BLOOMFIELD — Permission for New Hampshire ATV riders to cross the bridge to get gas here at a family owned store on the Vermont side of the river may require Essex County lawmakers to gear up for battle.
Sen. Vince Illuzzi, R/D-Essex-Orleans, and Rep. Janice Peaslee, R-Guildhall are already drafting legislation to resolve the problem — if a resolution is not at hand by the time the Legislature returns in January.
“We’ll get it resolved. We’ll fight for it,” Peaslee says.
Peaslee has been busy contacting state agencies over the last few weeks in hopes of finding an easy solution to what she sees as something of an embarrassment.
“It’s only a stone’s throw from where they need to be,” she grouses.
The problem arises from a Vermont law that says ATVs, or all terrain vehicles, cannot be legally driven on a state highway. And the fact that Debanville’s General Store is the only place nearby to provide gas for New Hampshire riders isn’t cutting any slack among Vermont bureaucrats.
“Allowing ATVs to operate on a state highway could have an adverse impact on the safety of others users of the road,” wrote Glen Button, the director of enforcement for the state Department of Motor Vehicles in an email to Senator Illuzzi last week.
Button also noted that the department does not have the authority “to grant an exemption” — a position also struck by other state agencies like the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Agency of Natural Resources.
Their reluctance to act, however, has only tweaked the ire of store owner Darlene Belknap and caused her to turn to technology.
“Thank God for the Internet,” she says, where she turned as a last resort to get her message out.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people and it seemed no one wanted to say they had the responsibility to do anything about it.”
So, she began sending emails.
“All I am asking is 50 feet of highway to cross the road,” she wrote to Illuzzi and others in an email recently, noting that she has helped the state over the years by selling fishing and hunting licenses and serving as a weigh-in station during hunting season.
Peaslee believes that the issue is a make or break deal for the store, which has seen hard times with the closing of the Ethan Allen plant in Beecher Falls and the shutdown of the Groveton, N.H., paper mill. And just across the river, she notes, is an ATV park where riders gather to ride the trail that will take them to the big woods in the northern corner of the state.
When Belknap and her husband took over the store seven years ago, she said, they did it with the intention of bringing back the community — a community that exists on both sides of the river.
In an email, she called the reluctance of any state officials to step in “a slap in the face.”
New Hampshire officials may have also contributed to the problem by no longer recognizing the Vermont registration of ATVs in their state. Each side, in fact, has taken steps to mutually exclude the other.
In an effort to break the impasse, New Hampshire and Vermont officials have scheduled a meeting for Sept. 1 in Lancaster, N.H.
Belknap says she is optimistic something will be done, if not in Lancaster then in Montpelier.
“They don’t want to mess with me,” she says, counting the e-mails she has been sending to politicians as well as officials. “It’s probably easier to pass a bill.”
