This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
WOLCOTT— On Thursday morning, Margo Baker was gearing up to make meatloaf sandwiches for the lunch special at the Wolcott Country Store. She both works at the store, tucked between Route 15 and the Lamoille River, and lives upstairs in one of seven apartments.
So Baker has seen firsthand the limits of the building’s small septic system. The tenants can’t have a washing machine, she said, and without a laundromat in town, she has to lug her laundry to neighboring Morrisville or Hardwick. The country store can’t expand its offerings. The system is simply too small, said the building’s owner, Fred Martin. The leach field’s tight position next to the river means he can’t expand it, and recent flooding – which, this summer, brought water into the basement – has forced him to have the sewage pumped out.
“The leach field is just backed up,” Baker said. “The septic’s just not big enough to support the store and all the apartments.”
Meanwhile, the lack of a public wastewater system in the town of roughly 1,500 poses big hurdles to adding housing in the village.
“We have a former church that is closed, and the property owners had stated that they had hoped to put maybe four apartments in there, but they’re hindered by the lack of wastewater,” said Linda Martin, the chair of the town’s selectboard (no relation to Fred).
But a new town sewer system is on its way. Last month, voters approved plans for Wolcott’s first-ever municipal wastewater system in its core village district. In addition to helping make more redevelopment in the village center possible, town officials hope the system – which will involve hooking up individual septic tanks to a common leach field located high on a hill – will help ease Wolcott’s flooding woes.
The additional wastewater capacity could allow the country store to create a seating area where people can “drink their coffee, visit, maybe eat their lunch,” Baker said. Martin, the building’s owner, said the new system could let him add another apartment to the building, too.
“It’s a benefit for the town, I think,” Baker said.
A lack of municipal water and wastewater systems in Vermont’s small village centers has long inhibited development, standing in the way of projects as modest as a restaurant or small apartment building.
“If you want to have seats in a cafe, or, you know, offer restroom facilities for any sort of establishment – wastewater is the foundation for that,” said Victoria Hellwig, a regional planner with the Lamoille County Planning Commission, who has helped support Wolcott’s wastewater project.
But a fresh focus from both state and federal programs, like the Covid-19-era American Rescue Plan Act, has helped make projects like Wolcott’s possible. Town officials have lined up over $5 million in state and federal funds, which they expect to fully cover the costs of getting the new system up and running. Just this week, the town secured $750,000 in economic development funds from the Northern Border Regional Commission aimed at bolstering rural infrastructure to help support the project.
Town officials hope that the new community septic system will encourage the revitalization of underutilized buildings in town, which would, in turn, entice users of the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail to make a stop in town. A project to renovate an old schoolhouse into a cafe and meeting space is already in the works, said Martin, the selectboard chair.
The wastewater system buildout could also allow property owners to add sorely-needed housing on existing lots, Martin said, and allow buildings once dedicated to another purpose to be converted into housing.
A desire to encourage more housing growth amid Vermont’s acute housing shortage has propelled rural wastewater projects from Westford to Montgomery in recent years. But residents’ concerns that the new public infrastructure will fuel unfettered growth and congestion have mired some such projects in local controversy.
Wolcott hasn’t been immune to that tension, either. A subset of residents forced a revote on the wastewater system, in part questioning the potential impacts of new development – and adding more development in the floodplain, according to reporting from the News & Citizen. Residents have also raised concerns around ongoing maintenance costs for the system. But the project was approved, again, during the second go-around at the polls.
Flooding in recent years has caused issues for homes with leach fields along the river, including sewage backups. In the new system, waste will be collected from hooked-up properties to a pump station and then sent to a larger, community leach field at a proposed site near the town’s elementary school, on a hill. A Q&A page on the town’s website says the system will be designed to withstand a 500-year flood event, and engineers aim to avoid siting the new infrastructure in places at high risk of flood-related erosion.
But navigating those challenges underscores a conundrum for Wolcott and many other Vermont towns. To avoid sprawl, state officials have long attempted to encourage infill growth and housing density in downtowns and village centers — but in many cases those town centers are situated alongside increasingly flood-prone rivers.
Wolcott has been hit hard by the flooding of the last two summers. Martin, the selectboard chair, said she is greenlighting nine buyouts – the majority in the village area, which the new wastewater system is primed to benefit.
That will deal a blow to the town’s tax base, she said, and will mean the town can’t bring in user fees from those properties to aid in the long-term maintenance of the new wastewater system. The system is expected to serve about 50 properties around School Street, mostly residences, according to the News & Citizen; that means losing even a small number to buyouts could bring future financial strain.
The buyouts still have a long, bureaucratic road ahead, but moving forward with them “breaks my heart,” Martin said. Some of the flooded-out residents are couch-surfing, have relocated to neighboring towns, or have left the state, she said.
Still, she hopes building out the new wastewater system can help the town make up for the housing it’s losing.
“It’ll make a brighter, you know, downtown village center regardless,” she said.
