The state has walked back efforts to pursue a highly anticipated wildlife crossing project across Interstate-89 and Route 2. The crossing would have connected over 100,000 acres of protected land between Mount Mansfield and Camel’s Hump, in the middle of the Green Mountains.
For two years, state agencies have been working on plans to build the 150-foot-wide underpass in Waterbury after getting $1.6 million from the Federal Highway Administration for the design. It would replace a long, narrow culvert that runs several stories below the highway at Sharkeyville Brook, a tributary of the Winooski River.
Now, the project is on hold for the foreseeable future after the heads of the Agency of Transportation and the Agency of Natural Resources said they would not be applying for another grant to help fund construction — recently estimated to cost $50 million.
“We get the value of this sort of infrastructure, but you have to be able to afford to build it,” said Joe Flynn, secretary of the Agency of Transportation.
The federal program to fund wildlife crossings was created under the Biden administration and typically caps project funding at $25 million. The state says it doesn't have the money to cover the rest of construction, which would run millions more because of the cost of digging 50 feet beneath the road, meeting engineering standards, and traffic control on a section of interstate where more than 13,000 cars and trucks pass every day.
“This is a pretty expensive project to deliver and we can’t — the grant that's available is not enough to do the project,” Flynn said.
The culvert there today is about 5 five feet wide and almost 400 feet long. It was built in the 1960s, when the highway first opened. The state has almost no record of animals venturing through it.
“We had one mink go through the Sharkeyville culvert, once,” said Jens Hawkins-Hilke, a conservation planner with Vermont Fish & Wildlife. “It's a pinhole of light.”
But animals still look for passage along this stretch of road. It sits along the spine of the Green Mountains, a nearly continuous forest along the length of Vermont. The state has identified this region as vital to wildlife movement, particularly as species move north in response to climate change. On the side of I-89, the soil is packed down from a makeshift trail of bears, moose, deer, and other animals walking along the roadway.
“To us, that seems like looking for a place to cross, and not feeling comfortable,” said Hawkins-Hilke.
And some do venture onto the highway. Over the past decade, dozens of bears, moose and deer have been killed by cars between Bolton and Waterbury.
There are two other underpasses in the area: An undersized culvert about a mile to the west in Bolton and a passage beneath a bridge more than two miles away in Waterbury.
Neither are at the scale of the project proposed at Sharkeyville Brook, which would be big enough to accommodate large animals, fish and floodwaters.
“The Sharkeyville underpass would have been the biggest example in New England of anything like it,” said Kate Wanner, conservation director for the Trust for Public Land in Vermont and New Hampshire.
As of now, there’s no alternative plan for securing public funding to replace the culvert. The federal funding set aside for wildlife crossing projects will run out after next year, and the state has not identified other grant opportunities.
“That culvert in particular is not failing yet, so we have to take that into consideration,” said Flynn, with the Agency of Transportation. “We have over 300 large culverts like that on the interstate system in Vermont.”
But conservation groups are still pushing for the project, as many continue to work on protecting adjacent land.
“These highways were built with public money,” said Jim Shallow, with The Nature Conservancy.
“Our hope is that we can continue to have a public investment in making them safe for wildlife and for people.”
