This commentary is by Mark Naud, who is an environmental and land use attorney in Burlington.
I have practiced environmental law in Vermont for 30 years, working on land, water and governance issues throughout this basin. I served as chair of the Vermont Citizens Advisory Committee on Lake Champlain’s Future. And I will tell you something easy to forget when you are inside the daily work of environmental protection: What we have built around this lake is genuinely rare, and it works.
The Patrick Leahy Lake Champlain Basin Program is a trilateral cooperative — Vermont, New York and Quebec — governed by a steering committee that includes agency officials alongside the citizen advisory committees of all three jurisdictions. It has advanced phosphorus reduction, wetland protection, fish passage, water quality monitoring and heritage programming across an 8,000-square-mile watershed, all without a centralized regulatory authority, essentially by consensus.
That is not an accident. It is a design. In 1990, Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom published “Governing the Commons,” a landmark study of how communities successfully manage shared natural resources over the long term. She identified the design principles that long-enduring governance arrangements share: clearly defined boundaries, collective choice arrangements that include those affected by decisions, monitoring, and nested layers of governance that adapt as conditions change. The LCBP fits those principles with unusual precision and has been proving them in practice on this lake for 35 years.
The citizen advisory committees are not a courtesy feature of this program. They are structural. New York’s citizen advisory mandate dates to the Champlain Basin Compact of 1966, more than two decades before the LCBP existed. Vermont established its advisory committee by executive order in 1988 and codified it by statute in 1990. The 14-member committee — 10 citizens appointed by the governor, plus four elected legislators — operates independently of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, with grant authority, mediation powers and a mandate to develop an annual action plan and recommend Lake Champlain policy to the Legislature. Quebec’s committee was established under the same founding framework.
These citizen bodies are accountable to the people of the basin, not just to the agencies that govern alongside them. That independence has a foundation older than any statute. Each of us owns this lake in the deeper sense the law has long recognized: Lake Champlain is held in public trust, by the states and the province, for the people who live here and for the children who will inherit it. It is the largest thing in which most of us will ever have any ownership stake. The governance architecture of the LCBP — citizen committees embedded in decision-making, legislative accountability, consensus rather than hierarchy — is what the public trust actually requires: The people who hold the lake in common are the ones who govern it.
When people ask why this program has lasted while so many others have faded, the answer is not the federal funding or the agency partnerships, though both matter. It is that the people who live with this lake have always had a seat at the table and a role in making the decisions. That is Ostrom’s insight made operational.
That principle is being tested right now in Vermont. On May 6, Gov. Phil Scott vetoed S.218, a voluntary road salt reduction bill supported by ANR and the Vermont Agency of Transportation intended to reduce the chloride pollution that has nearly doubled in Lake Champlain and some of its tributaries over the last 25 years. The veto contradicted ANR and Transportation Agency testimony, existing policy and arguably state law, with a veto letter that mischaracterized the bill as mandatory when its text was explicitly voluntary. House Republicans concurrently moved to weaken Vermont’s conservation goals. The governor is separately advancing executive order rulemaking in conflict with existing statute to roll back wetland protections.
The public trust obligation does not run to whoever shouts loudest. It runs to the lake, its watershed and the generations who will inherit it. Someone is dumping pollutants into Vermont’s waters every day, sometimes with a permit or through an exemption, in violation of the public trust the state holds as sovereign, regardless of how confidently anyone asserts that they know best. When political will overrides the fiduciary obligation the public trust imposes, the governance architecture that has protected this lake for 35 years is exactly what stands in the gap.
The LCBP Steering Committee is finalizing the first-ever formal memorandum of understanding between the program and its administrative host, the New England Interstate Water Pollution Control Commission. It is not a renewal. It is a founding document — the first formal codification of a relationship that has operated on shared understanding since 1992.
Getting it right matters. The memorandum should encode what has made this program work: governance authority resting with the steering committee and the communities it represents, with citizen advisory committees recognized as structural participants, not optional stakeholders; and administrative support that does not set programmatic direction. It should be calibrated to the program’s accountability cycles, including the first-ever independent federal evaluation due this year, so that it can be revisited rather than locked in before that evaluation is complete.
Lake Champlain has been here for over 10,000 years. The program has been helping us steward it well for 35 years. The memorandum of understanding should be worthy of both.
