Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism podcast. Every episode begins with a question. Today:
“What’s the purpose of county government in Vermont?”
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript below. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
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Josh Crane: From Vermont Public, and the NPR network, this is Brave Little State. I’m Josh Crane.
I go for a walk on my road almost every day. And just a few paces from the end of my driveway, is this sign.
(Bangs on sign)
It says Windsor County on one side. And Orange County on the other. It’s the county line. This is a border crossing I give very little thought to on my walks.
To be honest, I don’t really ever think about Vermont counties. I’ll have conversations about state level politics and I’m clued into local issues and town drama, but counties? Not so much.
I know that Vermont has counties, obviously. And I know they do… stuff. Though don’t ask me what stuff, exactly.
It seems like a lot of you aren’t really sure either.
Paul Hochanadel: Why does Vermont have counties? And how do counties in Vermont compare to other states?
Anonymous question-asker: Why doesn't Vermont have county government?
Gary Novosel : What is the purpose of county government in Vermont?
Michael Moser: Why doesn't Vermont have county government, and should it?
Becca Golden: What is the purpose of Vermont's counties?
Josh Crane: One of our reporters at Vermont Public, Howard Weiss-Tisman, focuses on issues facing local towns around the state. But in this story, he takes the time to answer all your questions about that murky middle layer of Vermont life: counties.
And what he finds is that those counties — overlooked, unassuming Vermont counties — may represent a key to unlocking Vermont’s future.
Howard picks it up when we come back.
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Nicole Wilkerson: Good morning.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Hi there.
Nicole Wilkerson: This is Kelley. She’s our county clerk.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Hi Kelly, I’m Howard from Vermont Public.
Patty Ross: I’m Patty. Patty Ross.
Nicole Wilkerson: She’s the other assistant judge.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Good to meet you. You’re the two assistant judges?
Howard Weiss-Tisman: It’s an early Monday morning in mid-January, and I’m at the Addison County Courthouse in Middlebury with Gary Novosel, one of our question-askers who lives in nearby Bridport.
Gary Novosel: Gary, from Bridport.
Nicole Wilkerson: Right. I saw your emails.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Gary grew up in the Northeast Kingdom, and he lived in New York State for about 23 years, before moving back to Vermont.
When he moved back he noticed a difference in his tax bill, and in how New York, and Vermont, seem to pay for and deliver services.
Gary Novosel: New York State had a very big county government presence. There was a county highway department, courts, social services, just a huge amount of government happened at that level.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: In New York, the counties raise taxes and provide social services, senior assistance and healthcare to towns and cities.
There are county executives elected and professional staff hired to take care of the roads, assist towns with zoning and economic development, and maintain the prison system.
Here in Vermont, none of that happens at a county level.
Gary Novosel: So coming back to Vermont, you know, I was wondering, OK, what is the difference?
Howard Weiss-Tisman: That’s why we’ve come to the Addison County Courthouse this morning — to find out what county government does do here in Vermont.
Kelly Munger: I’m going to officially call the meeting to order. OK. And this is a meeting on our FY 26-27 budget …
Howard Weiss-Tisman: The county budget meeting is held in a small room. It’s actually the passport office, with the two assistant judges, the Addison County sheriff, and county clerk Kelly Munger, who’s leading the meeting.
Kelly Munger: Does anybody have any questions or comments on the budget, proposed budget? Go for it.
Gary Novosel: Actually I do …
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Gary came prepared.
Gary Novosel: When I saw this posted in the Addy Indy last week …
Howard Weiss-Tisman: There’s plenty of time to ask questions because we’re the only members of the public attending this budget discussion.
Gary is curious about how the county budget shows up on his town budget in Bridport, and he has some questions about staffing at the sheriff’s department.
As for me, I’m curious about how sparsely-attended this meeting is. I ask the county clerk if they usually get more of a crowd.
Kelly Munger: Uh, you are the first two in probably about eight years, and at that point there was one gentleman from Lincoln, who came for a couple of years.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Vermont has 14 counties, and in each county there is likely a similar scene unfolding at their annual meeting — a couple county officials, gathered in some sort of a makeshift space, with a handful of local constituents in attendance, at most.
And the reason for that, very frankly speaking, is because in Vermont, the counties don’t really do very much.
Vermont has among the weakest forms of county government in the United States.
Here’s what county governments here actually do: Counties collect taxes to pay the administrative staffs at the county sheriff’s offices. They maintain something known as the “side judge system,” which is an antiquated tradition where elected officials, without law degrees, are fact-finders during civil and family cases. And most of the counties are responsible for taking care of the historic courthouse buildings and sheriffs’ offices.
That’s pretty much it.
With Vermont counties taking on so few responsibilities, a lot of the services that counties in other states take care of fall on the shoulders of town selectboards and city councils.
Historian and author Gary Shattuck says it's the way things have always been done here.
Gary Shattuck: If you really want to get stuff done, you went down to the towns. And the towns had the authority to build the roads, and whatever the local needs might be, bridges.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: You can trace the origins of this all the way back to the 1700s, before Vermont was a state. That’s when the Governor of New Hampshire divided up the land that would soon be known as Vermont into mostly six-mile by six-mile townships.
If you look at a map of Vermont today, it looks like a checkerboard, with all these little towns strung out across the state.
The folks who settled in each of those towns were left to build roads, figure out developments, enforce the laws and care for those who needed help.
County lines were eventually drawn and re-drawn as the population grew, but counties were never really given much power, aside from running the courts — and even that power has dwindled over time.
And so Gary says Vermont’s 250-or-so towns have been pretty much taking care of business ever since.
Gary Shattuck: The blood was being pumped through the efforts of the towns. It wasn’t coming from counties, if you will, or from a state. And I think that things were so much stronger from a local level, and that tradition is what you’re seeing today.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: It's never been easy to make a go of it here, but for most of that time, Vermont’s unwavering allegiance to local control has worked out.
Selectboards try to figure out what it costs to run things, they set a tax rate and folks come out on Town Meeting Day to vote on their budget.
This sort of direct democracy is the bedrock of who we are as a state — and for a lot of people it’s a potent remedy to a world that’s otherwise spinning out of control.
But Michael Moser, who’s another one of our Brave Little State question-askers, wonders if it’s time for a change.
Michael Moser: Why would you, why would you go it alone when your neighbor needs the same thing and you can work together and maybe find some efficiency and and, you know, reduce burden on taxpayers every five miles down the road?
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Michael lives in Cambridge, in Lamoille County, and he served about 10 years on the town’s planning commission.
During that time, he saw his small town struggle to find volunteers and take care of all the things that needed to get done. Not to mention that everything is getting so expensive.
Michael knows there are no easy fixes to all of this, but from what he’s seen it’s time to think about a different way forward.
Michael Moser: I don’t think that we lose anything by working together more closely across the landscape to ensure that we protect what’s important to us. And I don’t think it marks the end of Vermont, or I don’t think it’s detrimental our, to the state overall. I think that we could be doing better, and we should be doing better.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Vermont’s local government structure was really put to the test during catastrophic flooding in 2023 and 2024.
In most other parts of the country when disaster hits, it’s the county government that puts things back together.
Here in Vermont, small towns got overwhelmed by the FEMA disaster recovery process, and by the daunting prospect of rebuilding municipal roads and bridges with a tiny road crew.
Here’s Douglas Farnham, the state’s Chief Recovery Officer.
Douglas Farnham: We have a lot of character in Vermont. We have a lot of passion, and a lot of really good history. But the downside of that is that, yeah, some of our towns won’t work together on things. Right? And there will be a lack of a regional focus that could be used to approach things more efficiently and effectively.
And what that ends up with in a disaster situation is, when you have towns approaching things differently and they’re not all willing to work with each other then, yeah, you can have people that slip between the cracks. And you have gaps in the fence essentially.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: But Douglas says that, with weak regional government, it’s also funding that can slip between the cracks.
When the federal government sent out COVID relief money, there was a pot of money for cities and towns and a pot of money for counties across the United States.
Vermont had to send a special letter to the feds explaining that, yes, please, we want that $120 million that’s going to the counties, even though we don’t have a county government structure to spend it.
And Douglas points to the ongoing statewide discussions about consolidating school districts. He’s seeing a similar tug of war play out between local control and regional efficiency.
Douglas Farnham: The advantage of living in Vermont, being a smaller state, is that we get to interact with each other as people. And that brings along with it, you know, all the dynamics that come with human interaction. One of the, I think, the reasons people like local control is that you get to consider that.
When you implement more technical and robust structures like you see with other county governments, you take the human elements out of it. And I think that’s what people are afraid of with some of the consequences of moving towards that.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Some towns are trying to move toward this new way of getting business done.
When we get back, an experiment in cross-border collaboration.
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In the absence of county government, some towns are reaching across their borders to save money and experiment with new models of doing business.
And when the towns of Richmond and Hinesburg started sharing police services a few years ago, people took notice.
WCAX: And this deal is the first of its kind here in Vermont.
Local 22: A unique inter-police partnership between the towns of Hinesburg and Richmond may provide a temporary solution …
Howard Weiss-Tisman: There was a lot of excitement in each town.
Richmond town manager Josh Arneson told WCAX that the plan might be something other small towns would want to explore.
Josh Arneson: It’s something that I think can really work for towns of our size. So some shared services, especially in the policing end of it, can provide a lot of benefits to each community.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Essentially, Hinesburg provided police service to Richmond, and Richmond paid Hinesburg for their trouble.
Todd Odit: We were providing them general coverage. That was working well for a while.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Todd Odit is the Hinesburg town manager. He says that, eventually, things got more complicated, and messy between the two towns.
Todd Odit: For towns to work together it gets really difficult when it comes down to the personnel.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: There was too much time spent negotiating hours and reciprocal services. Each town felt like it wasn’t being treated fairly.
They considered more formally merging the two police departments, rather than just extending Hinesburg’s service into Richmond. But Todd says those discussions fell apart at the end of last year.
Todd Odit: It’s it’s it’s dead for now. In the past year we spent a lot of time kind of spinning our wheels trying to figure out how to move forward, and we just weren’t moving forward.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: So Hinesburg is back where they started. They’re going into their upcoming town meeting without additional revenue coming in from Richmond — and with requests from their own police and fire departments for increases to their budgets.
So, as bad as things got with Richmond, Todd says, he’s still looking for other creative solutions to try to control Hinesburg’s rising tax rate.
Todd Odit: You know, for ages, the small towns were able to survive by themselves. I think towns are really going to be forced to come to the table and figure out how to work together. Because it’s only going to be when, I think, they realize that they fail and they can’t figure it out on their own that they have no choice left but to work with someone else.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Which brings us to our third question-asker, Paul Hochanadel.
Paul Hochanadel: We have these regional problems — homelessness, housing, transportation — and um, why can’t we have greater coordination to try and solve some of these problems, you know, that we face?
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Paul lives in Burlington, Chittenden County.
He thinks because Vermonters are so tied to their town identities, to their local spending decisions, and infrastructure challenges, it’s hard to even consider working collaboratively on things.
Paul Hochanadel: There’s no alternative to the towns right now. People don’t have a chance to see, well, what would it look like to do something more regionally, ‘cause they’re not thinking about their county identity.
If if resistance to change might be you’re the last, you’re the last on the hill and nobody’s left, you know, then at some point you change or you die, is kind of, you know, not to be too morbid.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: And so Paul’s curious about what that change could look like.
Paul’s not alone. Vermont lawmakers have been puzzling over the same question.
Ruth Hardy: How can we make changes that still preserve our Vermont values and culture but more effectively deliver services?
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Addison County Senator Ruth Hardy was a member of the Government Operations Committee in 2024.
And she said coming out of two years of flooding, and spending down the COVID relief money, on top of a bunch of other issues, there was a feeling that the state needed to do more to help towns work together.
Ruth Hardy: Almost every issue that we encountered, there would be somebody that would say, ‘This would so much easier if we had effective county government in Vermont.’
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Ruth sponsored a bill about two years ago that set up a county and regional governance committee, and the committee has been learning from what other states do.
As we were putting the final touches on this episode, a new bill was introduced in the statehouse to try to help small towns work together more effectively.
Sen. Brian Collamore: So, yes. Let’s have Senator Wendy Harrison kick things off.
Sen. Wendy Harrison: Thank you, Thanks for having me.
Sen. Brian Collamore: So tell us a little about how this bill came about.
Sen. Wendy Harrison: OK …
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Windham County Senator Wendy Harrison introduced a bill at the end of January that would allow small towns in southeastern Vermont to pool some of their tax income and spend it on regional law enforcement.
It’s the kind of regional, cross-border model that might have helped towns like Richmond and Hinesburg collaborate better.
Sen. Wendy Harrison: If successful it could be easily replicated in other Vermont towns.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: The bill would set up a regional police district, kind of like Vermont’s regional solid waste districts, or even a multi-town school district.
Windham County Sheriff Mark Anderson wants lawmakers to allow him to test out this new model for five years.
Sheriff Mark Anderson: For about 70 years this problem has existed and has been studied by the Vermont Legislature, by think tanks, by special interest groups to all come to some semblance of what we’ll call regional governments.
Howard Weiss-Tisman: Having stronger county or regional government in Vermont won’t take care of all of our problems.
But there are people here in the state who say we absolutely can’t keep going with these small, volunteer selectboards shouldering the whole load.
Maybe some day, “County Meeting Day” will be as important a date on Vermont calendars as Town Meeting Day.
But we’re a long way from that.
We’re back in the Addison County courthouse, with Gary Novosel, the question-asker from the top of the episode. Gary and I have posed a few questions, but otherwise the meeting breezes by …
Kelly Munger: Any other questions, concerns from anybody?
Howard Weiss-Tisman: … And ends without much fanfare.
Assistant judge: I approve it.
Other assistant judge: I’m good.
Kelly Munger: So we will let the budget stand for FY 26-27 at $464,583.
Assistant judge: Awesome.
Kelly Munger: And we’ll meet again next year.
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Credits
This episode was reported by Howard Weiss-Tisman and produced by Burgess Brown. Editing and additional production from Josh Crane and Sabine Poux. Angela Evancie is our executive producer. Ty Gibbons composed our theme music; other music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to Becca Golden, Alicia Freese, Catherine Hurley, Ted Brady, Cheryl Morse, Dona Brown, Chris Campany, Austin Davis, Carolyn Partridge, Grant Reynolds, Joyce McKeema and Peter Gregory.
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