Garbage. That’s what Rick Knight sees when he looks across the street from his home in rural Sutton.
His neighbor’s property on Route 5 is an eyesore covered with junked trailers, broken pallets, twisted sheet metal, plastic buckets, a basketball hoop, gasoline cans and piles of used tires.
“That’s nothing. Wait’ll you see around back,” Knight said on a recent visit.
Knight, who moved to the tiny Northeast Kingdom town from Ferrisburgh three years ago, set off down the highway toward what he said was the real problem. He bushwhacked down an embankment, clambered up onto railroad tracks and hiked along them until he came to a spot overlooking the rear of his neighbor’s property.
A mountain of used tires spilled down the embankment behind the neighbor’s aging mobile home. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of discarded tires filled an overgrown gully between the home and the railway. Most were intact, but some appeared to have been burned or shredded.
Knight said he’s worried about the environmental damage from such a pile, which is close to a creek, and frustrated that the neither the town nor the state appear to be doing a damn thing about it.
He called the Department of Environmental Conservation two years ago and was told it was considering installing video cameras to try to document any dumping. He called again recently and was told the department was still considering it.
Town officials told him the owner has agreed to remove 20 tires a month from the property until the problem is resolved.
“That’s just great,” Knight said. “At that rate, in about 75 years we’ll have nothing to worry about.”
This property is one of many that illustrate an intractable problem in Vermont. Local zoning officers and understaffed state environmental enforcement officials lack resources to address illegal dumping, and the situations can persist for years. That frustrates neighbors such as Knight, who are forced to live with the nuisance.
The DEC’s enforcement division has investigated 4,450 complaints of solid waste dumping and unpermitted scrapyards since 2015, with 587 cases remaining unresolved. With only five investigators and no funds to help people clean up problem properties, the work is overwhelming, according to division director Marjorie Klark.
“That’s a high, high volume of complaints to investigate,” Klark said.
So, the small division prioritizes the worst cases and relies on property owners to clean up when told to do so, she said. Sometimes court orders are needed to force cleanups.
Mental health issues are not uncommon in these situations, she said.
“We’re talking about people with limited capacity. They don’t understand environmental rules. They don’t even understand that it’s wrong,” Klark said. “If you told some of these folks, ‘Hey, hire a contractor to get this cleaned up,’ they wouldn’t know where to begin.”
Other property owners simply lack resources to deal with their mess, leaving local and state officials with few good options.
Knight’s neighbor, Sheila Conley, acknowledged that cleaning up her property would be a huge challenge. She told Seven Days that she inherited the property from her grandfather several years ago and that he “fixed cars.”
“I don’t have a lot of those details,” she said.
Conley said she has a disability, lives on a fixed income and has been trying to get the run-down mobile home into livable shape. She got rid of some of the tires last month but said that without a vehicle of her own, she isn’t sure how she can regularly remove more. A program to help her clean up would be “a miracle.”
“I’m just doing the best I can,” she said.
The town is not imposing fines on her at the moment, she said, because she isn’t allowing any more tires to be dumped.
Half a mile west on Route 5 at the intersection of Underpass Road, her uncle, James Perry, has amassed so many tires that they are spilling off of his property and onto the road. Tires are stacked so thickly on both sides of his driveway that there is no longer room for a vehicle to pass, just a narrow walking path. One day last week, a pickup truck at the top of the driveway was completely surrounded by tires.
When approached at the base of his steep driveway, Perry emerged from a friend’s car wearing a colorful hat and a confused scowl. He soon warned a reporter to stop taking photos.
The town notified Perry in a March 4 letter hand-delivered by a sheriff’s deputy that he would be fined $25 per day if he didn’t begin moving the tires within a month. Perry said he never got the letter.
He nevertheless got the message and recently moved about 3,000 tires off the road with the help of a friend, he said. Many were sold in South Carolina, he said, while another guy wants 500 to use as a fence. A piece of scrap wood sat on the pile with “Tires for Sale” scrawled in orange spray paint. There was no phone number; Perry said he has no phone.
Where does he get all the tires?
“Everywhere,” he said.
He insisted, however, that he is no longer in the scrap tire-hauling biz.
“I told them I can’t get rid of them all in three days. I need time,” Perry said. “They said they would work with me if I kept getting rid of the tires.”
Joe Witt, the town’s zoning administrator, said Perry had likely been getting paid by local tire shops and mechanics to dispose of used tires. In addition to the tires spilling out onto the street and along the driveway, there are an untold number of tires behind the home, which borders a wetland, he said.
Town officials repeatedly explained to Perry that he can’t stockpile tires like that, but he kept it up until the tires overflowed onto the road, Witt said. The town ultimately delivered the letter warning of daily fines.
“It’s not like we’re sitting on our hands. We’re doing what we can do,” Witt said. “There are lot of people in Vermont that, if they own property, [think] it’s theirs to do with what they want.”
The town was hoping that the state might intervene.
“I figured they were going to jump on it, but they didn’t do anything,” Witt said.
It’s not like we’re sitting on our hands. We’re doing what we can do.
joe witt
There’s a similar story in Enosburgh. Riley Bockus lives across Stonehouse Road from a property owned by Larry Benoit, an elderly farmer. Bockus said the cows were removed about a year ago and Benoit now lives in a nursing home. Bockus has long known that the property was littered with garbage, some of which can be seen from the road, but was surprised by what he found when he traipsed deeper onto the property.
Two dozen deteriorating semitrailers sat in an overgrown field, some full of tires, construction debris and household garbage. The surrounding woods are filled with an array of rubbish: collapsed mobile homes, junked cars, a rusty van, decrepit boats, clay pipes, overgrown travel trailers, discarded appliances, 50-gallon drums and piles of household garbage. Much of the material is submerged in a wetland area.
“There is no reason it should be like this,” Bockus said.
He filed a complaint with the town and DEC that included photos. A DEC officer confirmed part of Bockus’ complaint during a visit in February but said he couldn’t visit the entire property because there was too much standing water. The officer indicated that he spoke to the town zoning official, who did not think there was any hazardous material there. He also spoke to Benoit’s daughter, Carmen Benoit, who now lives in the state of Georgia and said she wants to clean up the property, according to a state report.
As long as the property owner is working on the issue, Enosburgh doesn’t envision taking enforcement action, according to Ed Adrian, an attorney for the town.
“I can tell you 100 percent the town is not ignoring it,” he said.
Bockus is frustrated by what he feels is a slow response. The town, however, is satisfied for now with the progress.
“If the owners are consciously and actively working to clean up the site, it seems unjust ‘to kick them while they are down’ or actively trying to come into compliance,” Adrian said in an email.
Carmen Benoit, in her statements to the DEC, suggested that other people, including Bockus, might be responsible for the dumping, according to the state report.
“That doesn’t sound to me like someone who is accountable. That sounds to me like someone shedding the blame,” Bockus said.
Benoit said she is working on a cleanup plan. Some of the vehicles are surely her father’s, she acknowledged, but some others may have been placed there by another individual who has “taken advantage of my elderly father.”
“I’m appalled by the whole thing,” she told Seven Days. “I love the state of Vermont. I want it to be beautiful. And I know the property has some work to do, and I’m actively working on it.”
She declined to further detail the cleanup efforts.
Klark, the state official, said she is trying to beef up the enforcement team by filling three vacant positions, which would bring the number of active officers up to eight. But there are limits to what they can do. They can’t go on a property without the owner’s consent or a court order. And they need to take special precautions when people make threats, she said.
Ideally, Klark said she’d have one environmental enforcement officer per county — 14 all told. But that won’t happen anytime soon. She has never requested funding for that many staff members, nor for cleaning up any properties, she said.
“We could have all sorts of programs, but it’s a balance,” she said. “We’re trying to level-fund budgets. We are trying not to have taxpayers pay more every year, right?” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Dump Next Door | Vermont is littered with junk-strewn properties. Neighbors seethe as cleanups drag on for years.”
This article appears in July 1 • 2026.
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