of the deficiencies, but the Agency of Education was simply wrong about others, administrators said. State officials had not clearly communicated the approval requirements, were difficult to reach and often failed to reply to emails, Expeditionary School leaders said.

And the entire process — by that time, nearly a year and a half in — had dragged on much longer than the expected six to eight months.

“I believe this approval system is flawed,” Blodgett, the school’s board chair, wrote to the State Board of Education in December. “We are a beginning school, just in our third year, with lots to learn. Although we took issue with some of the visiting team’s findings, we did learn from the report, which finally reached our hands, and have made many adjustments.”

Ted Fisher, a spokesperson for the Agency of Education, said that Covid-19 had created a backlog in the independent school approval process.

“Both the Board and the Agency are working hard to address this backlog as quickly as possible and have made significant progress in recent months,” Fisher said. “The AOE is executing the State Board’s review process as it is articulated in state law and state board rule and working as expeditiously as possible to clear the backlog.”

But from one perspective, it’s clear why the situation would be frustrating. Amid the push to consolidate small school districts, pressure from the state’s education agency ultimately drove Ludlow to close its public school. Now, that same educational bureaucracy seems to be standing in the way of the town’s efforts to replace it with a sustainable private school.

In December, the state Board of Education ultimately voted to deny the Expeditionary School’s bid for approval. The school submitted a new application in April.

By that time, however, the Vermont Legislature was mulling strict new requirements on independent schools. One key provision was written into the state’s budget bill: a moratorium on all new independent school approvals, effective July 1.

If that language ultimately takes effect, it could leave the Expeditionary School with too little time to be approved.

A hard deadline

Expeditionary School administrators and parents say the school is an invaluable asset to its community and its students, many of whom have struggled in traditional education settings.

The Expeditionary School “saved our son, as a learner, but more so as a person,” Becky Wynne, the parent of Expeditionary School students, wrote to Board members last month.

“ESBR has been able to provide my daughter with the support she has needed to push past her anxieties, to be more present and engaged with her learning and to grow in her sense of community,” Christine Reid, another parent, wrote in a separate letter to the board. 

But the school’s approval still appears to be a long shot. It’s unclear whether the usual steps — a recommendation from Agency of Education staff, review by a subcommittee, and then a decision from the Board of Education — could happen in time.

“The Agency is still in the process of reviewing the application and gathering additional information from ESBR,” Fisher, the Agency of Education spokesperson, said in an email. “We hope to be able to provide a recommendation this month. It is premature to say if the Agency will recommend approval, and the decision to approve is ultimately the State Board’s.”

Even if the Agency does issue a recommendation in time, an approval would require 11th-hour action from the state Board of Education, which has ultimate authority over private school approvals.

“I just don’t see the requisite things that need to happen happening before July 1,” said Jennifer Samuelson, the chair of the state Board of Education, which has ultimate authority over private school approvals.

“I mean, I will consider anything that’s ready for the board to consider it,” she added. “But I haven’t seen anything.”

The last week

This past week was the Expeditionary School’s last week of class, and students and teachers were busy with final projects and an end-of-the-year play. One student was expected to graduate on Saturday, the school’s fourth ever.

Administrators said they did not know what would happen if the moratorium took effect before the Expeditionary School could be approved. Amid the uncertainty, the head of school recently accepted another position elsewhere.

Since its inception, the school has relied mostly on donations and fundraisers to operate. On Town Meeting Day, voters approved an unusual ballot article to give $75,000 in public “bridge funding” to the school. Ironically, trustees said, the school is receiving public money from the state of New Hampshire for a student’s tuition — even as it is ineligible for Vermont funds.

But it’s not clear if the school can sustain itself through fundraising for another year.

The board “just works and works and works to try to raise the money to do this,” Blodgett, the board chair, said. “And people have lives. They see the importance of this, but they have lives too.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: In Ludlow, a new school faces an existential threat.

Strolling through rows of his trees on a gray, rainy day in June, Greg Burtt couldn’t help but smile when he pictured a typical autumn day at his apple orchard in Cabot.

In his picture-perfect imagination, he envisioned a sunny day. He described how hundreds of cars park in his fields and stretch down his road on any given fall weekend. Along with his family and a handful of staff, Burtt will fry roughly 600 dozen cider doughnuts in a single day. Families will stay for hours picking their own apples and munching on fresh fruit, doughnuts and cider. Kids can slide down a playground’s yellow curly slide or run through the small corn maze as many times as they’d like. A pumpkin patch and 15 acres of fruit trees are surrounded by hazy blue mountains.

“You know, it’s surprising how it doesn’t feel crowded in the orchard. I think there’s just so much space,” he said. “But you can just hear chatter and families hanging out together having a good time.”

Things may look different this fall at Burtt’s Apple Orchard. On the night of May 17, temperatures plunged into the 20s in Vermont, and a deep freeze set in across the entire Northeast, decimating fruit crops in a region known for its yearly bounty.

More than three weeks later, it is unclear how much aid the federal government will provide to farmers who suffered devastating losses in the once-in-a-generation weather event.

“A frost in May is not unheard of, but this one was significant enough because it was so cold,” Vermont’s Secretary of Agriculture Anson Tebbetts told VTDigger this week. “And the particular timing — the apples were in bloom, the blueberries were in bloom, very tender vines for the grapes — everything was really vulnerable.”

Much of the damage was immediately visible. On the morning of May 18, farmers could split open their apple buds and find brown inside, a sure sign of death for the young fruit. But weeks later, a fuller picture of the frost’s impact is coming into focus.

Along with colleagues at the state Agency of Agriculture, staff with the University of Vermont Extension surveyed fruit tree farmers across the state. Nineteen apple orchards responded, accounting for roughly half of the state’s acreage. “For the vast majority of respondents, estimated crop loss was 95% or greater,” Tebbetts told VTDigger.

In apples alone, the financial losses accounted for in the survey are upward of $3.6 million. For cider, the survey documents another $1.2 million in losses. Add in other types of fruits — grapes, blueberries and stone fruits — and the total crop losses among respondents are an estimated $5.8 million.

Assuming that the farms that haven’t responded to the survey fared similarly, Tebbetts said, losses across the state could surpass $10 million.

“I think there was a lot of frustration that there was really nothing anyone could do about it,” Tebbetts said. “You know, Vermont does not have that infrastructure of possibly protecting crops from frost. … It’s really heartbreaking.”

It’s a blow so devastating that Tebbetts has drafted a letter — which he is now circulating among state officials across New England and the Northeast, gathering signatures — to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, pleading for a federal disaster declaration and financial aid to the region’s farmers.

Worrying about the unknown

Three weeks after the frost, Burtt walked through his rows of trees, inspecting their branches. Some varieties seemed to persevere. He plucked a Pixie Crunch fruitlet off a branch, and broke it open to reveal a hopeful green interior. 

Others varieties seemed almost frozen in time, their blossoms — now papery and brown — holding on to the branch, refusing to bear fruit. As he walked through the rows of anomalies, he shook his head, muttering that the trees were “doing weird things.”

Burtt hopes he’ll see 25 to 40% of his usual crop, and knows he’s lucky compared to fellow orchardists whose crops were wiped out completely. But there are still so many unknown factors: Will this year’s apples have damaged cores, rendering their flavor bitter? Will their growth be stunted, making for tiny, undesirable fruits?

“The first couple days afterward, it was really nerve-wracking. You go through periods of being mad, and then just being distraught,” Burtt said. “You realize how much of what you do is out of your control, which is, in a lot of ways, humbling, I guess.”

Still, his mind wanders. It’s human nature. One swath of his orchard fared significantly better than the other, and he developed his theories of why: He gestured to the mountains and mimed airflows and cold bursts and shelter provided by surrounding trees.

“I’m sitting here saying, ‘What did I do different to this orchard than that orchard? Could I have done something to get fruit on my whole orchard?’” he said. “Probably there’s nothing I could have done. You still sit there and you wonder if you could have done something better.”

For some, crop insurance may help cover their losses. But crop insurance is not mandatory, and many farmers forgo it in order to save the premium. Others, like Burtt, opt for what he called the “bare minimum” coverage level.

Burtt is insured through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency. An agent has already taken a preliminary assessment and will come back in the fall to conduct a final assessment of how his crop fared.

But Burtt has no idea what kind of payout he will ultimately receive. Never having experienced a natural disaster like this since he began selling apples in 2009, Burtt has never had to file a crop insurance claim before.

‘We don’t have a piggy bank’

John Roberts, a former dairy farmer who now serves as the Vermont state executive director for USDA’s Farm Service Agency, told VTDigger that he wants to be cautious not to raise farmers’ hopes too high that the government will come to the rescue.

“If they had insurance, great. If this event encourages them to get insurance in the future, great,” Roberts said. “If we can get a (disaster) declaration, I don’t know the extent to which relief would be granted to the farmers. I have no way of knowing that.”

Asked about un- or under-insured farmers for whom May’s frost may be the final financial blow, forcing them to shutter, Roberts exhaled and said, “Goodness. Well, I would not be surprised.”

“Certainly, my message would be not to look them in the eye and say, ‘Well, tough beans. These are the breaks,’” Roberts said. “No. I work for an administration that does try its hardest to keep farmers on their farms.”

He pointed to low-interest loans serviced through the Farm Service Agency. He conceded that a loan can’t help every struggling farmer — particularly those already “mortgaged to the hilt” — but, “If you’ve got somebody who wants to keep going, I know that our staff will bend over backwards to do what they can to help them.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a piggy bank sitting with cash in it, and these are the harsh realities of life,” he said, before correcting himself. “Of farming, maybe not life, because farming is so unique.”

In his letter to Vilsack, Tebbetts painted a relatively grim picture for producers ravaged by the freeze, saying the region is at “a critical crossroad with our growers.”

“Right now, growers are assessing their ability to stay in this industry,” Tebbetts wrote. “Unfortunately, many orchards, produce operations, and vineyards are either uninsured or under-insured and insurance claims are unlikely to cover the total business loss from crop damage and reduced revenue from value-added products. Without aid we will see devastating blows to local economies because of downsizing and closing businesses.”

Vitally, crop insurance covers only crops — meaning, no value-added products made using the crops. That means crop insurance won’t cover vineyards’ lost income for the wine they can’t produce and sell with the grapes they now don’t have. They can only claim the losses on the grapes themselves.

Or for Burtt, he can’t claim any income lost on his annual fresh cider and doughnuts. He’s begun calling orchards significantly larger than his own, hoping to purchase some of their apples wholesale, and make his cider and doughnuts using their apples. But when he calls, even they don’t know what to expect of their crop come fall.

‘You have to do all the same work’

All the while, Burtt has to keep working hard, knowing all the meanwhile that his crop is sure to be scant.

“You still know you have to do all the same work. You’ve got to mow the grass, you’ve got to protect the trees from different diseases and bugs, you already did all the work on pruning,” Burtt said. “You’re like, ‘OK, all this work I’m doing is for a year-and-a-half from now when I might get paid.’”

Burtt just hopes that people will still come out to support his orchard — even if he has to press his cider with apples from elsewhere. His primary-school-age children are brainstorming new endeavors to support the family business. Their recommendation: a french fry stand.

“I’m just hoping that people still come out even though we won’t have as many apples,” Burtt said. “Crop insurance, that’s great. But as long as people still want to come out and support the farms, that’s huge.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont leaders pursue federal disaster aid after orchardists face ‘heartbreaking’ losses in May freeze.