MONTPELIER, Vt. (WCAX) – About 160 households will no longer receive hotel rooms following the end of cold weather rules for the state’s General Assistance program this week.

Anti-homeless advocates said last year the federal government authorized Vermont to use state Medicaid funds for a program that could supplement rent for people at risk of homelessness.

State leaders this week said that is not an option as Vermont is still building the program.

Vermont Human Services Secretary Jenney Samuelson said at a press conference this week the waiver gives the authority, not the funding or infrastructure to build the program.

“The state would need to put up significant investments including enrolling housing providers, landlords, developing and building IT systems,” Samuelson said. “These steps require significant time and resources.”

The state legislature and Governor Scott’s administration have been trying to wind down the use of hotels and instead ramp up shelters to get people back on their feet.

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Amanda Rancourt was facing a predicament.

She had started raising chickens in response to rising egg prices. But last May, a clutch of baby chicks she was raising in her backyard had grown up. Unexpectedly, one of the supposedly all-female chickens had a surprise for Rancourt.

The chicken turned out to be a rooster.

Rancourt knew what that meant. She could keep the chickens. But she lives in Barre City.

The rooster would have to go.

“It’s unfortunate. I literally live on the Barre City, Barre Town line,” she said. “It just kind of stinks we weren’t able to keep him, legally.”

Over the past few years, complaints across Vermont municipalities regarding roosters and their chatter have spurred many towns to ban them within their borders. Ordinances banning roosters have been in place in Burlington, South Burlington, Williston and Essex Junction for years. Yet regulations are not consistent, even between neighboring communities. The town of Barre, where Rancourt lives, has rooster regulations, while just up the road, the city of Montpelier does not.

As winter finally lets up and backyard flocks begin stirring from their coops, Vermont municipalities are increasingly saying “no” to roosters, creating a patchwork of local regulations that routinely pit the state’s agricultural heritage against suburban quality of life.

More communities have begun considering new bans. Last fall, the St. Albans City Council unanimously voted to ban roosters, with the threat of daily fines and possible court-ordered removal if a rooster is not moved, according to officials. A series of noise complaints regarding roosters crowing around the city had pushed the government to look at restrictions, St. Albans Mayor Tim Smith said. 

Urban density fueled the complaints, with most residents living just 30 feet apart. And perhaps a blind spot in the city’s animal control laws helped the backyard chickens proliferate, said Chip Sawyer, St. Albans’ planning director and author of the proposed ordinance.

“A barking dog, you can deal with,” Sawyer said. “You can order someone with a barking dog to keep their dog inside. You can’t really order a rooster to be kept inside the home.”

The new rule drew little resistance. Only one family with a pet rooster complained, Smith said.

“To have some one person feel that his activities, his hobbies, whatever you want to call it, take priority over his neighbors is, in my opinion, very selfish,” Smith said. 

Meanwhile, a similar dispute between neighbors in Shelburne prompted the town to debate adopting its own restrictions on roosters. 

“They start yodeling at dawn and go on until dark,” wrote Ruth Hagerman, a Shelburne resident, in an email to town government representatives that was shared with VTDigger. 

“They are disturbing the peace of those around them and are providing a textbook example of how neighborly policing doesn’t work.”

Yet after debating a drafted law, which was based on ordinances in neighboring municipalities, the Shelburne selectboard decided during a meeting last year to keep things as they were. 

Shelburne Town Manager Matt Lawless was wary of overregulating how residents raise animals and produce their own food.

“We need to be cautious, I think, in when we deal with nuisance or when we’re concerned about health and safety, that we also look at the positive value provided, and we not make it hard for people to do things that are good,” Lawless said.

A ban on roosters felt too controlling, according to Shelburne board member Andrew Everett. He felt that for Shelburne, a community that is a mix of suburban and rural, changing traditional Vermont ways should be resisted until absolutely necessary.  

Meanwhile, Williston’s war over backyard chickens has now spanned nearly a decade, with residents on smaller properties twice rebuffed in their efforts to keep hens. The city still classifies chickens as livestock, prohibited on any lot under an acre. The most recent attempt to lift the ban died in September 2023. Selectboard members who had previously supported the ban again voted to peel the chicken provisions off a broader housing package, shelving them indefinitely.

Chicken bans in Williston have survived at least two attempts to overturn them, the most recent in 2023. Photo by Al Frey/Williston Observer

The trend of banning roosters from Vermont municipalities has caused a somewhat unintended wrinkle: what happens to the roosters?

The growing number of roosters that need to be re-housed has become an issue, said Pattrice Jones, cofounder of VINE Sanctuary in Springfield, an animal sanctuary that assists in rescuing roosters. 

Sanctuaries around the state have been overwhelmed with requests to take roosters, Jones said. Chicks from hatcheries and farm stores that unexpectedly turn out to be roosters — and misconceptions about roosters being inherently violent — add to the problem.

But the growing list of local ordinances banning roosters has resulted in even more requests to take them in, adding to VINE’s “perpetual” waiting list, Jones said. 

For many, emotional attachment to their roosters complicates the decision of what to do with the feathered pets. 

“We hand raised them from when they were chicks and my kids were attached to them,” said Rancourt, the Barre chickens owner. 

After a few months of looking, she was able to find a more rural home for her rooster, away from the suburban neighborhoods and the rooster ban in Barre. 

“We understand that if they ended up becoming a problem with people, that they may end up having to cull them and eat them,”. 

“Personally I couldn’t do that.”

MONTPELIER — After weeks of false starts and discarded plans, the House Education Committee passed an education reform proposal Thursday. But it’s a far cry from what was envisioned in last year’s landmark Act 73, and will almost certainly face political hurdles in the House, Senate and from Gov. Phil Scott’s administration.

The proposal, H.955, which passed with only Democratic support, would create study committees in seven areas of the state to facilitate voluntary mergers of the state’s 119 school districts. Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, the House Education Committee chair, praised the committee’s work before calling the vote.

“For the field and school districts and Vermonters out there, we are respecting — I think, very much so — the different ways we deliver education in Vermont,” he said. “We are respecting local voice. We are respecting an aversion to forced mergers at the state level.”

The proposal marks a compromise after weeks of political gridlock among committee members over perennial issues like school choice and preserving local voice in rural communities.

Education reform has consumed much of the political oxygen in the Statehouse this year and last. Gov. Phil Scott, buoyed by Republican electoral gains in the November 2024 election, ushered in plans to consolidate Vermont’s 119 school districts and reform the state’s education finance system.

Leaders in both parties have endorsed plans for reform, citing the ever increasing cost of education and the need to expand access to educational opportunities.

But Thursday’s committee plan is out of step with the more ambitious ideas floated by Scott, his Agency of Education and even Conlon himself, which would have mandated school district mergers. Conlon’s initial plan in February would have forced the merger of the state’s 119 school districts into 27, each with student populations between 2,000 and 4,000.

Yet after several weeks of deadlock, the committee pivoted to a proposal with voluntary mergers. Conlon’s plan for forced mergers “didn’t get a lot of love” from colleagues or constituents, he said.

The Senate, meanwhile, continues to hammer away at the details of their own proposal, which doesn’t look likely to follow Scott’s vision for education reform either.

The House proposal has a long road ahead of it, and will likely change significantly as it proceeds through the House and Senate. Lawmakers in both chambers will scrutinize the plan’s emphasis on voluntary mergers, and question whether the plan could find the types of savings the governor has called for.

“For me, there are misses in this,” Rep. Joshua Dobrovitch, R-Williamstown, said Thursday. “I feel like we’re not actually providing the relief that our taxpayers want in a timely fashion.”

The bill will next be taken up by the House ways and means and appropriations committees.

To merge or not to merge

The House’s proposal borrows from the school redistricting task force, the body created last year to draw up school consolidation maps. That group’s recommendation last fall bucked calls for forced mergers and instead suggested new regional entities that would share services among member school districts.

The proposal advanced Thursday would overlay seven cooperative education service agencies, or CESAs, over the state’s 119 school districts and 52 governing units.

Those regional entities, already in use in southeastern Vermont, would then facilitate the sharing of services in special education, professional development, human resources and other areas for member school districts.

Grants from the Vermont Agency of Education would help stand up those agencies, and they would be managed by a board of directors appointed by member supervisory unions and supervisory districts.

Study committees would then be formed within each CESA, which would work towards a voluntary merger process for member districts. All member school districts would be required to participate in the committees.

The study committees’ work would run through 2027 and 2028. Residents in school districts queued up by the study committees for a merger would then vote on whether to merge.

The law does offer preliminary guidance for how study committees could consider merging districts.

One proposal in the legislation, for example, would have the Addison Central, Addison Northwest and Lincoln school districts merge with the Mount Abraham Unified School District.

Another would see the Franklin Northeast, Northern Mountain Valley and Missisquoi school districts merge into one.

But voters in a district in any proposed merger would have the final say under the legislation.

The legislation would also change the effective date of the foundation formula, moving it back from July 1 2028, to July 1, 2030.

Act 73 will shift spending decisions away from local districts and their communities and to the state via a foundation formula, which would then provide each school district with a set amount of money based on the number of students enrolled.

Policy v. politics

Scott and leaders in his Agency of Education have made it clear they do not support the House’s proposal.

Scott said Wednesday he was “appreciative” of lawmakers moving anything out at all, but the proposal was not something he could accept. He’s previously threatened to veto the state budget if lawmakers don’t follow through on his education reform demands.

“If we end up in the same position that we’ve ended up in years past with increasing property taxes that dysfunction won’t allow us to fix, the voters will decide what to do with that,” he said Wednesday.

Education Secretary Zoie Saunders last Friday told lawmakers in the House Education Committee that the direction of both the House and Senate’s proposals were “concerning.”

“Each of the proposals that are put forward are not fully benefiting from scale. And we know we need to move to scale,” she said. “And if we don’t, the smaller districts will be at an inherent disadvantage.”

In the end, Conlon said he was bound by the political realities in the Statehouse. He said barriers like support for school choice and local control were too difficult to clear.
“The world we are trying to maneuver and move around in is not just policy, it is also politics,” he said.

This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.