“What you see on screen is really my worst nightmare,” Jens Hawkins-Hilke, a planner at Vermont’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the House Transportation Committee on Friday.
“A foggy road, a large moose and a vehicle moving very quickly.”
Hawkins-Hilke was pitching the committee, with a slideshow behind him, on the utility of building dedicated crossings for wildlife over or under roads around the state to avoid collisions, such as with moose, that can hurt or kill the driver and the animal and cause substantial property damage.
The crossings also help connect key parts of animals’ habitats, such as blocks of forest, that are otherwise splintered by human infrastructure and thus harder for many species to get around.
And get around they do. Male bobcats traverse some 19 miles every day, he said as an example. In 2017, he recalled, the state tracked a male black bear from Bennington that, in response to a dearth of acorns and nuts, traveled all the way across the state to Brattleboro — and back.
Hawkins-Hilke noted, too, that the need for better habitat connectivity is expected to only grow in the coming decades because climate change is slowly pushing wildlife across North America to migrate north and into higher elevations. Modeling from The Nature Conservancy shows that a substantial amount of that migration is likely to funnel through New England, he said.
Vermont has installed a handful of different types of wildlife crossings in recent years to try to address some of that need, said Hawkins-Hilke, as well as Andrea Wright, who manages the environmental policy and sustainability division of the state’s Agency of Transportation. One that’s worked especially well, they noted, is called a “wildlife shelf.” It’s essentially a flat walkway underneath a bridge that is built by filling in space along a riverbank with rocks and debris.
State officials have identified 1,285 structures along roads throughout the state that could be improved to maximize wildlife connectivity, they said. They highlighted a series of five improved crossings, built since 2024, along a stretch of Route 12 known as “moose alley.”
But at one location that has some of the greatest need for better connectivity, plans to install a wider, more appealing crossing for wildlife have hit a snag. Last June, the transportation agency walked back plans for a new, 150-foot bridge on Interstate 89 and U.S. 2 in Waterbury that would have connected over 100,000 acres of protected land along the Green Mountains.
The state previously received a $1.6 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration to design a replacement for an existing long, narrow culvert that runs underneath the highways at Sharkeyville Brook, which is a tributary of the Winooski River. But the state decided not to apply for another grant to help fund construction, estimated to cost some $50 million.
That decision was made largely because that other grant would have covered only about half the construction cost, officials said, and they weren’t willing to eat the rest using state dollars. The project is still on state planners’ radar, Hawkins-Hilke said.
However, “we’re in a very difficult financial situation, both at the state and federal level,” he added. “Big expenditures here are tough.”
— Shaun Robinson
In the know
It’s no secret that Vermont is short on primary care providers. Finding ways to invest more in earlier, preventative primary care is a major focus for Vermont lawmakers this year — and increasing the number of people who can practice as primary care providers is central to making these efforts effective.
Friday morning, the Senate Health and Welfare Committee heard testimony on a bill that aims to do just that: S.142 proposes creating a pathway for internationally trained doctors to get their licenses to practice here in Vermont.
Diana Wahle, who chairs the Windham County NAACP Health Justice Committee, read testimony from many former doctors who have moved to Vermont from countries including Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Egypt. Many of them work in health care but have not yet been able to reinstate their credentials as physicians.
“Some of these folks are my constituents and my friends,” said Sen. Martine Gulick, D-Chittenden Central, who sits on the Senate health committee. “Some of the folks you are mentioning here are not just great medical professionals, but they are really important members of our community, and they give in so many ways.”
— Olivia Gieger
On the move
The Senate gave preliminary approval Friday to its version of this year’s “budget adjustment” bill, H.790.
Senators are set to nix a $5 million earmark the House proposed to support Section 8 housing providers, who are contending with wavering federal support. The cash was slated to come out of a $50 million pot legislators have already fenced off to respond to federal funding changes. But the Senate’s version does not prescribe a specific amount of money for housing aid in the near-term, as providers have asked for.
Sen. Andrew Perchlik, D/P-Washington, said on the floor that his appropriations committee made the change because after the “budget adjustment” bill cleared the House, Congress passed a slate of appropriations packages that include much, though potentially not all, of the funding the housing providers say they’ll this year to keep people in their homes.
The committee still didn’t have a full picture of the providers’ need, though, and so is open to changing the language further when H.790 heads to a likely conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate’s differences. Before then though, the bill must still get final approval in the Senate next week — which it almost certainly will.
— Shaun Robinson
A bird, a plane
A low-flying helicopter making repeated flights over the state capitol Friday led several worried civilians to inquire about the strange aircraft.
According to Conor Kennedy, chief of staff to the House speaker, the helicopter belonged to the U.S. Marine Corps and was the largest helicopter in the military’s inventory. The flights were part of a training, Kennedy said, and will continue next week. There is no threat to the public, he said.
It’s the second time in recent weeks that a low-flying aircraft has raised eyebrows. In the last instance, a Coast Guard plane turned heads when it flew over the Golden Dome.
— Ethan Weinstein
Freaky Friday
Today was Friday the 13th — a notoriously spooky 24 hours.
Inquiring minds wanted to know: Is the Statehouse haunted?
“There’s no question that I have felt spirits,” David Schutz, Vermont state curator, who’s spent more than four decades in the building, said Friday. But he was confident that those spirits are benevolent, not malevolent.
In fact, he preferred to talk love, not fear — namely the Statehouse-themed Valentine’s Day cards for sale outside the cafeteria.
— Ethan Weinstein
