MONTPELIER, Vt. (WCAX) – A top Vermont lawmaker is calling property tax rates and the potential for another spike a de facto emergency. Senate Leader Phil Baruth is now urging Gov. Phil Scott to take the first full week of the new legislative session to address the soaring costs of schools for next year and the long term.

After a double-digit increase in property tax rates this year, many taxpayers are concerned with affordability to the point where many say they might not stay in Vermont if lawmakers can’t fix it soon.

“My kids are looking to move out of state because it’s very expensive to live in Vermont. It’s as expensive as some of the bigger cities,” said Leslie Borrok of Shelburne.

Borrok says she and her husband might have to do the same if property taxes continue to rise.

“If we’re gonna be on a fixed income with Social Security and whatever monies we’ve been able to pull together, it’s going to be unaffordable for us to continue living here,” she said.

The statewide property tax for education rose 13.7% this year. State leaders are bracing for another double-digit increase in 2025. Among the cost drivers– soaring health care costs for teachers and staff.

It affected the budget at the Slate Valley Unified Union School District, which put five spending plans to voters this year.

“When you have that amount of money being taken up over something that we don’t have control over, that is frustrating I think to all of us in the schools and in the classrooms,” said Brooke Olsen-Farrell, the superintendent of the Slate Valley Unified Union School District.

To keep budgets and tax increases down, school districts may have to grapple with cutting positions, something Alexis Koch knows well as a teacher at Essex High School.

“We basically had to cut a bunch of programming in our schools, a lot of teachers were let go, and I personally since I’m also a teacher in the district also almost was cut back,” Koch said.

In a statement released Monday, Vermont Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth says we are at a critical junction and calls on the governor to propose solutions to the funding crisis at the start of the session. Baruth, D-Chittenden County, wrote, in part: “Vermonters need, want and deserve a thriving public education system as well as affordable and predictable property tax rates. In order to achieve both, we need the Governor’s early, transparent and collaborative engagement.”

Interim Vermont Education Secretary Zoie Saunders says in the short term, the state can again look to pump other tax revenues into the education fund to help offset the impact on property taxes.

“It will require us to make difficult choices. We are operating with a limited amount of money but we understand that there is a need to make some stabilization in our system,” Saunders said.

This past year, the Legislature used approximately $95 million to buy down the average statewide property tax rate from the projected 18.5% to 13.8%.

But the education funding formula may need to be completely rethought for long-term solutions, along with other hard choices, like consolidating schools and larger class sizes.

Both Democrats and Republicans agree there are no easy answers.

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A Vermont Superior Court judge last week dismissed a lawsuit filed by more than a dozen rental property owners challenging Burlington’s regulations governing short-term rentals.

The lawsuit, filed in July 2023 in Chittenden Superior civil court, argued the city overstepped state law when it enacted restrictions in June 2022 on short-term rentals.

Those restrictions set strict limits on property owners who rent out their properties using services such as Airbnb and VRBO. It prohibited short-term rentals in the city unless they are owner-occupied and defined a short-term rental as a dwelling rented to guests for fewer than 30 consecutive days.

The penalty for noncompliance starts with a $100 civil fine and increases to $200 after the second violation.

Burlington is not the only municipality to set limits on short-term rentals. Towns and cities such as South Burlington and Morrisville have in recent years enacted similar regulations in an effort to ensure the availability of housing for long-term residents.

In previous legal filings, the property owners’ attorneys wrote that enforcement would have a “substantial impact on Plaintiffs’ financial stability and greatly harm Plaintiffs’ business interest.”

State law grants municipalities jurisdiction over regulating housing for the purpose of promoting a city’s or town’s health, safety and welfare. But the plaintiffs, 14 different individuals and business entities in Burlington, argued the city overstepped state law by setting duration limits and owner-occupied requirements for rental units.

Superior Court Judge Samuel Hoar was not convinced, and on Nov. 19 dismissed the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs’ claim “fails as a matter of law,” Hoar wrote in the decision, because the city “plainly has broad authority to regulate short-term rentals” under existing statute.

“The relationship between a lack of available long-term housing and strains on the housing market, with impacts on homelessness, is intuitive, as is the consequent impact on a municipality’s general welfare,” Hoar wrote. “Thus, the city’s regulation of short-term rentals bears an obvious and rational relation to public welfare, health, and safety.”

The judge’s decision was first reported by Vermont Public.

The plaintiffs in the case included three individuals — Sean Hurley, Kristin Baker and Petra Winslow — and a number of companies. The properties listed in the suit are mostly located in the city’s Old North End.

Liam Murphy, an attorney with Burlington law firm MSK, which represented the plaintiffs, did not respond to a request for comment. City attorney Kimberlee Sturtevant and city spokesperson Joe Magee did not respond to an email seeking comment.

This story by Liberty Darr was first published in The Other Paper on Nov. 21

As the state’s second-largest city, South Burlington has for decades had plans for a downtown area ripe with commerce, community and connectivity and data now shows those plans are coming to fruition.

The idea for a thriving city center dates back 50 years ​​when South Burlington was officially incorporated as a city in 1971. Those plans for a vibrant downtown began taking shape nearly 10 years later as the term “City Center” would appear in three master plans that followed.

But it wasn’t long ago that the heart of City Center, the roughly 100 acres wedged between Dorset and Hinesburg roads most notable for housing the state’s only Target and Trader Joe’s, looked much different than it does today.

While the city hit a milestone in 2021 when it cut the ribbon on brand new municipal and other community buildings at 180 Market St., Ilona Blanchard, community development director and an employee of the city for over a decade, remembers that even paving that street was a major accomplishment for the city.

“If you were here 15 years ago, half of Market Street was paved and the other half was a dirt road,” she said, letting out a laugh. “When I came here, we had to borrow a grader from an adjoining community to grade it.”

But after what state and local officials recognize as a critical housing shortage, data shows that South Burlington has become one of the largest suppliers of new homes in the state.

A recent analysis put together by the Vermont Housing Financing Agency for the Department of Housing and Community Development, known as the “Vermont Housing Needs Assessment 2025-2029,” outlined staggering statistics for the state of just under 650,000 people.

In recent years, the report outlines that the supply of available homes has simply not kept pace with the increased demand to live in Vermont.

To accommodate projected growth in households living year-round in Vermont, replace homes that are lost from the housing stock due to disrepair, normalize vacancy rates and house the homeless, Vermont is likely to need an additional 24,000-36,000 total homes across the state over the next five years.

Without increased supply, Vermont’s home sale and rental markets will continue to grow even tighter than they currently are, the report says, with prices likely to continue to skyrocket and further intensify an affordability crisis throughout the state.

According to the report, Vermont’s homeowner vacancy rate — the number of homes on the market compared to the total number of actual households — is estimated at 1.2 percent, below the 2.0 percent rate considered indicative of a healthy housing market, with Chittenden County at a notably low vacancy rate of .5 percent, reflecting the high demand for homes in the region.

While the Legislature made monumental strides in housing legislation over the last two years — Act 47 and working to modernize Vermont’s 50-year-old land use law, Act 250 — meant to spur development and limit obstacles to building housing, a campaign, Building Homes Together, launched by Chittenden County Regional Planning, Champlain Housing Trust and non-profit developer Evernorth aims to build nearly 1,000 units of housing per year in the county over the next five-year period.

But in October, the group announced that Chittenden County had drastically failed to meet that goal with 720 units built in 2023.

Housing plans

Nearly 40 percent of those homes — 290 — were in South Burlington’s city limits. That trend, director of planning and zoning Paul Conner said, has been happening over the last 10 years and is something the city has specifically planned for and welcomed.

The boom can mostly be traced to 2012 when the city took steps to implement a financing model that city manager Jessie Baker said is one of the most powerful economic tools available to municipalities: tax increment financing or TIF. To most, the idea is mysteriously complex, but to city officials like Blanchard, that was the catalyst for much of the growth seen today.

The TIF district, a subset of the 300-acre City Center, was officially adopted by the city council in 2012 and allows the municipality to take out debt to build public infrastructure projects and pay off the debt using future tax revenue from new development.

​​The idea is that as the infrastructure is built and improved, it attracts private sector investment in new and renovated buildings and incrementally increases the value of the grand list, or the total value of all city property.

Since its inception, more than 500 homes have been built in the district; 187 are under construction, and 46 have been permitted and are awaiting construction. Of those, 139 are perpetually affordable. These numbers do not include the roughly 200 new homes built within City Center, but outside of the TIF district.

“When I think about the TIF district, I think about it as the kernel or the seed,” Blanchard said. “What we’re seeing right now is we have now established a downtown market in South Burlington, which we did not have before and the TIF district as an economic tool has established this form of the downtown. It’s the core of it. But that also means that it is blazing the way for other properties in the area to build on the success that is here.”

Baker noted that a large portion of these numbers comes from the University of Vermont and the University of Vermont Medical Center’s investment in housing but countered the common perception that since the institution’s faculty, staff and students have first-right of refusal to the housing, it’s not really adding positively to the housing stock.

“I think that’s a real misconception,” she said. “A lot of these folks are folks that will be otherwise living in our community, in other apartment buildings or condos or pricing out other folks who want to live here. It’s important to always note that adding capacity across the living spectrum is adding capacity. It’s not fighting between our neighbors on what capacity that is, whether it is affordable housing, student housing, designated housing, it is still adding new homes.”

Competing goals

But with that growth, both Baker and Conner noted that there is simultaneously an increased focus on things like environmental protection, climate resiliency and connectivity. All these are also areas of focus that the city’s planning department and commission focused on when crafting the new land use regulations that were just passed by the city council earlier this month. But the team also noted that the battle between the need for housing and protecting portions of Vermont’s landscape is not always easy to balance.

Like many neighboring communities, some residents in South Burlington have voiced opposition to development and lawsuits over environmental and aesthetic concerns have frequently ended up in court.

“Zoning is an incredibly strong tool to be strategic as a community,” Baker said. “I think South Burlington is really trying to thread that needle right now and actively participate in all the climate conservation efforts and the housing efforts, and I think that’s a hard conversation in our community, and that’s a hard conversation at the state level.”

While South Burlington is partly leading the way for housing goals in the county, the work to meet demand is not possible without collaboration with surrounding communities, Conner and Baker said, which reflects the way people inherently move through the county on a daily basis.

“They don’t live their daily lives within the bounds of one single municipality,” Conner said. “They use Chittenden County and beyond every day for their everyday needs. The community uses our core communities interchangeably every day, and so it’s therefore our responsibility collectively to make sure that the transportation, housing, the services, all that is provided to the way people live.”

The growth over the last 10 years is only set to continue as the city has plans for even more infrastructure projects — all approved by voters — to create a more walkable, thriving downtown and includes projects like the planned walking and biking bridge over I-89.

“It’s always really thrilling to go outside and to see people walking on Market Street and sitting at the bench in front of the library and city hall, seeing the seniors in the senior center,” Blanchard said. “Our downtown is about people, and it’s just so great to see people using it in the way that it was intended.”