This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
Gov. Phil Scott has appointed the members of a new board that will administer Act 250, Vermont’s statewide development review law.
The new Land Use Review Board replaces the old Natural Resources Board, a shift mandated under Act 181, a major land-use reform law passed last year. That law takes steps to relax Act 250’s reach in existing downtowns and village centers across the state, and also lays the groundwork for extending Act 250’s protections in areas deemed ecologically sensitive.
But the new law also changes how Act 250 is administered. The Land Use Review Board is made up of five full-time members with relevant professional experience — a significant change from the former citizen-board structure. The new members have backgrounds in municipal and regional planning, environmental law, and civil engineering. The review board will also play a key role in overseeing a years-long mapping process that will cement Act 250’s jurisdiction in the future. (Regional district offices still make permitting decisions on individual projects, however).
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“Vermont faces a significant housing crisis and the work of this board will play a very important role in helping us address it, while protecting our beautiful landscape and environment,” Scott said in a statement announcing the appointments earlier this week. “I’m confident this board has the diverse expertise, work ethic, and passion to tackle the work that’s required in Act 181 while also forwarding common sense improvements to the law to further our shared goals.”
The new board chair, Janet Hurley, currently serves as the assistant director and planning program manager for the Bennington County Regional Commission. Before that, she worked as a local planner throughout the state, in Manchester, South Burlington, Milton, and Westford, according to a press release from Scott’s office.
Since Act 250 was enacted in 1970, “it can certainly be credited with saving Vermont from rampant development,” Hurley said in an interview. “But it can also certainly be responsible for the depth of our housing crisis, because the burden of Act 250 permitting — often duplicative, especially in our town and village centers — just made housing development that’s affordable much more difficult to achieve for so many years.”
In the past, new housing projects would trigger Act 250 review based on how large they were, and how many homes a developer had already built in a given area during a given timeframe. That system could in fact lead to the sprawl it was trying to prevent, prompting developers to avoid bumping up against Act 250 permitting by building “smaller scale, single family home development dispersed around our towns and villages,” Hurley said.
Act 181 shifts the permitting program toward “location-based jurisdiction,” meaning some areas of the state that already have robust local zoning review and water and wastewater infrastructure could be exempt from Act 250 altogether. That new system will take years to implement, though, and the transition will be one of the board’s primary tasks.
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As that longer process plays out, lawmakers made temporary exemptions to Act 250 last year. They were designed to encourage dense housing in already-developed areas, and so far, the carve-outs appear to be working as intended. Hurley thinks loosening Act 250’s rules around housing will make a big difference.
“The market just can’t bear the cost of construction at this point, and so any relief to the financing of new housing development is going to be meaningful,” Hurley said.
More from Vermont Public: Vermont loosened Act 250 rules for housing. Here’s where developers are responding
Still, members of the board think Act 250 will continue to play an important role in years to come.
“The housing crisis requires us to act swiftly, and that means a lot more housing, period,” said Alex Weinhagen, current director of planning and zoning in Hinesburg and another new board member. “But larger projects have impacts, and the whole point of having a development review process is to make sure that we acknowledge those and that the projects, you know, do what they can to minimize them.”
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To Weinhagen, Act 181’s goals were to reform statewide development review so that “it’s smarter, it works better, it’s applied consistently across the state, and it’s only used when it’s needed — and not used in places where there’s adequate local level development review happening,” he said.
The board will study whether appeals of Act 250 permits should be heard by the board itself — or continue to be heard in state environmental court. Legislators and administration officials hotly debated the issue last session, arguing over which option would in fact speed up lengthy appeal timelines, and ultimately directed the new board to assess it further.
The other members of the new board include L. Brooke Dingledine, an environmental attorney in Randolph; Kirsten Sultan, an Act 250 district coordinator in the Northeast Kingdom with a background in engineering; and Sarah Hadd, a former local planner and current town manager for Fairfax, according to the press release.
The new board appointments took effect on Jan. 1, and the board will begin its work on Jan. 27.
Have questions, comments or tips? Send us a message.
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.
