Editor’s note: This commentary is by Brian Shupe, who is executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council.
It is important that we maintain citizen access and strong local involvement in Act 250. The Vermont Natural Resources Council and the Scott administration jointly presented a package of recommended changes to Act 250, Vermont’s landmark development control law, to the Vermont Legislature. Together, we are urging lawmakers to consider a carefully balanced package that will make Act 250 better for the environment, business, communities, and interested citizens.
Early headlines about the package focused on proposed changes to the district commissions that presently review Act 250 applications. It is important to clarify how those proposed changes will work and how citizen access and local involvement will be maintained.
Act 250 was designed in 1970 as an integrated, stand-alone program with nine district commissions, made up of three citizens from each region, reviewing applications with the assistance of professional district coordinators. The commissions were administered and coordinated by a statewide Environmental Board made up of nine Vermonters from various walks of life. Appeals of district commission decisions were heard by the Environmental Board, whose decisions could be appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court for final adjudication.
This worked well for 34 years. But, like all restrictions on land development and property rights, Act 250 had its share of detractors. In 2004, at the urging of then Gov. Jim Douglas, the Environmental Board was eliminated and replaced by a Natural Resources Board with limited power, and appeals of district commission decisions were sent to the newly expanded Environmental Division of the Vermont Superior Court.
Since that time, the three bodies have lacked coordination and oversight, and the system has become more challenging for all parties to participate in, including for VNRC and the citizen groups with whom we have worked. At the same time, development projects and the associated environmental and community impacts have grown increasingly complex.
In addition to many other changes to strengthen the law, the current package of proposed changes would create a hybrid district review process administered by an independent, three-member professional board that would review the largest and most complex projects in the various districts, together with two regional representatives (a.k.a., district commissioners).
Hearings would take place in the impacted community to ensure that citizens have easy access to the process. In this way the district commissions are restructured and integrated with the NRB, restoring the self-contained and well-coordinated program that was lost in 2004.
So-called minor projects, which constitute approximately 80% of all applications, would be reviewed by — and permits issued regionally by — the district coordinators, who do the lion’s share of the work reviewing minor applications today.
To maximize public involvement, the package of changes would also create a new pre-application scoping process to provide all parties, including affected neighbors, concerned groups of citizens, and community officials, an opportunity to learn the details of a proposed development before a formal application is filed and identify and resolve conflicts before the project is finalized. This has been an elusive goal of citizen activists, and VNRC, for many years.
The NRB’s decisions would then be appealed directly to the state Supreme Court, eliminating the Environmental Court review, which has proven to be expensive and time consuming for applicants and citizens alike.
We believe that these proposed changes will result in a better review process: one that expands opportunities for citizen involvement through the scoping process, maintains regional perspective through the hybrid NRB, ensures independence from political pressure, and involves a range of professional perspectives and backgrounds in the make-up of the board to better deal with complex projects and associated impacts.
In addition to the significant change to the existing review process, the draft legislation also includes proposals to:
• Strengthen criteria to better address such issues as water quality, transportation, climate change, forest health, and wildlife habitat protection.
• Expand jurisdiction to protect ridgelines, better control sprawl around interstate interchanges, and address the scattered fragmentation of our working lands and natural areas caused by sprawling road and driveway development far from town centers.
• To balance these additional protections, the package also would exempt development from Act 250 jurisdiction in areas that have gone through state designation processes created to help redevelop our larger downtowns and promote compact residential neighborhoods in areas that are served by water and sewer, and have been delineated to avoid fragile environmental resources.
These are among the many proposed interrelated changes intended to modernize Act 250 in what is a comprehensive, and complicated, plan to ensure that Act 250 will not only remain relevant for the next 50 years, but will also become stronger and more accessible than ever before.
