This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
In the early 1970s, dozens of rural landowners, real estate agents and concerned citizens trekked to Montpelier in the middle of a snowstorm to decry a statewide land-use plan. They told state leaders the plan would infringe on their private property rights and impede local control over decision-making, and that it amounted to a descent into communism.
“The state owns the river, I don’t go in their river, the state owns the highway and I don’t go on that, they can stay off my property,” said a furniture store dealer from Wolcott, according to a 1972 Rutland Daily Herald report.
The plan never came to fruition, as state leaders relented to the bitter opposition. But arguments over how to balance environmental preservation and economic growth — and the public good versus private rights — have reverberated throughout the decades in Vermont.
Fifty years on, Vermonters are in the middle of the latest chapter of this debate. After this spring’s impassioned protests over Act 181, the statewide land-use plan set in motion by lawmakers in 2024, the Legislature is poised to partly repeal the law.
Ben Huffman, 88, a planner for then-Gov. Deane Davis’ administration, said the Act 181 controversy “is similar to the 1970s fear of losing one’s right to do what one wanted with one’s property — particularly in rural areas.” Yet the scope of the 1970s plan was much broader, he said.
By the late 1960s, new interstates brought Vermont that much closer to the big cities of the Northeast, and people began moving here en masse. Home construction accelerated, and so did concerns that all the new development was polluting the environment and marring the bucolic landscape that had drawn new residents and visitors to Vermont in the first place.
“Land developers, homebuilders, were flocking in and building terrible, shoddy housing developments in swamps and just places that you really shouldn’t be building, and weren’t making provisions for the disposal of waste, sewage. It was just a nightmare,” said Paul Searls, a professor at Vermont State University who has studied the history of development in Vermont.
Davis toured such developments in southern Vermont and was horrified by what he witnessed, Searls said. In response, the Republican governor pushed through Act 250: the landmark 1970 land-use law that required larger-scale developments to get a state permit.
Davis’ vision for governing development in Vermont didn’t stop there. The next step was to create a statewide land-use plan and map that would guide where the state should focus development, and where it should maintain natural resources and open space.
“A Land Use Plan will help promote the orderly growth of the state,” boasted a full-page spread in the Rutland Daily Herald in 1973, a public service message from the State Planning Office under Davis’ successor, Democratic Gov. Thomas Salmon. “It will forestall haphazard development that would result in abrupt changes in the character of Vermont.”
Actual maps laying out how, exactly, the state would divvy up land for different uses varied over the years, as Davis and Salmon tried and failed to get a land-use plan through the Legislature. The chief gripes: The land-use plan infringed on personal property rights and eroded local control.
Opposition was fierce. First, a pro-business lobby came out hard against the land-use plan, arguing that Act 250 itself had gone too far and needed to be reined in. Then a group dubbed the Northeast Kingdom Landowners Steering Committee, helmed by a Lyndonville real estate agent, argued the plan amounted to “statewide zoning.”
“It is clear that the Act 250 ‘land use plan’ will lead not only to a major invasion of the rights of property owners, but also to the end of town responsibility for local problems in favor of centralized controls from Montpelier,” read one Steering Committee newspaper ad in 1972.
Unruly public hearings ensued, as opponents showed up in the hundreds arguing that the land-use plan was “‘Satan’s work, Communist propaganda, and a wishy-washy bureaucratic nightmare,” as one report put it in December 1972.
John McClaughry, founder of the conservative Ethan Allen Institute, recalled voting in favor of Act 250 when he served in the House in 1970. He felt that smaller towns could use some state regulation to protect them from “big time” developers showing up with plans to build thousands of homes, he said in a recent interview.
But the now 88-year-old from Kirby soon became a vocal critic of the land-use plan, which he argued was part of a “new feudalism” that gave decision-making power over private land to the state. There was also a class dimension to the debate, he said. Ordinary people simply wanted to be able to pass on land to their children, he said, shifting into a hypothetical.
“All I want to do is, you know, cut off a couple of lots and give them to my two sons. And here I got all these fancy folks from Yale Law School … and they’re going to come around, tell me what I can do with my lot,” McClaughry said.
Fast forward 50 years, and lawmakers tried once more to create a statewide land-use map.
In 2024, the Democratic-led Legislature passed Act 181 over the objections of Republican Gov. Phil Scott. Their aim was to ease state regulations in already developed areas to encourage more homebuilding, while boosting protections over the state’s most sensitive ecosystems. To do that, lawmakers set off a mapping effort to delineate all the land in the state into different “tiers” that would dictate rules for building there.
As draft maps of these tiers were released, a protest movement of rural landowners and local officials swelled, arguing that increased restrictions on building in rural areas would freeze their communities in amber. Ian Ackermann, a maple sugarmaker in Cabot, summed up their position at a protest on the Statehouse steps in March.
“It seems pointless to buy land and have a dream when maps are being made by people you’ve never met, by people that have never stepped foot on your property, and yet they’re trying to control the very land you own,” Ackermann said.
Democratic lawmakers capitulated in a dramatic about-face last month and are now set to roll back the conservation-focused measures in Act 181, the most controversial portions of the law.
To Searls, the historian, getting everyone to agree on what Vermont should look like — and how land should be governed — has always been a tall task, especially because the debate often cuts to a core tension.
“In order to save some Vermont traditions — such as the integrity of the landscape — you have to give up others, like the ability to do with your land whatever you want,” he said.
