When Rep. Amy Sheldon (D-Middlebury) announced last week that she will support repealing key provisions of the land-use reform law she helped craft two years ago, many in Montpelier were stunned. The chair of the House Committee on the Environment is one of the most steadfast advocates for natural resource protection in the Statehouse.
Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth (D/P-Chittenden-Central) said he was “shocked” to hear that Sheldon was willing to kill some of the law’s environmental protections instead of simply delaying when they would take effect, as the Senate recently voted to do.
But those who closely watched the testimony in Sheldon’s House committee in the days before her decision were not surprised that she capitulated.
“Something that seemed unfathomable a month or so ago seemed inevitable by the second week of testimony,” Neil Ryan, one of the most vocal critics of the new environmental protections in Act 181, told Seven Days.
Ryan, a Corinth cattle farmer and writer, described the proposed regulations as a form of class warfare. Urban environmentalists, in the name of protecting sensitive habitats, had passed top-down rules for which rural towns and their residents would pay the price, he argued.
He made his case on the Statehouse steps last month, along with hundreds of other rural Vermonters angered by the new regulations. Ryan posted on social media, including on a Facebook page that has gained more than 10,000 members. And he testified in Sheldon’s committee, laying out why he believed two central elements of Act 181 were flawed and their rollout botched.
The 2024 law was meant to loosen red tape on development in urban areas while toughening regulations in environmentally sensitive areas such as forests, headwater streams and wildlife corridors. The legislation has been called a “grand bargain” between housing advocates and environmentalists, but it was controversial. Gov. Phil Scott vetoed the bill, but a supermajority of Democratic lawmakers forced it into law over his objection.
The elimination of Act 250 land-use review for housing projects in urban areas with robust zoning has been well received. But opposition exploded in so-called “Tier 3” rural areas where Act 250 reviews would be tougher and a new regulation would trigger environmental review of any proposed new roads longer than 800 feet. Ryan and many others argued that those pieces needed to be repealed.
Senators heard the blowback, but they opted for delay, not repeal. Last month they passed S.325, which would have pushed off some implementation dates to 2028 and 2030.
That wasn’t good enough for critics, who had come to view the process that created Act 181 as flawed, Ryan said. Lawmakers didn’t do enough to engage citizens before the law was passed, he said, and the impending regulations felt to many like a done deal even though they were still being written.
“The rural landowners, homeowners, small farmers and woodlot owners most affected by Tier 3 and the road rule were mostly engaged after the law’s architecture was set, not during it,” Ryan told lawmakers.
So, when regulators began developing the rules and pinpointing the rural areas that would be affected, residents came to view the regulations as making their lives more difficult while doing the opposite for urban developers, Ryan said.
“Trust has been broken,” Ryan told lawmakers. “Rural Vermonters — and I speak for a lot of them — increasingly view a tiered framework as one that creates first-, second- and third-class citizens.”
That anger boiled over during one of the committee meetings when Rep. Mike Tagliavia (R-Corinth) lost his patience with an environmental advocate as he was testifying.
Jamey Fidel, vice president of Audubon Vermont, was one of the architects of Act 181 during his time as the forest and wildlife program director at the Vermont Natural Resources Council. He’s been warning about the dangers of forest fragmentation for decades, something the new road rule sought to curb.
Fidel outlined for lawmakers on the environment committee a number of ways he felt the rules could be revised to lessen their impact on landowners. He said postponing the rules would give regulators time to narrow the areas affected and to work with landowners on other ways to accomplish conservation goals.
Tagliavia, who had been arguing for repeal of Act 181 for weeks, had heard enough.
He ridiculed Fidel’s call for more public input now that Vermonters had objected to a process that “feels like a cheese maze with nothing but dead ends.”
“They want action. They don’t want bullshit!” Tagliavia yelled.
The five-member Land Use Review Board, a group of professional planners, has been tasked with writing the rules to implement Act 181. It has repeatedly asked lawmakers for more time to engage with Vermonters struggling to understand the impacts, according to Alex Weinhagen, a former Hinesburg planner who serves on the board.
“It was a difficult job to do, and we needed more time to work with everyone,” Weinhagen told Seven Days.
But the pressure to repeal only grew.
More than a dozen selectboards urged lawmakers to repeal Act 181 or parts of it. The Rural Caucus of Vermont, an influential tripartisan group of more than 50 lawmakers, pressed Democratic leaders to repeal parts of the law as well, warning of “significant uncertainty and anger in rural communities.”
Housing advocate Miro Weinberger, a prominent Democrat and executive chair of advocacy group Let’s Build Homes, warned that the provisions could make it harder to build urgently needed homes in rural areas.
As the support for delay or repeal mounted, the potential political fallout became clearer not only to committee members but to all Democrats.
“I had multiple lawmakers tell me ‘We are going to get destroyed at the polls if we don’t do something,’” said Austin Davis, director of government affairs for the Lake Champlain Chamber.
I had multiple lawmakers tell me, “We are going to get destroyed at the polls if we don’t do something.”
austin davis
Act 181 started to remind lawmakers of another environmental policy that became a painful political liability. In 2023, the Democratic-controlled legislature passed a law known as the clean heat standard that sought to reduce fossil fuel emissions but which Scott blasted as raising costs for Vermonters.
The program never went into effect because energy regulators concluded it was too cumbersome for such a small state. Republicans wielded affordability as a cudgel in the 2024 election; Democrats lost more than two dozen seats and their supermajorities in both chambers.
“Lawmakers were worried Act 181 was going to be another clean heat standard,” Davis said.
Lachlan Francis, chair of the Vermont Democratic Party, agreed that Democrats faced political peril if they did not act.
“There is no doubt that it would have been a difficult way to go into the 2026 election given the energy behind repeal,” he said.
On Tuesday, the Land Use Review Board said it was suspending work on the controversial new rules because the legislature intends to repeal.
House Speaker Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington) praised Sheldon and her committee for listening closely to feedback and changing course, which she likened to the way the House has responded to concerns about forced school consolidations proposed by the governor.
“Vermonters have been clear that a top-down approach, whether it be land-use policy or the administration’s proposal to force school consolidation into five districts, is not the right approach for shaping the future of our state,” Krowinski said.
In an interview, Krowinski said one idea that has emerged from the testimony is to form an oversight committee to track the rollout of environmental policies.
It remains to be seen how the final version of S.325, the bill calling for implementation delays, takes shape. Sen. Russ Ingalls (R-Essex), who was active in the public pushback against Act 181, said nothing but full repeal would do for what he called a “terrible law.”
Scott, who supports the Act 250 exemptions for developed areas, called it “great news” that lawmakers appeared to support partial repeal.
The original sponsor of S.325, Sen. Anne Watson (D/P-Washington), said she wanted to take more testimony on the changes, but she seemed to accept that a mere delay of the rules had become politically untenable.
“The more that I have learned, the more I have come to understand that there were some legitimate problems with the policy,” Watson said.
Lawmakers often get nervous when they receive lots of negative feedback about how a policy they’ve passed affects their constituents, said Lauren Hierl, VNRC’s executive director. That’s especially true when people feel their property rights are being restricted, she said.
“We still, thankfully, live in a democracy,” Hierl said, “and people have been raising their voices and sharing their perspective, and lawmakers are responding, which is, to me, what their responsibility is and part of their job.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Act of Contrition? | Vermont lawmakers added special protections for rural land two years ago. Facing a revolt, they now favor repeal.”
This article appears in April 22 • 2026.
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