Vermont’s system of town government is not really set up to deal with the effects of climate change.
Flooding, which has hit the state hard in recent years, doesn’t respect municipal borders. And the state’s small towns, with their mostly volunteer boards, are left to navigate complicated decisions that affect other towns downstream and upstream.
The state’s Climate Action Office recently published a report that lays out a series of strategies for how Vermont should address the climate crisis.
One of the main priorities is having towns within watersheds work together more, rather than trying to tackle major flood resilience projects on their own.
“I think we are at a tipping point in our state,” said Vermont’s director of climate action, Jane Lazorchak. “We really need to think about the capacity at municipal levels and what makes sense, understanding that disaster recovery is becoming more of the norm.”
In the past 15 years, flooding has led to 22 federal disaster declarations in Vermont. That’s about double what the state faced in the previous few decades.
"I think we are at a tipping point in our state. We really need to think about the capacity at municipal levels and what makes sense, understanding that disaster recovery is becoming more of the norm."Jane Lazorchak, Agency of Natural Resources
Towns have increasingly been exploring ways to reduce flooding, such as restoring floodplains. But Lazorchak said it’s unrealistic to expect a small town to take on expensive and complicated projects.
If more towns band together to plan and pay for projects, she said it might be possible to reduce the impact of widespread flooding that’s hit some of the state’s larger economic centers, usually downriver.
But it’s a heavy lift, Lazorchak said, trying to convince small towns to invest time and money into projects that don’t always directly benefit their own taxpaying residents.
“We put a lot of pressure, a lot of work, at the municipal level in Vermont,” she said. “Most municipalities in Vermont don’t even have paid staff. And I think this is just the next iteration about how we evolve as a state to think about and take care of communities more holistically than town-by-town.”
The Lamoille County Planning Commission has embraced this idea, and is undertaking an engineering analysis of the Lamoille River and its floodplains.
The study, which is being paid for with a $230,000 federal grant, will help the region better understand which areas are prone to flooding, and how floodplain restoration along one section of river could have important effects further up- or downstream.
Planning Commission Deputy Director Seth Jensen has been bringing the dozen or so towns along the Lamoille together to share what they are each doing independently, while trying to lay the groundwork for shared floodplain restoration projects in the future.
Such projects would depend on state and federal funding, but community input is key, according to Jensen.
“To really get the fine-grain understanding of the flood dynamics, and the potential alternatives, the local community is still really critical,” Jensen said. Following the devastating flooding in Montpelier in 2023, the city worked with a few local nonprofits to form the Montpelier Commission for Recovery and Resilience.
And earlier this year the group pulled together a meeting with representatives from about 25 towns along the Winooski River.
“We are not an island. We’re part of a watershed,” said Jon Copans, executive director of the Montpelier commission. The goal, he said, is “to figure out how do we work together to solve some of these problems.”
"If you look at the climate models we’re at the beginning of this change in our climate. It’s going to keep getting worse, and so it’s up to the towns to act because there’s really nobody else coming to save them."Chris Campany, Windham Regional Commission
In southeastern Vermont, the Windham Regional Commission recently organized a meeting with four towns in the Deerfield River watershed.
Officials from Wilmington, Readsboro, Dover and Whitingham met to talk about possible projects to work on together.
Windham Regional Commission Director Chris Campany said the conversations starting to happen come at a time when federal COVID-19 relief money is drying up, and the federal government is making major cuts to how it supports communities after disasters.
Still, Campany said, towns have no other option but to start working together more to address the effects of climate change.
“If you look at the climate models we’re at the beginning of this change in our climate,” Campany said. “It’s going to keep getting worse, and so it’s up to the towns to act because there’s really nobody else coming to save them.”
After being hit hard by flooding in 2023 and 2024, Vermont saw just a few localized flooding events this summer.
So in the absence of spending time and money reacting to a disaster, Campany says, now is the best time to prepare for the next one.
