The city of Winooski had already removed about 30 trees from its Main Street corridor when it learned that the $1 million grant that would cover the trees’ replacement — with 130 new street trees — had been outright canceled by the federal government.
The grant, from the U.S. Forest Service, was just one $1 million piece in the city’s broader $22 million Main Street Revitalization project, and it was meant to create a buffer between pedestrians and the road, generate more shade and offer stormwater filtration.
A built-in contingency fund for the revitalization project will now cover the costs of the tree work, but at a cost to the city and, ultimately, to city taxpayers, said Jon Rauscher, the city’s public works director.
“What that means is that we’re gonna have to finance an additional million dollars that we weren’t expecting to finance,” he said, at an additional cost of about $40,000 each year. Rauscher said he is still looking to claim the full grant and is exploring other ways to recoup the funds through Congress or the Vermont Attorney General’s Office — but he’s not optimistic.
Rauscher and the city of Winooski are not alone. In Vermont, the city of Newport and the state’s forestry programs have also been sent spiralling in the wake of President Donald Trump’s January executive order that paused the distribution of funds allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act, and with it all of the law’s grant programs to support forestry.
Specifically, Winooski and communities across the country heard the same news: a massive $75 million grant, that these awards were part of, had been canceled. The Arbor Day Foundation received the initial funding and then coordinated the funds’ dispersal to sub-awardees like Winooski and Newport.
For the Vermont Division of Forests, part of the Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, more than $10 million in grants has been put on hold.
“It’s such whiplash,” said Elise Schadler, manager of the state’s Urban and Community Forestry Program, who has been helping guide cities through the national grant process. “The metaphor I’ve been returning to is that it feels like for two decades I’ve been standing on a really solid stone floor, as the foundation of this program. It’s been pulverized and now I’m trying to stand on sand dunes.”
Roots and shade
Winooski was one of three cities in the state that received grants for urban forestry development through the U.S. Forest Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Newport had only just begun the very first steps of planning its own street tree planting. The city’s downtown development group was awarded a $363,000 grant through the same Arbor Day Foundation program that was to fund the Winooski project. The Newport grant was expected to cover the costs of a consultant who could lead a treescape design for the downtown and nearby Gardener Park, and to begin to cover the initial costs of implementing that design.
Though the award came in late 2023, Newport decided to put the urban tree project on hold until the plans were in place for the downtown redesign, so the landscape design would fit into that bigger planning process.
“The only reason we hadn’t spent any of (the grant in 2024) is because we were trying to be responsible about how to spend it,” said Newport Mayor Rick Ufford-Chase, who also led the Newport City Downtown Development.
By the end of 2024, city staff were ready to start sending out requests for proposals and begin work with landscape design consultants in the new year. But, by February, the city learned that those funds had been put on pause, then completely terminated.
“The blow is tremendous, and the impact will be felt for years,” Ufford-Chase said. “It’s huge, and the reason it’s so huge is because if we don’t plan for urban treescape, we are missing a major piece of climate mitigation for this community.”
The city will miss out on the cooling and shading effects that trees provide from extreme heat in the summer and the flood resilience their roots can offer, he said, at least for now. He intends for the city to find other pathways to reach its tree planting goals.
“We’ve got to get this group together, figure out what our options are, lick our wounds, and then take the next step, even if it’s scaled way back. There are things we have to keep working on here,” Ufford-Chase said. “We will somehow. We will figure this out.”.
In Rutland, though, the story is different — despite the fact that the city also received a $1 million urban forestry grant through the Inflation Reduction Act, it went directly to the city, instead of being routed through the Arbor Day Foundation. There, the funding is moving forward as normal.
“It’s remarkable that we haven’t heard anything,” said Ted Gillen, an engineer for the city. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had not notified the city of any pause in funding, and only after VTDigger’s inquiry, did the city reach out to the department to confirm the funds were still available.
“We’re sitting here wondering, ‘Are we going to lose ours too?’” Gillen said, adding that his “heart rate went up” when he heard Newport had lost its grant. “The potential of losing this grant would be heartbreaking for me.”
For now, Rutland is moving ahead, albeit cautiously, to roll out the project expanding tree cover in the downtown and Mussey and Green Brook areas.
Three-legged stool
Individual cities are not the only ones facing a blow to budgets — the state Division of Forests also received a huge pot of funds through the Inflation Reduction Act. A total of $10,174,510 of federal grant money to the division have been placed on hold.
Some of the money — about $1.7 million — has already been cleared for spending, according to department records. That includes support for wildfire prevention and urban forestry grants. On Friday, Schadler, who runs the state’s urban and community forestry program, learned that $750,000 awarded to the state’s Urban & Community Forestry Program to offer its own sub-awards for smaller projects similar to Winooski’s or Newport’s, had been reinstated. It means that a handful of community projects for tree planting or invasive species control can move forward.
The rest still languish in a federal review process, which, per the executive order, is scheduled to end April 20.
One such paused program is a $5 million grant the state received to support foresters working with private landowners and loggers. The funding would pay for foresters to develop management plans that incorporate sustainable forest practices while also making funding available to loggers to cover the cost of implementing these practices.
“Additional practices like managing land for wildlife habitat or timber stand improvement through thinning or protecting riparian zones to allow for more flood resiliency may not have a commercial benefit to (a landowner,)” said Oliver Pierson, the department’s director of forestry.
In Vermont, about 80% of forests are privately owned, which means “this is a really important program to help develop and get these practices implemented across the landscape,” Pierson said.
Though the funding came through the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in 2022, the Division of Forests just received approval from the state of Vermont to launch the program at the end of 2024. “We were just getting going,” Pierson said.
The state relies on annual allocations from the U.S. Forest Service, which the state then matches in different ways. But those funds are supplemented by one-time programs.
“It’s definitely a three legged stool with federal funds, state funds and special funds, and if one of those legs goes away. What happens? The stool tips over,” Pierson said.
This instability comes at a time when the future of forests is already uncertain: “It’s happening at a time when, arguably, the needs are increasing in all of those areas (where the grants are directed,)” Pierson said.
Drought, like the one all of New England saw last fall, is increasing wildlife risk in the region, as are the number of pests, pathogens and invasive species in Vermont. The emerald ash borer, beech bark disease and the newer threat of beach leaf disease are all “dramatically” shifting forest composition and management needs, Pierson said.
Vermont’s forests have needed care for a long time, Pierson said. The state’s robust farm industry meant that almost all of the landscape was deforested in the 19th century. Today’s forests are relatively young, in terms of trees’ timelines — less than 1% of forests are over 150 years old. As agriculture contracted and trees returned to the landscape through the 20th century, they came back as relatively uniform stands, with limited species or age diversity.
“Those forest types are much more vulnerable to different types of stressors that are out there,” Pierson said.
Most foresters, nonprofits and logging groups in the state practice what is called “active forest management,” which works to re-introduce more variation in age, species type, and structure (things like stumps and dead trees left on the ground). With a broader range of tree types, the forest is less vulnerable to threats that target specific ages or species.
“There are these real challenges out there, and we are hopeful that the pause is just delaying us from addressing them. But I think we’ll look at it as a real lost opportunity should the federal review lead to those grant funds being revoked,” Pierson said.
The whiplash in federal priorities, moving from one administration’s heightened attention on forest health to another’s disregard for it, is very much at odds with the pace and pattern of forest growth, he said.
“Meanwhile the dynamics in the forest themselves aren’t changing. We still have invasive species and threats from climate change, and landowners who want to do the right thing, but they don’t have all the resources to do so,” Pierson said.
