This commentary is by Ray Pelletier, an adjunct professor at Norwich University who served on the CVFiber Communication Union District board of directors for more than four years.
Vermont has invested enormous public resources into connectivity, creating Communications Union Districts and committing more than $100 million in state and federal broadband funding to expand last-mile fiber infrastructure so Vermonters can get online.
That work matters. It is necessary. But it is no longer sufficient.
The system isn’t strained. It’s broken.
Small towns, many run largely by volunteers, are now responsible for managing complex grants, cybersecurity risks, disaster recovery, emergency dispatch services and climate resilience, while residents reasonably expect to interact with local government online — paying bills, applying for permits, accessing records and participating remotely in civic life.
Yet most towns lack the staff, expertise or scale to deliver these services on their own. This is not a failure of leadership, commitment or civic spirit. It is a structural failure.
Vermont’s regional planning system was never designed to be an implementation system. Regional Planning Commissions do important work, but they are largely advisory bodies, not operators.
The result is a widening gap between what Vermont plans and what Vermont can actually deliver.
Recent research by the Vermont Policy Institute concludes many municipal officials already understand from experience: informal cooperation among small towns is no longer enough.
That finding reinforces conclusions reached in recent state-sponsored reviews of Vermont’s rural technical assistance and municipal support systems, which document widespread capacity constraints, administrative burdens and coordination failures across municipalities.
Public-administration research shows that while voluntary intermunicipal cooperation can address discrete or short-term needs, complex, long-term service delivery increasingly requires formal regional institutions with professional staff and durable governance.
Councils of Governments are legally constituted regional entities formed by municipalities to deliver shared services, manage programs and employ staff while preserving local control.
They provide durable regional institutions that carry shared services from concept through operation.
This is not consolidation. It is not centralization. It is cooperation with structure.
Digital government services illustrate why capacity, not connectivity, has become the binding constraint. Without regional capacity, towns face impossible choices: building complex systems with limited staff, relying on one-off vendors with little continuity, or foregoing modern services altogether.
Each option increases cost, risk and inequity while reducing reliability and public trust. Cybersecurity, procurement, accessibility standards and ongoing maintenance do not scale down well; they require expertise and continuity that small towns struggle to sustain on their own.
A Council of Governments model allows towns to share these responsibilities while retaining control over local policy decisions. Digital services become infrastructure, managed professionally, delivered equitably and available to every community and resident, not just those with the largest tax base or staff.
Digital services are a key reason COGs are now necessary. Vermont has already acknowledged these challenges through legislative studies and agency-led examinations of municipal technical assistance and shared services, including the Act 181 report on strengthening Vermont’s rural technical assistance system.
That review identified consistent, systemwide challenges: limited staff capacity, high administrative burden and systemic coordination failures that disproportionately affect small and low-capacity municipalities.
What remains unresolved is how Vermont builds regional institutions capable of sustained delivery. This is not an untested idea. Connecticut COGs operate shared regional geographic information system platforms that support online permitting, emergency response coordination and public records access — precisely the capacity gap Vermont towns face after broadband build-out.
Vermont’s Regional Planning Commissions plan and convene effectively, but unlike Councils of Governments in Connecticut and Massachusetts, they are not currently structured or resourced to operate shared municipal services.
Local autonomy has not been weakened. It has been protected by giving towns access to the capacity they could not otherwise afford.
Vermont does not need to copy another state’s model wholesale. But the evidence shows regions that invest in implementation institutions perform better than those that rely solely on planning. It is a solution that could expand over time as the idea proves itself and produces visible benefits.
The current legislative session is underway, and structural change will not happen overnight. This is precisely the moment to be clear about the direction Vermont needs to move, before incremental fixes harden into another generation of stopgap solutions.
Moving in this direction will require legislative action to authorize regional entities, with clear accountability and municipal consent, to operate shared municipal services.
Connectivity was the first step. Planning was the second. Now comes the harder work: building institutions that can deliver.
Councils of Governments are not a silver bullet, but they are a practical response to a reality Vermont can no longer avoid — the scale and complexity of modern public service delivery exceed what our current system was designed to handle.
Connectivity was just the beginning. Implementation supported by durable regional institutions must be the next chapter.
