By Rep. Gina Galfetti

[Editor’s note: Act 59, the state law to which Rep. Galfetti refers, follows a United Nations land use initiative and was sponsored by Rep. Amy Sheldon (D-Middlebury), chair of the House Environment Committee.]

Vermont has committed itself to ambitious conservation goals through Act 59, the Community Resilience and Biodiversity Protection Act, often referred to as the state’s “30×30 and 50×50” initiative. These goals aim to conserve 30 percent of Vermont’s total land area by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050. 

Achieving these goals, however, will be impossible without recognizing and equitably including the very landowners who already steward much of the state’s working landscape.

More than 19,000 rural Vermont landowners participate in the Use Value Appraisal (UVA) Program, AKA ‘Current Use,’ enrolling approximately 2.5 million acres of agricultural and forest land. For decades, this program has kept land undeveloped, productive, and locally managed. It is, by any reasonable measure, Vermont’s most successful conservation program. Yet under Act 59, these lands were largely excluded from the conserved land inventory, and the people who manage them were largely absent from the law’s development.

This omission matters. Act 59 envisions a forthcoming “Conservation Plan” that will rely heavily on private landowners, especially farmers and forest managers, to meet statewide conservation targets. But their goals for their land, the methods they’ve used to maintain it in an undeveloped state, the economic and regulatory pressures they face, and their conservation needs have not been equitably considered as Vermont moves into Phase II of implementation.

House Bill 70 (H.70) offers a straightforward and sensible correction. It proposes adding land enrolled in the Use Value Appraisal Program to the definition of “conserved land” in Act 59, specifically by recognizing UVA land as a “natural resources management area.” This change would acknowledge that working agricultural and forest lands managed under UVA already provide critical benefits for biodiversity, climate resilience, and community stability.

Organizations representing rural and working-land interests, including members of the Rural Caucus, Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast, the Vermont Farm Bureau, and the Vermont Forest Products Association, have asked that H.70 receive meaningful consideration in the legislative process. 

To date, that consideration has been cursory at best.

State agencies such as the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and the Agency of Natural Resources have indicated they will continue refining interpretations and guidelines for conservation categories under Act 59. That ongoing work is important, but it is not a substitute for clear legislative intent. If Vermont is serious about collaboration, trust, and shared responsibility in conservation, then the statute itself should reflect the role of working lands and the people who steward them.

Vermont’s conservation future cannot be built by overlooking rural landowners or redefining conservation in ways that exclude long-standing, successful models. Recognizing UVA-enrolled land through H.70 is not about weakening conservation standards; it is about grounding them in reality, fairness, and partnership.

If we want to meet our conservation goals, we must start by counting and listening to the land and landowners who have been conserving Vermont all along.

The author owns a Barre house-painting business and is one of two members of the Vermont House of Representatives from Barre Town. She is a Republican.