Peter Anthony and Gordon George lived for years on opposite banks of the flood-prone Stevens Branch of the Winooski River in Barre.
Anthony, 80, is a retired economics professor who now serves as a state representative. He raised his family in a modest two-story home just feet from where granite-lined banks have for more than a century contained the river in a man-made channel.
George, a 74-year-old retired semiconductor tool operator, moved into a house across the river in 2009. He planned to fix it up for his son and daughter-in-law but ended up living there himself.
Both men grew accustomed to the occasional flooding of their old homes and the recovery ritual of mucking out silt-filled basements and helping neighbors do the same. But neither was prepared for the July 2023 flood that not only surged into their basements but also filled their first floors with several feet of water, rendering both homes uninhabitable.
All too aware of the risk of future floods, George and Anthony decided not to rebuild. Both were hoping for a lifeline from a federal program that would pay them a fair price for their homes and let them move on with their lives.
Only one of them has any hope that will happen.
Anthony’s application was approved by Barre officials earlier this year, giving him a shot at some of the millions that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has made available for Vermont. George’s request was denied — not by faceless federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., but by officials in his own city.
“It’s not gonna happen,” Mayor Thom Lauzon told George as he pleaded for the Barre City Council’s help last month.
FEMA’s buyouts come with a caveat: The home and other structures must be removed and the property permanently set aside as green space. Lauzon said the city needs to be “judicious” in supporting buyouts because demolishing too many homes could erode the city’s tax base and exacerbate Vermont’s housing crisis.
So, Barre officials have established criteria for deciding which buyouts are justified. George’s home was one of dozens that didn’t make the cut.
Local leaders across Vermont are being forced to make difficult decisions in the wake of three major floods in 12 months. They must choose which of their flooded-out neighbors will be allowed to seek federal buyouts and who will not be given that chance.
While most buyout funds come from the federal government, the first gatekeepers are selectboards and city councils across Vermont: Without local government approval, FEMA will not consider an application.
Anthony’s buyout was endorsed by city staff because demolishing his home and several nearby ones would allow for the restoration of a floodplain, which could reduce downstream flooding. George’s home was deemed too isolated, and removing it was considered unlikely to improve the city’s flood resiliency.
Interest in the FEMA buyout program has soared since major floods in July 2023, December 2023 and July 2024. The state, which is helping manage buyout applications for cities and towns, now has 295 active applications from 67 communities either submitted to FEMA or in the queue, with many more expected. Doug Farnham, the state’s chief recovery officer, estimated that FEMA could spend up to $50 million on buyouts in Vermont.
Some communities, including Plainfield and Middlesex, are allowing any homeowner who qualifies under FEMA guidelines to seek a buyout, reasoning that it is their right and the tax hit is inevitable.
Communities must decide which of their flooded-out neighbors will be allowed to seek federal buyouts.
Other towns are taking Barre City’s approach — saying no to some homeowners in order to protect what they see as the greater good of the community. The central Vermont city represents the starkest example of this dilemma.
Hundreds of Vermont homes likely qualify for buyouts under FEMA standards, which require a house to be located in a designated Special Flood Hazard Area. The buyouts aim to cover the property’s market value before any flood damage.
Barre’s conservative approach only supports buyouts for properties that were either undermined by landslides or are right on the river. The city has green-lighted buyout applications for 25 riverside homes or businesses. It has rejected 38 others.
Some communities with healthier budgets and suitable space to rebuild on higher ground can afford to offer more buyouts, but Barre, one of the poorest cities in the state, has neither, Barre City Manager Nicolas Storellicastro said. It’s terrible for municipal staff and elected officials to have to choose between the good of individuals, whose home is often their largest asset, and the good of the city, he added.
“It’s not about the sadness of your story,” he said. “It’s about applying a standard and sticking with it regardless of the consequences. And the consequences suck.”
‘We Loved the Place’
After the July 2023 flood, Peter Anthony and his wife, Marsha Kincheloe, stayed with friends before moving into an apartment above a downtown Barre shop. They eventually decided the cost of rebuilding and the continued flood risk made it unwise to return to their riverside refuge of 45 years. Today the house sits behind a tangle of overgrown gardens, its porch littered with tools and muddy floorboards. Inside, the lower four feet of walls are stripped bare.
“We loved the place,” Anthony said. “The kids loved the place. The river was our friend until it slowly ceased to be our friend.”
He remains in limbo, unsure whether the buyout of perhaps $200,000 will come through and where they would go if it does. Nevertheless, he is grateful the city has signed off on his buyout and hopes his and other homes around Scampini Square can be replaced by green space with public access to a widened river.
“I will be overjoyed if that happens,” Anthony said. “I will consider that a gift to the city.”
Across the river, Gordon George’s home sits abandoned about 60 feet from the east bank of the Stevens Branch on a narrow strip of land between the river and North Main Street. The scene is much like that at Anthony’s home: The yard is choked with weeds, and silt covers the steps and porch. A yellow sign taped to the front door by the fire marshal declares the property “off limits to unauthorized personnel” due to “serious hazards.”
On a recent visit, it was evident why. George turned the key and pushed open the door, only to have it hit something heavy. A broken toilet blocked the door from fully opening.
Squeezing through the gap, George entered the front room to reveal a gutted disaster zone. Walls had been stripped down to the plaster and lath; warped boards had been ripped from the floor.
George readily recounted details of past floods. He hauled out 157 five-gallon buckets of silt from his basement after Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. A few years later, in 2015, another flood deposited even more silt for him to clear out: more than 171 buckets’ worth.
He was more reluctant to share his feelings about losing his home but eventually opened up. “It’s kinda devastating,” he said. “Sometimes it makes you wonder what life is all about.”
George has moved twice since the 2023 flood and now shares a mobile home with a woman in Weston’s Cooperative in Berlin, an arrangement facilitated through HomeShare Vermont.
While he didn’t have flood insurance, George isn’t destitute. He worked for 28 years in Essex Junction making semiconductors for IBM and its successor, GlobalFoundries. He proudly declares that his thrift (“I’m a Scotsman!”) has left him with savings to fall back on.
But it strikes him as arbitrary and unfair that he can’t even ask FEMA for a buyout because Barre officials have decided his home, despite being in a FEMA flood zone, is not close enough to the river.
“I think I should at least be allowed to try,” he said. “I believe that deeply in my heart.”
After the city manager turned him down, George took his case directly to the city council in August. “I’d just like to put this to bed one way or the other,” George told councilors at a public meeting, adding that the uncertainty was eating him up.
That’s when Lauzon told George that not only was the city rejecting his bid for a FEMA buyout, but Barre, which has a limited buyout program of its own, wasn’t going to purchase his home, either.
City officials believe some flooded homes sit on land that could be redeveloped with housing designed to withstand floodwaters and have offered to purchase a few such places. The city’s bids have been modest because the budget is tight, demolishing houses is expensive, and the sites would have to be offered at no cost to housing developers.
Homeowners so far have considered the city’s offers “a slap in the face,” Storellicastro said, and none has accepted them.
City Councilor Teddy Waszazak said he wishes that both the city and FEMA buyout processes could be opened up to more property owners. Some residents whose FEMA buyouts were rejected, including a couple with a young daughter on Berlin Street, are clearly at risk, he said.
“Call me a bleeding heart, but I think safety is the basis of everything the government does. And if your house is flooding three times a year, you are not safe,” he told Seven Days.
But when he proposed expanding the buyouts beyond those that the city manager had proposed during the August meeting, Lauzon discouraged the idea.
“If you listen to these stories and you’re not heartbroken, then you’re not human and you shouldn’t be sitting on the council,” Lauzon told his colleagues. “But if we start messing with the process, that slope is going to turn so slippery so fast, and what is supposed to be a mitigation program is going to turn into a popularity contest.”
Build Back Never
Storellicastro has been Barre’s city manager for less than two years. In that time, he’s had a crash course on the city’s history of flooding and the development patterns that make it particularly vulnerable.
Last week, as he walked past a cluster of homes on River Street that have been approved for buyouts, he explained the city’s rationale for limiting applications mostly to homes or businesses directly adjacent to the river. This land holds promise for projects that would reconnect the river to its historic floodplain and thus reduce flooding downstream.
“We’ve targeted the properties that we think have the greatest value as a whole to the city,” he said.
The city also hopes to limit FEMA buyouts to preserve places — including other parts of the floodplain — for future flood-proof development.
“Look at us. We’re either ledge or floodplain,” Storellicastro said. “If we don’t build on floodplains, if we don’t take advantage of every potential site, it’s like signing a death warrant for the city.”
That puts Barre at odds with the goals of the FEMA buyout program, which is to remove structures from high flood-hazard areas to minimize danger, according to Richard Verville, deputy director of the Mitigation Division of FEMA Region 1.
“We’re getting people out of harm’s way,” he said.
Using FEMA buyouts is an important part of Vermont’s strategy to protect the state and its residents from the frequent floods driven by climate change. After Tropical Storm Irene, the state used about $37 million in FEMA funds to purchase 170 properties. Some of them formed the backbone of signature flood-mitigation projects, such as a new four-acre park in Northfield. Dog River Park replaced some of the 18 flooded homes that were bought with FEMA funds and torn down.
“If we don’t build on floodplains … it’s like signing a death warrant for the city.” Barre city manager Nicolas Storellicastro
But critics say the disaster relief program is itself a disaster. In addition to pitting residents against local governments and eroding local tax rolls, they say it’s underfunded and takes too long to help flood victims. Their concerns have only deepened as FEMA faces tens of billions of dollars in potential aid and rebuilding costs from Hurricane Helene, which struck Florida and other southeastern states in late September. On its heels, a second major hurricane, Milton, was bearing down on central Florida as this issue went to press.
Storellicastro said FEMA’s prohibition on all future rebuilding on buyout parcels is unreasonable for a city such as Barre and needs to change. Buildings can be designed and constructed to be flood resilient, as evidenced by how the City Place building in downtown Barre, built in 2014 to stringent codes, survived recent floods unscathed. Building flood-resistant housing on properties FEMA purchases should be allowed, he said.
It’s a “terrible conversation” to tell the owners of a damaged home that they can’t pursue a FEMA buyout because the city needs to preserve the possibility that someone else might someday build modern housing on the site.
“If we’re in this purported housing crisis, we have to act like we’re in a housing crisis, and that means we have to be super conservative and aggressive on maintaining every potential lot that could have a flood-resilient house,” Storellicastro said.
Changing the rules that prevent development on buyout sites would require an act of Congress. U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) agrees that major changes to the FEMA process are necessary, including the change that Barre officials support. He favors bipartisan legislation to streamline FEMA’s processes and push more decision making to the local level. He’s also called for an audit of the agency’s relief programs.
“All of us can imagine how heartbreaking, how traumatic, it is for a family to have lost their home,” Welch told Seven Days last week. “But then to have the pain of a dysfunctional process inflicted on them just adds to that trauma.”
The program should place more decision making in the hands of local officials, who could get flood victims aid payouts more quickly and give municipalities the flexibility they need to buy people out without undermining their grand lists, Welch said.
Waszazak, the Barre councilor, agrees that FEMA’s program needs major reform, but he’s not holding his breath for Congress to act.
He said state government should step in now. It could help Barre and other communities bypass FEMA, buy flooded properties more quickly, and then decide whether the land should be returned to floodplain or rebuilt with safer housing.
“Right now, we’re in this sort of hellscape of bureaucracy which takes forever. But climate change is happening now,” Waszazak said.
Middlesex Is All In
Barre is not the only community grappling with buyout decisions. Liz Scharf, chair of the Middlesex Selectboard, expressed concern earlier this year about the impact on the town budget if all those who sought buyouts received them. Ultimately, however, the selectboard decided the tax impact from losing taxable property had to be secondary to helping residents escape flood danger.
“I don’t think we actually thought twice about not accepting these applications, because we’re thinking about our townspeople,” she told Seven Days.
Middlesex, which straddles the Winooski River, has 14 buyout applications under review by FEMA, making it second only to Barre. That could change, however, when new batches of applications come in from hard-hit towns such as Johnson and Plainfield, according to Stephanie Smith, the state’s hazard mitigation officer.
Waterbury, downstream from Barre on the Winooski River, has also struggled with buyouts. Its selectboard has approved some but has resisted allowing homeowners in one desirable neighborhood to pursue them.
Randall Street is lined with well-kept homes. Pumpkins adorn porches, and children’s chalk drawings decorate the sidewalks. The state office complex and popular downtown businesses such as Prohibition Pig are a short walk away.
But the neighborhood also shows subtle signs of distress. Some homes are in disrepair, with porches and siding damaged as a result of two floods in the past year. Two stately homes that previously would have inspired bidding wars have languished on the market for months.
Skip Flanders has lived for decades on the corner of Randall and Elm streets. This summer he inquired about a buyout, but some selectboard members worried that endorsing his FEMA application might open the floodgates to others.
“I think it would dramatically change the character of our community,” selectboard member Mike Bard told his colleagues.
Board chair Roger Clapp, who lives two doors down from Flanders, asked whether, instead of seeking a buyout, Flanders had considered offering his house on the still-strong real estate market.
“Why would you not put out a ‘for sale’ sign and sell this problem to somebody else?” Clapp asked.
Flanders, 78, replied that he’d feel wrong selling his home to someone while knowing that future floods would surely drive them from the home in the middle of night, as had happened repeatedly to him and his wife.
“It’s a lot of expense to maintain that house in a place that it shouldn’t be.” Skip Flanders
On a recent visit, a car jack held up a corner of a porch covered with tools. When Flanders lifted a piece of plywood to expose the undermined foundation, his dog wandered over for a look and fell into the hole.
After extracting the disoriented canine, Flanders explained that he’d flood-proofed the home as best he could after Irene, including moving the furnace, electrical panels and personal items out of the basement. But mucking out and drying out a basement after every flood is exhausting, he said.
“It’s a lot of expense to maintain that house in a place that it shouldn’t be,” Flanders said.
He’s not sure he’d take a buyout if FEMA offered one. But he feels the selectboard shouldn’t be blocking him from asking.
“I don’t think that’s letting people decide their own fate,” he said.
Flanders ultimately was able to convince the selectboard to back his application. But his next-door neighbor, Lisa Meyer, could not get approval for her three-unit apartment building, which sustained serious flood damage.
Unsure why the board didn’t support her application, Meyer noted that Clapp, the board chair, had publicly downplayed the impact of the floods on the neighborhood.
“(He) has an approach of, ‘Hey, what’s the big deal? You have to clear out your basement once in a while,'” Meyer recalled. “That’s really frustrating to hear.”
Clapp did say at an August selectboard meeting that he’s become so used to flooding that it “doesn’t really affect my life all that adversely, honestly.”
In an interview at his home, Clapp noted that it is one thing to offer a buyout for a single family but another entirely to let desperately needed apartments be torn down.
He wants to explore ways to prevent flooding in the first place. This includes strategies to acquire land elsewhere in the watershed for floodplain restoration projects, lowering the height of the state-owned cornfield immediately behind Randall Street and even using that soil to build a berm to protect his neighborhood.
But building berms to protect private property is prohibited under state rules and is the opposite of the state’s strategy of giving flooded rivers room to spread out so that they slow down and their energy dissipates, according to Rob Evans, rivers program manager at the Department of Environmental Conservation.
There are exceptions for emergencies and densely populated areas with no other options, but “it’s a really high bar” and “largely cost prohibitive,” he said.
Helping people elevate their homes has also come up, though municipal manager Tom Leitz has warned that such projects are significantly more complicated.
Clapp said he’s aware of the challenges but has spoken with Gov. Phil Scott and other state officials who are open to considering the cornfield project. If the Netherlands can figure out how to keep dry its vast swaths of land below sea level, Vermont — which after Irene found ways to protect the government office complex near Randall Street — ought to be able to safeguard his neighborhood, he said.
“I think there is a fairly legitimate chance of protecting this street,” Clapp said, “and until we investigate that further, I’m not willing to let that go.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Buyout Blues | Many Vermont flood victims want FEMA to purchase their damaged homes. But some towns are saying no.”
Related Stories
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2024.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
