The volunteers addressing the crowd inside Plainfield Town Hall had never sought federal funds to build a multimillion-dollar bridge before. They had no professional experience in floodplain mitigation or affordable housing development.
“We’re all learning as we go,” Karen Hatcher warned her neighbors on September 24. “It’s so complicated and very easy to miss something.”
Nevertheless, the group, which had formed after flooding devastated the town this summer, presented a new, bold vision of Plainfield. They imagined reengineering washed-out Brook Road — a project that would likely cost between $10 million and $15 million — and restoring vast swaths of floodplain.
Arion Thiboumery, another resident volunteer, pitched the Plainfield Village Expansion Project, a subdivision of 30 units of affordable housing within walking distance of downtown. He hoped builders could break ground by 2026. The plan is meant to make up for the 20 or so flood-stricken homes that will likely be bought out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, then razed.
An added challenge: finding grants for the work and applying for them. The group of volunteers, mostly retirees, say they are up for it. They feel they have no choice.
“We need to make sure that we take care of our town and we get all the money we need to be able to move into the future,” Hatcher said.
Plainfield is not alone. For towns across Vermont ravaged by two years of unprecedented flooding, the onus of rebuilding and hardening downtowns is falling largely on volunteers with limited expertise. That includes unpaid selectboard members, who are used to making decisions about road maintenance budgets, sidewalks and zoning. Now they are suddenly tasked with writing sophisticated grant applications and developing complicated emergency management plans to adapt to future flooding.
Unlike most states, Vermont has little county-level or regional government. That makes broader approaches to flood mitigation more difficult, as towns have to effectively band together. Many worry that this also hinders municipalities’ ability to navigate federal bureaucracy and, ultimately, secure funds.
“Towns are overwhelmed. They’re overworked. They don’t have enough professional capacity,” said Sarah Waring, state director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development program. Regionalization, she said, could allow municipalities to benefit from economies of scale.
State-level officials have been working with volunteers to create some emergency management and flood recovery plans. But the catastrophes of the past two years have exposed Vermont’s lack of regional coordination — and what that could mean for the future.
“Disasters are a stress for our governments,” said Doug Farnham, who was appointed Vermont’s chief recovery officer after the flooding in 2023. “They show us what our strengths and what our weaknesses may be.”
With that in mind, legislators passed a bill earlier this year that created a County and Regional Governance Study Committee. The six-member panel has met twice — and already made progress.
“There’s this whole diverse group of issues that were like, Wow, this would be potentially easier if we had county government in Vermont,” said state Sen. Ruth Hardy (D-Addison), cochair of the study committee.
Vermont’s lack of county governance, in fact, is likely impeding the state’s ability to apply for and win competitive grants, particularly to fund regional projects that are critical to flood recovery. That’s according to a September memo from interim Administration Secretary Sarah Clark. She found that Vermont had won just $5 million from a specific pool of grants doled out through the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. By comparison, New England states had earned a combined $129 million in grants, 8o percent of which went to county or regional applicants.
Vermont does have 11 Regional Planning Commissions, which are governed by boards made up primarily of locally appointed officials. The commissions help shape projects and assist municipalities in applying for federal dollars. But they lack the authority to administer federal funds like an elected county government could.
“There’s a competitive disadvantage for Vermont,” Farnham said. “The regional story is often much more powerful and much more successful in competitive grant applications.”
Federal dollars and resources are often packaged for counties. Federal disaster declarations, which make stricken areas eligible for relief, are made on a county level.
In fact, the U.S. Treasury Department initially withheld county-specific money in the American Rescue Plan Act from Vermont because the state’s counties didn’t have a mechanism to receive it. After months of deliberation, and advocacy by former senator Patrick Leahy, the department allowed federal COVID-19 relief money to go directly to Vermont’s cities and towns.
Local municipalities — some with fewer than 1,000 residents — decided on their own how to manage the relief funds. And that, Sen. Hardy said, weakened Vermont’s ability to make meaningful regional change.
“I had a few towns in my district that actually wanted to refuse that money,” Hardy said. “I told them: ‘Please don’t refuse it; you can do anything with it.’”
Hardy thinks regional projects often make more financial and organizational sense. State Treasurer Mike Pieciak said a regional approach is especially useful when addressing questions about wetlands and river basins.
But without someone coordinating the effort, it’s up to towns to band together. They can quickly become overwhelmed. Farnham, who has been working on reforming the state’s emergency management system, said he’s concerned about the amount of time town-level volunteer emergency coordinators have logged — in some cases thousands of unpaid hours. With little respite, emergency management positions have had high turnover.
“The spirit of volunteering is a positive thing and is something our communities need to thrive,” Farnham said. “But it crosses a line at some point where some things need to be formalized.”
That’s apparent at the town level, where resources can dictate the rate of recovery. Wealthier towns, the USDA’s Waring said, “have way more time to plan, to come up with projects, to try to raise money, to pull in nonprofits or regional help.”
Johnson, a Lamoille County town of about 3,500 residents that experienced some of the worst flood damage in 2023 and 2024, is also one of the poorest municipalities in the state. Randall Szott, the town’s community and economic development specialist, worked with the Vermont Council on Rural Development and FEMA to organize a series of community meetings for residents to develop a climate resiliency plan.
About 100 people turned out in September to identify Johnson’s biggest challenges. With a flood-prone town center, no grocery store — the town’s only one flooded in 2023 and hasn’t reopened — and a sudden dearth of affordable housing as a result of buyouts, they had plenty to discuss.
But residents and officials alike worried about the town’s capacity to make the sorts of changes being proposed. Participants weighed what mattered more: a functioning grocery store or affordable housing.
“We get this advice like, ‘Oh, well, you need to form these committees,’” Szott said. “Of course, that’s true. But we don’t have the same level of expertise in our communities to draw on that other communities do.”
One of those other communities is Montpelier. There, a public-private partnership known as the Montpelier Commission for Recovery & Resilience announced last week that it has completed a draft emergency plan for the city.
In an interview, Sen. Hardy was clear that the governance study committee will carefully consider options. There are many ways that Vermont could create more robust regional capabilities, she said, that don’t include creating county-level government.
“Our towns are the heart and soul of Vermont’s history and identity,” Hardy said. “But I do think there are some services that towns provide that could be provided efficiently and effectively at the regional level.”
Said Farnham, “The groundwork needs to be laid within the next year. There’s no guarantee that these communities can continue to thrive if we don’t adapt.”
That urgency is felt in Plainfield. Soon, close to 30 homes may be approved for FEMA buyouts. That means the town will lose a huge portion of its tax base, just as it’s mapping out infrastructure repairs that are predicted to cost up to $15 million.
Hatcher, the newly appointed town grants manager, receives a $4,000 yearly stipend from the town for her work. Despite the modest pay, she spends most of her free time researching grant applications and coordinating volunteers.
“If we hadn’t been hit as hard, I don’t think we’d be where we are now,” she said. “I don’t think we’d be asking these big questions.”
Rachel Hellman covers Vermont’s small towns for Seven Days. She is a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. Find out more at reportforamerica.org.
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This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2024.
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