This commentary is by Loralee Tester, the executive director of the Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce.
A year and a half ago, I attended the Vermont Solutions Summit, hosted by the Vermont Chamber of Commerce in Burlington, which brought together business, education and policy leaders to discuss solutions to the state’s workforce and economic challenges. It was an important event, and I was glad to be there.
However, one moment from the final panel has stayed with me: when Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, referred to the “urban dwellers and the cave dwellers” of Vermont, the latter term clearly directed at rural Vermonters in my view. I was one of only a small handful of people in the room from the Northeast Kingdom. I remember looking around and realizing that hardly anyone even reacted. The comment seemed to pass as clever, harmless, maybe even funny. To me, it was neither.
It was a small but telling reminder of something many of us in rural Vermont know well: too often, the people making policy in this state speak about rural communities with a mix of condescension, amusement and disbelief. We are treated as though we are difficult, unreasonable or simply in the way.
That attitude has deep roots. In 1970, Gov. Deane Davis helped usher in Act 250 with warnings that Vermont needed protection from development that would line our roads with “fried-chicken shacks.” The phrase is still quoted as if it were charming shorthand for anti-sprawl sentiment. But to modern ears, it lands differently. It reveals that the fear was not only about development. It was also about which kinds of people and places were undesirable. That is what makes this moment so troubling.
Because once again, in the language of planning, protection and stewardship, Vermont is advancing policies that will hurt the people who have shaped this state for generations.
Act 181, the 2024 overhaul of Vermont’s land-use law, is presented as smart land-use reform. Its supporters describe it as a way to direct growth, preserve biodiversity and strengthen village centers. Those are worthy goals, but — forgive the cliché — the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
When these policies make it harder for rural families to build a modest home on family land, to create opportunity for the next generation, or to remain in the communities they have sustained for generations, who exactly is being protected?
Not the farm family trying to carve out a lot for a son or daughter. Not the young worker who wants to stay in the town where they grew up. Not the small rural community trying to stay alive.
What we are seeing, once again, is that people with power often describe exclusion in the language of principle. Historically, zoning and land-use regulation across America have been presented as neutral tools of order and protection, while serving to keep out people deemed undesirable, unsightly or inconvenient. Vermont likes to imagine itself better than that.
It is not.
When rural Vermonters are discussed as obstacles to progress, when their concerns are waved away as ignorance, and when policy makes it harder for them to remain on and use their own land, the result is not morally distinct simply because the rhetoric is greener.
That is what so many people are missing in this debate. This is not only about permitting; it is about dignity. It is about whether the people who built Vermont, worked its land, raised families in its small towns and kept communities going when no one else was paying attention, still count.
There is a quiet cruelty in the assumption that rural Vermont is failing, outdated and destined to disappear anyway. At a committee meeting shortly after I took up my position at the Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce, a company CEO told those assembled that rural Vermont was dying and, in his words, “deserves to die.” I’ve since heard similar sentiments from people in Vermont’s more urban communities.
But rural Vermont is not a mistake and is certainly not a relic. Nor is it a scenic backdrop for the virtue signalling of others. To those who live here, it is home.
If Vermont wants to protect its landscape, fine. Most of us do too. But let us be honest enough to admit that so-called “protection” can become a euphemism for exclusion when it is shaped by people who do not understand, value or respect the lives being constrained.
That is why Act 181 deserves far more scrutiny than it has received. Because if we are not careful, we will repeat an old pattern in a new form: powerful people deciding, with full confidence in their own righteousness, which Vermonters belong in the future of this state and which do not.
And if that is not a form of prejudice, what is?
