This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
Water utilities across the nation will have to replace all lead pipes within a decade under a new federal rule aimed at tackling a toxin that is particularly dangerous to young children.
In a state with aging infrastructure, Vermont officials are working to assess the implications of the mandate, which the White House finalized earlier this week.
Already, communities across the state have been undertaking a painstaking inventory of all of their service lines to comply with an existing federal rule, said Ben Montross, drinking water program manager with Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation. That means they must survey all of the service lines connected to the water system and document what materials they’re made of. Those results are due back to the state next week.
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That effort has ranged from tiny village schools — which often are distinct public drinking water systems — to larger city water districts, Montross said. Lead from decades-old pipes that connect water mains to buildings can leach into the drinking water supply, posing significant health risks.
“One of the reasons why we need to do these inventories is it’s really hard to guess and to predict where these service lines are,” Montross said.
Getting a sense of where lead pipes might be situated underground has required sifting through old land records and building permits, along with door-to-door visits to inspect water hookups in residents’ homes, said Thomas Garofano, water division manager and chief operator for Rutland City.
But that process has delivered encouraging results: The city has found no lead service lines, Garofano said. It has identified a minimal number of old galvanized pipes — typically steel and coated with a substance meant to prevent corrosion — that will be slated for replacement.
“For the City of Rutland, we look like we’re in pretty good shape,” Garofano said. Public works administrators in Montpelier and Brattleboro gave similar responses on Thursday.
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Right now, DEC’s understanding is that Vermont does not have “copious amounts of lead service lines statewide,” Montross said. Aside from Bennington — which has worked to remove its extensive network of lead service lines over the last several years – the state has not thus far detected other large concentrations of lead lines.
Based on the inventories the department has received already, along with conversations with contractors and consultants completing the work locally, Montross does not expect many “big surprises” when the inventories come in next week.
“We are cautiously optimistic that we have a good sense of what is in store,” Montross said. “But that’s not to say there won’t be, you know, lines that we didn’t know about that we get notified about next week.”
Detecting any lead service lines soon is key. Vermont received an influx of federal cash from the 2021 infrastructure law for replacing lead lines over a five-year period. That funding covers replacements for both the “system-owned” portion of water lines, on municipal land, and the privately-owned portions connecting to homes and other buildings.
Once that money runs out, there will no longer be funding available to address the customer side of the lines, Montross said.
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“So it’s in the water system’s best interest to do it now while the money’s there,” Montross said.
The new mandate rolled out by the Environmental Protection Agency this week to remove all lead lines in 10 years only makes that work more urgent. Currently, if a water system has lead service lines and elevated lead levels in drinking water samples, the operators are required to install treatment – like adjusting pH levels at a water treatment plant or using “corrosion inhibitors,” Montross said. If those interventions don’t work, then they must replace the lead lines.
The new rule goes a step further. “The new regulation isn’t waiting around for treatment,” Montross said. “It’s not allowing the lead lines to stay.”
There is no safe level of lead exposure in children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health risks from even low levels of lead exposure can be long-lasting and irreversible, and include developmental delays, difficulty learning, and behavioral problems.
The new EPA rule lowers the level of lead contamination that will trigger government enforcement. It also requires lead testing in schools that get their water from public utilities. Vermont has had a similar requirement on the books since 2019.
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In a separate announcement on Thursday, several Vermont municipalities will receive funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to mitigate lead exposure in homes.
Burlington has been awarded a $4.8 million grant to address “lead and other housing hazards in 96 housing units,” and Windham County has been awarded a $1.1 million capacity-building grant to develop a program “to determine the prevalence of childhood poisoning, identify and train local contractors to address lead hazards, and create a strategy to incorporate lead hazard control into existing and future housing repair programs.”
A person holds a giant penny at a mock funeral for the coin, which was discontinued in 2025, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What good is a penny at this point? Penny candy is a thing of the past, and a modern-day penny-pincher wouldn’t get very far if this were their get-rich strategy.
(This newsletter, though, costs you less than a penny. Chip in if you can.)
U.S. mints no longer make pennies, a decision that saves taxpayers an estimated $56 million annually. When the U.S. Treasury Department announced the country would stop minting them, it marked the end of an era — sorta.
Though those pesky copper-colored coins remain in circulation, some businesses, both in Vermont and nationwide, have begun experiencing penny shortages.
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Enter H.837. The bill outlines a plan that could allow retailers to phase out the penny by rounding up or down cash transactions to the nearest nickel.
Other states, including Arizona and Indiana, have passed rounding legislation, and a handful of others are considering it. As written, Vermont’s bill wouldn’t require rounding, a similar approach favored in other jurisdictions.
Some Vermont businesses have already adopted rounding. But lobbyists for Vermont businesses say some of their members fear the practice — without explicit state blessing — could open a business up to a lawsuit over alleged unfair and deceptive practices.
Worried or not, rounding will likely become more necessary as pennies get harder to find, Maggie Lenz, a lobbyist for the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association, told the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday. She encouraged the state to create a rounding framework, but discouraged lawmakers from making such a program mandatory.
Rep. Tony Micklus, R-Milton, agreed that rounding should be optional, but said the state should mandate a specific rounding framework for the businesses that choose to round.
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H.837’s approach, which would round down totals ending in 1,2,6 and 7 cents, and round up totals ending in 3, 4, 8 and 9 cents, would seem to be the fairest to consumers and businesses, those who testified agreed.
But the change is likely not net neutral. Zachary Tomanelli, a consumer protection advocate for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, cited a Federal Reserve study that indicated rounding could cost consumers $6 million annually nationwide. That’s because businesses price goods in ways that tend to lead to rounding up.
He called the cost modest and said he generally supported the bill.
Despite H.837 not making it past the crossover deadlines, there’s still hope that pennies might make it into Vermont’s currency cemetery. Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry, the commerce committee’s chair, said his committee could stick the rounding legislation in the Senate’s economic development bill.
That said, you might not want to ditch your pennies quite yet.
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In the know
Here are some numbers for you: Between 2012 and 2022, Vermont’s primary care workforce declined by 13%. In that same time period, the specialist workforce grew by 23%. That’s according to testimony Jessa Barnard, with the Vermont Medical Society, gave to lawmakers in the House Health Care Committee Tuesday. She said the numbers are reflective of a trend in medicine nationwide, attributed to the fact that primary care docs often make less but pay the same high cost for medical school as their peers in more specialized roles.
In Vermont, Barnard said that this widening gap is leading to a particularly acute shortage. According to a report her organization put out in 2022, the state needs 115 primary care providers to meet the national benchmark for our population size. That figure includes OBGYNs, pediatricians and family medicine docs. By 2030, as our state’s population grows even older, the Vermont Medical Society expects the state to need 370 more primary care physicians to meet the national benchmark.
— Olivia Gieger
Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, spoke with members of the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday afternoon about S.327, an economic development bill that supports a number of public resources for business owners across the state.
The bill has had a tough go of it so far.
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Clarkson handed out copies of what she referred to as “the actual bill,” which meant the package voted out by her own Senate Economic Development Committee before being “pretty much fully gutted” on its way through the Senate Appropriations Committee.
In a tight budget year, she said, this bill’s focus was on “supporting what works really well” for Vermont businesses. For Clarkson, that means continuing to invest in the initiatives like the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive program, a set of grants to help businesses expand in the state, which is scheduled to end in January. The Senate, she pointed out, has voted to extend the program for several years in a row, most recently through S.327.
“I am charging the House with doing the same thing,” she said.
Clarkson is also in favor of deepening the state’s relationships with outside investors by funding state delegates abroad. Vermont, she argued, should have more well-placed representation in areas like Québec — which this bill would provide for — and in the future Taiwan, which recently pledged to invest heavily in U.S. tech industries.
“We need somebody whose hand is up saying ‘yes, over here!’” Clarkson said.
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House commerce members met informally with a delegation from Taipei later Tuesday.
— Theo Wells-Spackman
On the move
The Senate advanced a bill Tuesday that would allow parents in Essex County to pay tuition to send pre-K students to New Hampshire schools.
In Vermont’s most rural county, families struggle to access pre-K programs, at least on this side of the border.
But S.214, legislation originally proposed by Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, would allow for a handful of families near the New Hampshire border in Essex County to tuition their pre-K-aged children to New Hampshire schools, Sen. Steve Heffernan, R-Addison, said on the Senate floor.
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Kindergarten through grade 12 are already able to tuition to New Hampshire schools.
The Senate will need to vote on the bill once more before sending it to the House.
Vermont and the federal government faced off Monday over the state’s first-in-the nation law aimed at forcing polluters to pay for the effects of climate change with the Trump administration warning it would spur “the type of chaos that the Constitution is designed to prevent.”
The hearing before Judge Mary Kay Lanthier of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont comes as the administration has unleashed a broad assault on state-based climate efforts, including suing to invalidate the Vermont law establishing a “climate superfund” to recoup money from the oil and gas industry.
The Biden appointee did not tip her hand, pressing attorneys for the state and the federal government over whether the state is within its rights or stepping on federal authority. The administration is challenging a similar law in New York, and a ruling against Vermont would likely jeopardize that law and chill efforts in other states to adopt climate superfunds.
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Vermont argued the law — “a modest action” — was passed by state lawmakers in 2024 to help raise money to deal with climate change.
RUTLAND, Vt. (WCAX) – Attorneys defended Vermont’s landmark climate superfund law on Monday, as it faces a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration.
Vermont lawmakers passed the Climate Superfund Act in 2024 after devastating flooding in 2023 and other extreme weather events.
The law requires certain large fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate-related damage linked to their emissions between 1995 and 2024.
It is being challenged by the federal government, along with the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and attorneys general from 24 Republican-led states.
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They argue Vermont is overstepping and that climate policy should be handled at the federal level.
Attorneys for Vermont and environmental groups asked a federal judge in Rutland to dismiss those challenges, arguing the state has the right to hold companies accountable.
“It was an intense and technical day of legal arguments over whether the Climate Superfund Act passes muster under federal law, and whether it is appropriate under our Constitution and other doctrines, and is going to survive this series of lawsuits that have been filed against it,” said Christophe Courchesne of the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Vermont was the first state to pass a law like this. New York followed, and more than 10 other states are considering similar measures.
This case could help decide whether those laws move forward.
