VTDigger37%
Vermont Democrats are destroying New England’s local governance tradition 87%
By Todd Heyman99%
7/30/2026, 10:36:59 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Politically Right Leaning Bias, Hasty Generalization, and Indoctrination, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 50.7% saturation with 484 hits. Analysis detected 2,674 faulty-reasoning hits from 955 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 74.8% and a BS Rank of 87% (3,416 of 25,253 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 86.50% of the article peer group.
The Vermont Democratic Party is off course.
In the shadows of highly technocratic laws, New England’s cherished wisdom tradition of direct democratic rule is being destroyed, even though Vermont remains a predominantly rural state with no signs that it has outgrown its chosen form of local government.
Under Act 181, the Democratic leadership dramatically increased the power of regional planning commissions to control decisions about local communities that have always been decided by our town governance structure.
Under Vermont law, land-use rules, whether zoning bylaws or town ordinances, passed by selectboards have always been subject to a direct democratic vote of all citizens, if enough citizens petition to take action.
No longer.
Regional planning commission staff who are neither elected nor subject to any ethical enforcement regime are now passing rules with the force of law that will trump a wide array of local decisions.
Act 181 has also delegated to RPCs the power to draft what amount to statewide zoning maps subject only to state bureaucratic approval.
RPCs not only get to make the rules for certain projects now, but they have been allowed to define the scope of their own jurisdictional limits.
Yes, Act 181 tells the courts that they must defer to the RPCs — which write the very definitions that decide when their plan overrides a town’s.
Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse.
It would be difficult to design a governmental unit with less accountability.
This power shift away from trusted local officials and Australian ballot town voting is heretical to New England, and exactly the type of addiction to unnecessary and so-called expert regulation that has created the blue states’ affordability crisis.
As New York Times columnist and liberal Democrat Ezra Klein has bluntly explained , “You cannot be the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live.”
In his book “Abundance,” co-authored with Derek Thompson, Klein writes that the affordability crisis is largely due to Democrats’ misplaced trust in complex regulatory processes over elected politicians.
He urges the party to confront its regulatory addiction to stop stifling the building of things we need, like housing.
Just like previous well-intentioned environmental measures Klein discusses, Vermont passed Act 181 to address concerns with forest fragmentation and wildlife habitats.
Its proposed solution was to impose the existing Act 250 commercial permitting regime on rural residents seeking to build a single house if their property was designated as Tier 3 land.
This would have been a minor inconvenience for the rich but a deal-breaker for anyone else, exacerbating the housing and affordability crisis in a single stroke.
It was also an intellectually lazy move.
The Legislature tried to slap a commercial regulatory regime on residential Vermonters to achieve something that regime was never designed to do.
And if the Legislature lacked the imagination to come up with a custom-designed solution, it could have chosen a better existing state law to address the issue.
Rewarding landowners with lower property taxes for voluntarily not developing these lands through the current use program, for example, would have made these lands more affordable, not less.
The lesser-known and understood provisions of Act 181 that survived are being implemented right now, and very few Vermonters know anything about it.
New rules are being drafted by unelected RPC staff, subject only to a supervisory network of unelected board members and state bureaucrats.
If you happen to be paying attention and wanted to have input on these rules in, for example, the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee region, where I live, you would have to work across more than a dozen different communities to persuade enough appointed board members to take action to veto the decisions of RPC staff.
Good luck.
If you have watched these public meetings online, you would see a member of the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee staff deny public involvement in violation of both Act 181 and Vermont’s Open Meeting Law, and then publicly disparage and make false statements about the person whom they unlawfully refused to allow to speak.
And these new rules are entirely unnecessary and overbroad .
They are written for large commercial chains, not the family-scale businesses that seek to operate in our sparsely populated rural areas.
In the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee region, any commercial project that triggers Act 250 review — no matter how small — must install electric car chargers .
If the business is deemed to have “substantial regional impact,” such as serving two towns near a town boundary, it must provide transportation impact studies for each phase of development to get its Act 250 permit.
If it is a rural business engaged in principal retail, it must also conduct transportation impact studies.
In the aggregate, all these new regulations will drive up the costs of desperately needed housing and other new economic activity in rural communities, if not deter them altogether.
While not every RPC has seized these powers as aggressively, there is no real obstacle to their doing so.
The next legislative session must revoke the doctrine of regional and state supremacy over local land-use decisions.
Regional plan rules should require municipal approval by means of warned votes in every affected community.
RPCs should require municipal approval to participate in Act 250 appeals, which can hold up projects for years.
And the law granting them the power to assume jurisdiction over virtually any project they choose, and implement rules that trump municipal ones, must be repealed.
If you are a Democrat voting in the primaries, make sure your chosen candidates understand that our democratic tradition is at stake.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Democrats are destroying New England’s local governance tradition .
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