Jon Margolis is a VTDigger political columnist.
For a while there, it looked as though even the pandemic could not stop passage of a bill to revise Act 250.
Gov. Phil Scott’s administration was for the bill, H.926. So were the administration’s frequent antagonists: the state’s mainstream environmental organizations.
No wonder. Historic though it was, Vermont’s land use and development law is 50 years old. Conditions change. There was something close to a consensus that the law had to be modernized. A study committee was formed. A bill was drafted. It passed the House 88-to-52 at the end of February and moved to the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, which seemed ready to approve it after a few (now remote) hearings.
Maybe not. The committee is scheduled to consider the bill Friday, and according to its chair – Chris Bray, D-Addison – it is likely to make major changes in the legislation, perhaps entirely doing away with provisions exempting some developments from Act 250 standards.
“Act 250 is not a relic to be worshipped,” Bray said. “It’s a living law. But I’m cautious about making changes to the law now.”
So, based on what they have said in committee, are at least two other members of the five-member Natural Resources Committee – Democrats John Rodgers of Essex-Orleans and Mark MacDonald of Orange – who made clear their problems with the bill before Bray did.
Like Bray, they have reservations about the parts of the bill that would allow some proposed developments in downtowns and village centers to avoid the Act 250 process in regard to the development’s impact on water quality.
In retrospect (assuming that this exemption plan dies Friday morning) the real question isn’t why these senators oppose parts of the bill. It’s what took them (and others) so long.
Because H.926 is not an environmental bill. It is an economic planning proposal. Its purpose (or the purpose of the first 28 of its 46 pages) is “to promote development and vitality in our community centers…by exempting projects in state-designated Downtowns and Neighborhood Development Areas from Act 250,” in the words of Kate McCarthy, the Sustainable Communities Program director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council.
This is simple economics. If downtown and village center development is easier and cheaper, more people will move there. Poof! They will “walk more and use less fossil fuels,” one senator said in a committee meeting, inspiring Chris Cochran, the director of community planning and revitalization for the Department of Housing and Community Development, to suggest that people would “get rid of one car.”
The trouble is that this is also simplistic economics. No one provided any data supporting the assumption that freeing developments from Act 250 standards would lead to cheaper housing, would persuade Vermonters to move from the countryside to village centers, or convince anyone to give up a car.
There is no such data. It is not even certain that exempting development from Act 250 would result in cheaper housing (as opposed, for instance, to higher profits for the developer). Nor is there any reason to suppose that these exemptions would convince outsiders to move into a Vermont downtown. If outsiders are moving into Vermont at all these days, they seem to be moving far out into the countryside, separating themselves as much as possible from other people and their viruses. For the moment, “live downtown” is not a good marketing slogan.
It’s easy to understand why the Scott administration would support these proposed exemptions. Not only is the governor pro-developer, he’s been doing as much as he can to get more people to move into the state to ease what he calls Vermont’s “demographic crisis.”
True, in this case the conclusion that more people would move into the state was based on hope and conjecture, not evidence. That’s still sufficient explanation for the administration’s support.
But why would most of the state’s environmental groups support a bill designed to diminish environmental regulation, thereby risking environmental (especially clean water) degradation?
A more complicated question. But surely part of the answer is that the state’s “mainstream” green groups (VNRC, Conservation Law Foundation, Nature Conservancy, Audubon, Vermont Conservation Voters) are convinced that global warming is the greatest danger facing the world, so anything that might alleviate it is worth supporting.
They’re right about global warming, perhaps injudicious about supporting ”anything,” no more how frivolous the argument that it would do any good. This could help explain why they support any wind power project no matter how little power it produces or how extensive its collateral ecological damage.
They also convinced themselves that their proposed exemptions would not degrade water quality because local regulations and other state laws would offer sufficient protection.
It was this that a majority of the Senate committee ended up rejecting.
“Municipal planning doesn’t take the 40,000-foot view of what does (a development) do to towns upstream and downstream,” Bray said.
The likely result here indicates that, at least to some extent, the legislative process worked. The lawmakers listened to opponents of the bill, including Annette Smith of the not-so-establishment Vermonters for a Clean Environment, VCE’s regulatory affairs director John Brabant; freelance civil engineer Thomas Weiss of Montpelier, and others. By this week, enough legislators seemed convinced that removing those proposed developments from Act 250 review was too risky.
The controversy is not over. Bray indicated that the committee was likely to approve the sections of H.926 dealing with forests and trails. These provisions do not appear as far-reaching as the proposed development exemptions, but they have also aroused opposition, including the charge that they haven’t been sufficiently scrutinized.
“They’re rushing it through,” said James Ehlers, the environmental activist and one-time candidate for governor.
Perhaps. But a week or so ago it seemed that the whole bill was being rushed through. The delay, if nothing else, might get environmental protection groups to ponder whether they ought to get back to the mission of protecting the environment.
