Peter Gregory, executive director of the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission in Woodstock, on Thursday, October 10. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
After last year’s flooding hit Middlesex, causing more than $4 million in repair costs, the task of applying for federal recovery programs fell largely to the town’s unpaid volunteers.
With only a handful of paid employees, most of them part-time, the Washington County town of roughly 1,800 relies heavily on its volunteer board members. Flood recovery from this year’s and last year’s storms has added an enormous task to their already full plates, said Liz Scharf, Middlesex’s selectboard chair.
For Scharf, the challenge made it clear that it has become unreasonable to expect small towns that rely on volunteers to take on these sorts of major projects.
“There are arguments for small towns being able to make decisions on their own,” she said, “but these decisions are getting harder and harder, and they require expertise to make a lot of these decisions, and we just don’t have the expertise.”
In the wake of two consecutive summers during which Vermont towns were hammered by flooding, state policymakers are confronting a longstanding question: Is Vermont’s tradition of hyper-local municipal government the most effective and cost-efficient way to organize services for residents?
In May, Gov. Phil Scott signed S.159 into law, establishing a committee to study whether a regional form of governance could “enhance and optimize public safety, tax collection and resource allocation.” That legislative study committee began meeting this summer — but any solutions it comes up with would likely be years away.
And as towns search for ways to collaborate in the meantime, they often find themselves confronted with a conundrum: setting up such structures takes time, effort and a lot of coordination, so even towns that want to partner with other municipalities have found it difficult to do the work required.
‘Clearly at a disadvantage’
Vermont has state government and municipal government, but, unlike many other states, it has very little in between. County governments do exist, but they have no elected representation, and generate taxes only for courthouse budgets and the state’s sheriff departments.
And while some regional entities have formed over the years — be it communications union districts to deliver broadband, waste management districts or water districts serving multiple towns — the patchwork system brings its own challenges. The entities, for instance, don’t always overlap with existing boundaries for regional planning commissions or legislative districts, creating confusion among policymakers and residents.
Peter Gregory, the executive director of the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission, a regional planning organization based in central Vermont, is adamant that the state needs a better system.
“As wonderful as Vermont’s tradition of strong local government is, we are clearly at a disadvantage in being able to deliver services on a sub-state level,” Gregory said.
Recent flooding events have underscored that need — small towns with volunteer boards simply lack the capacity to navigate the federal bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he said — but the issues extend far beyond flood recovery.
Small towns that apply for federal grants are often at a disadvantage competing against larger county or regional applicants from other states. Meanwhile, towns big and small alike find themselves needlessly competing with each other for personnel in law enforcement, road crew and public works amid a shrinking workforce.
“Some of the smaller towns are really struggling because they can’t afford law enforcement. They can’t afford a new town garage. It’s just one thing after another,” he added, “and I think it just all points to the need to encourage shared services to not only potentially reduce costs, but to provide better service.”
Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, one of the primary sponsors of S.159 and the chair of the Senate’s Government Operations Committee, said the issue arose again and again in her committee during the last legislative session.
Be it bills on property tax appraisal or on regional dispatch, “every single thing that came before us, it seemed to me that there were solutions that could potentially be easier if we had functional county government,” she said.
‘It’s just harder for us to argue for ourselves’
The new legislative study committee, co-chaired by Hardy and Rep. Michael McCarthy, has so far met twice — once in August and once in September — and has heard from several experts in Vermont and other states on various regional structures.
The committee consists of six legislators and is supported by a technical advisory group, made up of nearly a dozen stakeholder groups such as the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs, the Vermont League of Cities and Towns and the Vermont Association of Planning and Development Agencies.
“We don’t want to break things that are working really well. But what we keep hearing over and over again is municipalities are struggling to have the resources they need,” McCarthy said in an interview.
Rep. Mike McCarthy, D-St. Albans City, who chairs the House Government Operations Committee, listens to testimony on proposed changes to state election laws Feb. 15, 2023. File photo by Riley Robinson/VTDigger
A report to the committee, written by Interim Secretary of Administration Sarah Clark and Doug Farnham, Vermont’s chief recovery officer, detailed one of those challenges. It suggests Vermont’s limited form of county government has been a hindrance in applying for federal grant funding.
For example, looking at federal awards under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — which have primarily funded public transportation, infrastructure, broadband and environmental planning projects — it found Vermont has received $5 million to date, all awarded to the state Agency of Transportation.
Comparatively, other New England states have received a combined total of approximately $129 million in competitive grant funding, with 80% of the funds — $103 million — awarded through or in partnership with county applicants or other regional cooperative agreements, according to the report. For example, Grafton County, a rural New Hampshire county bordering Vermont, secured a $12 million federal award for a broadband program.
Farnham, in an interview, said there are some federal programs that Vermont is not even eligible for because it doesn’t have a governing body within its county governments, including energy efficiency programs under the Inflation Reduction Act.
“It’s just harder for us to argue for ourselves,” Farnham said. Applications for federal money either come from the state, which he said are not always the preferred awardee, or they come from municipalities, “where there’s just not a big enough group coming together.”
But in an interview, Ted Brady, the executive director of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, cautioned against making decisions based on easing the flow of federal funds, or by trying to make interfacing with FEMA easier.
“I think there are winners and losers — or there’s always losers — when you’re dealing with the federal system that has to accommodate 50 different government systems,” said Brady, who is supporting the committee via the technical advisory group.
While Brady is supportive of the regionalization study, he urged caution in pursuing efforts to boost county government, which he said could add costs to residents already struggling with high property taxes and could lead to less local control for residents.
While language in S.159 suggested the committee look at strengthening county government, Brady said the group’s real purpose is studying how to bring things up to scale — and do so in a way that will retain local democratic control over regional decision-making.
Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, works on her laptop in the Health and Welfare Committee at the Statehouse in Montpelier on February 14, 2024. Fhile photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger Credit: Glenn Russell
“I just don’t believe that the obvious answer is county lines that were drawn 250 years ago,” he said.
Hardy, in a separate interview, made assurances the committee’s work wouldn’t be overly focused on county governance.
“We don’t have all the answers to this, so I don’t want you to think that the answer to these problems is necessarily county governments,” she said. “But it led us to think, maybe there’s something that needs to be looked at here.”
‘There’s always something more immediate’
In the absence of a formal regional governance system, some municipalities have begun pooling resources and collaborating of their own accord. But many simply lack the staff time and financial resources to create or maintain the structures required for cooperation.
“We have a disjointed patchwork of governance and service agencies that are doing things like dispatch, where regionalization has long been a goal, but we don’t have governance structures that are specifically in charge of regionalization,” said McCarthy, the committee’s co-chair.
The towns of Hinesburg and neighboring Richmond, for example, have been party to an inter-municipal agreement to share its police services since the spring of 2023. Born out of necessity due to Richmond’s lack of officers, the agreement has since been amended to grant Hinesburg’s police chief, Anthony Cambridge, oversight over both departments.
“From a financial standpoint, it’s a good thing. You can cover more with less,” said Cambridge, who worked previously in regional police departments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “This way you can do more with the little number of officers that the state has. There aren’t enough police officers in the state, so why not cover more area with the officers that we do have?”
Since the agreement was inked, both towns have met to discuss fully merging the two departments into one. But the effort to merge the two departments by creating a municipal union district has been kept on the back burner, said Hinesburg’s town manager, Todd Odit.
Like many other towns, Hinesburg still has work to do to recover from flooding that hit the town in July of this year.
Regionalizing services, Odit said, is “worth looking at” and makes more sense for smaller towns. (Hinesburg and Shelburne have also been in discussions to possibly share a public works director, Odit noted.)
“Now, more than ever, the towns are competing for the same resources,” Odit said, but added that time constraints have made it difficult to dive into the details “because there’s always something more immediate.”
Farm fields are flooded from the Winooski River in Middlesex on December 19, 2023. File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
It’s a similar frustration borne out by towns throughout Vermont, bogged down by their own tasks and unable to plod through the time-consuming effort to create inter-municipal arrangements, which in some cases requires legislative approval.
Often, the issue of funding a regional entity, while concurrently funding existing services, can also hinder the process.
In 2018, seven communities in Chittenden County signed on to form the Chittenden County Public Safety Authority to provide regional emergency dispatch services. But years of work failed to bring the system to fruition, and the effort began to unravel in 2023, when Colchester, one of the partner towns, opted not to authorize annual funding for the municipal entity.
It reflected a common problem: attempting to generate the capital costs for a future regional center, while maintaining their own active local service.
“Every time there’s one of those opportunities, potentially, to save money and provide better service by collaborating, we have to create a new organization of towns to do something,” McCarthy said. “The question that we’re asking is, would it be better if we created regions that had some power, responsibility, governance to take on some of the duties that maybe the state is too big for and towns are not big enough for.”
‘Our towns can’t wait’
Given the scope of the challenge — and the workloads towns already face — regional governance advocates are looking to the Legislature to take the lead in addressing the issue.
The lack of regional structure in Vermont amounts to nearly “250 road crews, 250 selectboards all deciding over the same or very similar issues,” said Matt Wormser, the vice chair of the Shelburne selectboard, creating an “incredibly inefficient and duplicative structure in the delivery of municipal services.”
A proponent for regionalization, Wormser argued in a 2023 op-ed that Vermont needs “an Act 46 for municipal government,” referring to the 2015 law that consolidated the state’s 206 school districts into the 50 there are today. The Legislature, he wrote, should try to encourage such consolidation.
But while many perceive the situation as urgent, the legislative committee expects to take its time.
Whether it chooses to recommend bolstering county government, offering more responsibilities to regional planning commissions, or creating entirely new structures, is unclear — and will be for some time, Hardy said.
A final committee report is tentatively aimed for November 2025, but Hardy and McCarthy said that deadline could be extended.
Hardy emphasized that any decision the committee makes will ensure towns retain local control over regional governing bodies.
“I really want to make sure that this is clear, because Vermonters love their small towns, and Vermonters get worried about consolidation,” she said. The aim “wouldn’t be to replace municipalities, but really to enhance them, and to sort of take some burden off of them.”
Still, others have questioned whether Vermont’s local tradition has gotten in the way of better government in past years.
“It’s a New England thing to have local control. I understand that, and I respect that, and I love that,” said Gregory, with the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission, “but it’s not doing any favors for any of us at this point.”
He said he thinks the Legislature should take action sooner rather than later.
“I don’t want to wait for the end of 2025 when this report comes out,” Gregory said. “I think there needs to be some movement on this issue in the next session. Our towns can’t wait another two years while we try to solve everything in one fell swoop.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Does Vermont need regional government? Flooding brings new urgency to a perennial question.