Editor’s note: This commentary is by Heather Kennedy, of Montpelier, who is an environmental analyst with the Agency of Natural Resources. The views expressed are her own.
[I] work in the Watershed Management Division of Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources. When a catastrophic flood event such as Tropical Storm Irene destroys a town’s bridges and blows out its culverts, that wreckage is obvious. Less obvious is the feedback loop of wasted state funds and further damage to private property and public infrastructure caused by these structural failures.
Time and again I’ve seen our floodplain managers in the rivers program forced to make do with too little disaster-relief funding to address flood damages. Federal policies are complex, as you can imagine, but the gist is that FEMA will only provide monetary aid to replace existing culverts and bridges, when what is needed is larger (and so exponentially more expensive) culverts and bridges that can handle the force of the next flood event. Vermont towns rarely have the budget to improve their infrastructure, so repairs are almost always undersized. This leads to new catastrophic failures during the next violent flooding event, maintaining the cycle of wasted Vermont taxpayer and federal dollars to repair yet again culverts, bridges, roadways, homes and property.
Today ANR is dealing with another environmental problem that could be remedied with an influx of cash — namely the tragic suffering and death of New England moose due to parasites. The practice of tranquilizing dangerous animals for veterinary care is not unusual in zoos and wild animal parks, but it is expensive. If we had the funding, Vermont’s Fish and Wildlife Department could hire more wardens to track, tranquilize and treat moose and their calves for parasites. (For those who find it “unnatural” to medically treat wildlife, let me remind you that both the tick problem and the worsening storms are caused by us, not the moose. Rectifying their situation is really the least we can do.)
Therefore, I would like to ask our Vermont Legislature to move forward as other states have in developing a framework for vending and taxing marijuana. If ANR had the tax revenue to help towns repair their demolished infrastructure with properly sized replacements, Vermont property owners would save a great deal of heartache and we could make better use of our precious state funds. Taxing marijuana will allow state agencies to better serve constituents in every regard, not just in ANR and VTrans programs. Finally, when state offices are replete with tax dollars from regular hard-working, pot-smoking Vermonters, even our mega rich, out-of-state second-home owners will benefit in that the rest of us will be too stoned to hassle them about paying their fair share in taxes. When Vermont taxes pot, everybody wins!
