When Sen. Patrick Leahy first joined the Senate Appropriations Committee, his chief of staff Paul Bruhn was combing through the budget, looking at programs that sent funding to Vermont when he came across a line for historic preservation.
Vermont got about six times its per capita share, Bruhn recalled in a 2011 Vermont PBS interview. So he started looking into it.
“It’s not just saving individual buildings,” Bruhn, who went on to become a leader in Vermont preservation, said at the time. “It’s about communities, and it’s really about an essential piece of the character of Vermont.”
On Thursday, a week after Bruhn died, the Senate Appropriations Committee moved to rename a national historic preservation program in Bruhn’s honor — a tribute requested by his former boss and longtime friend, Leahy.
Included in a spending bill, which heads next to the Senate floor, is a line that renames a program that supports rehabilitation of historic properties the Paul Bruhn Historic Revitalization Grants.
Bruhn led the Preservation Trust of Vermont for 39 years and dedicated his life to protecting the physical character of the state. He helped to found the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust Board, he worked with conservationists to preserve important tracks of land, pushed Walmart to situate its first store in Vermont in downtown Rutland — as opposed to a strip outside of town — and preserved hundreds of architecturally significant 18th and 19th century structures around the state.
Leahy said the new program title is a “fitting gesture” recognizing the Bruhn’s historic preservation leadership in Vermont.
“He was a champion of historic preservation and leaves our state a legacy that is preserved in brick, mortar, stone and wood,” Leahy said in a statement. “Paul knew that historic preservation is not a cost for saving the past, but a wise investment in the future.”
Bruhn says the historic preservation appropriation inspired the founding of the Preservation Trust of Vermont in 1980 when he left Washington, D.C., and returned to Vermont.
“When I was coming back I thought, this is a field that I really would love to work in,” he said.
Bruhn co-founded the Trust and headed the organization until his death.
In his 2011 Vermont PBS interview, he reflected on why historic preservation is so vital to the culture of Vermont.
“We are frugal Yankees, and we don’t normally throw things away that still have value,” he said. “We really value the resources that we have, whether they be buildings or the landscape”
Bruhn saw historic preservation as a vehicle for bringing communities together — not just as a way attract tourists to Vermont’s hundreds of quaint villages and towns.
“We’re not interested in pickling Vermont, that’s not our goal,” he said in the interview. “We’re interested in strong vibrant communities that are changing all the time. We’re interested in downtowns that serve their own community first and foremost.”
Leahy said Bruhn’s preservation work spurred him to create the historic revitalization grant program in 2018. The program aims to provide resources to support small projects in rural areas that otherwise may not be able to access larger grant support.
In prepared remarks to the committee, Leahy thanked his colleagues. The renaming is “very meaningful to me, and a testimony to Paul’s dedicated public service spanning more than four decades and his longstanding commitment to preserving the historic icons of rural America.”
The appropriations bill sets aside $7.5 million for the program, an increase of $2.5 million over the last fiscal year.
