MONTPELIER — Last July, as the skies pelted Vermont with record amounts of rain, rivers across the state grew in volume and velocity, ripping through backyards and downtowns. The floods damaged at least 4,000 homes and 800 businesses, and caused $200 million in damage to public infrastructure. Seven months later, some residents are still displaced.
Under the golden dome, state lawmakers have spent much of the session considering how government policies might reduce the harm that future natural disasters cause to residents.
In the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, they’re looking to redesign the system that governs how and where people can construct developments near rivers that could flood during extreme rain events.
This week, the committee voted 5-0 in support of S.213, a bill that would require a state permit to build in river corridors — the river and surrounding land where water could meander during high flow times — starting in 2028. The bill, which already faces opposition from Gov. Phil Scott, must pass through the Senate’s money committees before the full chamber takes a vote.
Right now, regulations vary widely from one municipality to the next. A major goal of the bill is to transfer responsibility for regulating development in river corridors from municipalities to the state, which can look at river systems and watersheds more holistically.
The legislation would also make major changes to the way the state regulates wetlands and dams. It would require the state to manage for a net gain of wetland acreage, and it would install measures to improve dam safety, such as strengthening oversight and setting up funding mechanisms for emergency and nonemergency dam maintenance and removal.
“The state is in a unique position to be able to look upstream and downstream through a whole watershed and develop a coherent, strategic way of addressing that watershed,” said Sen. Chris Bray, D-Middlebury, who chairs the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee. “And so that’s why we’re proposing that the state take a more active leadership role in managing river corridors.”
‘This is really, really big’
Thirteen senators sponsored the legislation, including Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central. And it has endorsements from some of the state’s key environmental groups, including the Vermont Natural Resources Council and the Conservation Law Foundation.
But Gov. Scott recently announced his opposition, saying at a press conference earlier this month that the bill would shift “responsibilities for certain types of land use regulation from Vermont municipalities to (the Agency of Natural Resources) that will put Vermonters in jeopardy of violating laws they don’t even know exist.”
And officials within the Agency of Natural Resources, which would be charged with carrying out the reforms in S.213, say they lack the resources to do so.
Julie Moore, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources, told VTDigger that “there is clear recognition” in the Scott administration “about the importance of river corridor protection and flood hazard area management, in terms of reducing future flood risk.”
But, she said, the bill does not give the agency enough time or money to get the job done properly. The agency is “out straight right now,” Moore said.
Of the bill’s several proposed reforms, she’s most concerned about the new river corridor permitting system, which could apply to 45,000 parcels, by the agency’s estimation.
“This is really, really big, and represents a significant public policy change,” she said. “And we need Vermonters to have the opportunity to come up to speed on it.”
She and members of the agency who focus on environmental justice issues have also expressed concerns about the bill’s impact on certain vulnerable populations. For example, nearly 32% of all manufactured home parks in the state have some of their land in floodplains, and more than 20% of such parks have at least one house in the floodplain, Megan Cousino with the Department of Environmental Conservation told lawmakers. They could have trouble affording and navigating a new permit process.
Moore penned a letter to Sen. Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, and Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, who chair the Senate’s two money committees, telling them that “at this point, our capacity to take on new things — large or small — is completely exhausted.” She named a slew of big efforts, from leading the Vermont Climate Council to testing school buildings for PCBs, that are consuming the agency’s time.
Life safety policy
Disagreements about the bill represent a larger debate unfolding in the Statehouse that pits the urgency surrounding flooding, and, more broadly, climate change, against the state’s limited resources during what has been repeatedly described as a tight budget season. In total, lawmakers are asking for $4.9 million to fund the proposed work in S.213, which state officials say isn’t enough.
As climate change increases the likelihood that extreme precipitation will cause Vermont’s rivers to flood, lawmakers who support the bill say now is the time to take big action to change the way the state regulates development that could be in harm’s way.
“We, in state government, can do things that individuals can’t do,” said Bray, the bill’s lead sponsor. “Individuals can’t help shape how we manage rivers and wetlands and the dams in their town. It’s a government function.”
Currently, municipalities can regulate development in river corridors in several ways. Local officials can adopt flood hazard bylaws, a requirement for property owners to be able to access flood insurance. The potential to open access to flood insurance creates a big incentive for towns to adopt flood hazard bylaws.
But those flood hazard areas are based on maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has only mapped about 20% of Vermont’s stream miles, according to the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. And as rivers move, FEMA maps can become outdated.
River corridor bylaws are intended to fill in the gaps. After Tropical Storm Irene hit Vermont in 2011, the state created incentives for cities and towns to adopt bylaws that would determine where and how people can build in the floodplain.
Despite the incentives, few towns have had the capacity to create and implement those bylaws.
“You’re expecting a town with maybe no zoning or limited capacity to do zoning to suddenly have a conversation within the town about regulating land use and river corridors,” said Chris Campany, executive director of Windham Regional Commission, a planning group in southeastern Vermont, and a member of the Vermont Climate Council.
To an outsider, it might seem like a good time for local officials to take on the work, even if it’s challenging, Campany said. But the same towns that most need the regulations are also likely to have sustained damage from the summer’s flooding.
“If you’re also trying to manage how you’re going to pay for all this flood damage repair until FEMA can reimburse you, and then everything else that you’ve got on your plate, do you really want to take up a potentially really challenging conversation?” Campany said. “A lot of selectboard members don’t sign up for that.”
This barrier for municipalities is one reason why Ted Brady, executive director of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, a nonprofit organization that represents the state’s 247 cities and towns, told lawmakers that he’s open to the framework outlined in the bill, with some reservations.
“While on its face, this proposal flies in the face of local control — a central (tenet) of VLCT’s legislative policies adopted by our membership — I believe the goal of coordinating the regulation of development in river corridors recognizes that waterways don’t respect municipal boundaries, and what one town does upstream impacts downstream municipalities,” Brady wrote in testimony to lawmakers.
Sitting in the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee room earlier this month, crammed with witnesses from the Agency of Natural Resources and environmental groups who have advocated for the legislation, lawmakers read the almost 70-page bill line by line.
Some state officials reiterated concerns about the bill’s timeline, while others stressed the urgency of regulating development in river corridors before the next flood.
Sen. Mark MacDonald, D-Orange, asked the committee, if everything were to go according to plan, “by 2028, Vermont would be ready to implement rules to tackle 2023-type flooding?”
Campany raised his hand. The bill is a matter of life safety policy, he said.
“I would just encourage you to move as expeditiously as you feel is possible, because we’ve been talking about this for over a decade now,” he said.
