A response to Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale’s new overtures to rural Vermont

by Neil Ryan on the Substack Page for MacIsaac Highland Cattle

Senator Ram Hinsdale published a commentary this week in the Vermont Daily Chronicle under the headline “Where 100% of Vermonters Agree.”

She’s right that Vermonters agree on at least one thing: we want our kids and grandkids to be able to stay. That’s not a political position. That’s a shared hope that crosses every town line, every party registration, and every hill farm and woodlot in this state.

But with respect to the Senator, you’ve misrepresented S.325. And you’ve inserted your own interests without meaningfully acknowledging rural Vermont’s.

The gathering storm in response to Act 181 is about an 800-foot road trigger that can ensnare a farmer providing access to a corner of his property because a regulator deemed its primary function converted.

It’s about Tier 3 maps drawn without notifying the landowners they affect.

It’s about the sole asset of a retiree being rendered near worthless by the cost of permitting.

It’s about not being able to age in place while welcoming the next generation.

It’s about a newly created regulatory process so expensive and unpredictable that a low- or middle-income family considering building on the only affordable land available to them has to wonder why they even bother with Vermont.

It’s about a law that rural Vermonters—Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike—are turning out by the thousands to oppose.

This is the wrong time to run political cover for unpopular policy. It is not the time to reassert your prioritization of business interests. This is a serious economic justice issue that requires legislative remedy.

Rural Vermonters have identified precise, well-defined pain points. Your commentary chose to ignore them. Multiple bills have been introduced this session correcting the excesses of Act 181. They languished on the wall in committees without your voice.

S.325 Is Not What Senator Ram Hinsdale Is Saying It Is

Let’s start with the central claim: that S.325 represents the Senate listening to rural Vermonters and responding to their concerns.

That’s not the origin of S.325. Like, at all! It’s not how the process unfolded. The Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy chose not to hear individual testimony from concerned citizens. Senator Ram Hinsdale’s framing is a cynical post-rationalization in the face of public blowback.

On February 20, the Land Use Review Board (the state agency created by Act 181 to implement it) testified before the Senate Natural Resources Committee and asked for the delays themselves. The LURB requested that Tier 3 jurisdiction be pushed back a year. It asked for an 18-month delay on the Road Rule. Its stated reason: it needed more time for rulemaking and more time to ensure the public understood what was coming.

S.325 is a response to implementation agencies saying they couldn’t execute the law on schedule. It is not a response to rural Vermonters saying the law is wrong.

Here’s what S.325 does not do and your commentary never mentions: it makes no substantive changes to the Road Rule trigger. It makes no changes to Tier 3 mapping boundaries. It does not require that landowners be notified before maps affecting their property are finalized. It does not repeal, soften, or revise the underlying policies that rural Vermonters are inflamed by.

Perhaps too Preoccupied with Developers’ Interests

The Senator addressed her now-infamous “no man’s land” comment about Tier 2. She called it “an admittedly uninspiring statement” about a gap in the law. We’ll leave it at that.

But consider what she writes next. Her stated concern about Tier 2 is this: the 10x5x5 rule “limits small developers from meeting the full potential of their hometown housing projects.”

Small developers. Not farmers, multigenerational landowners, or rural families building for their children. Developers.

That tells you something important about whose problems she is actually trying to solve. It is not the problems of the individual rural Vermonters reading her commentary in the Chronicle. It is the commercial interests she regularly advocates for.

What a Real Response Would Look Like

Senator, rural Vermonters aren’t satisfied with a delay. A listening session or two isn’t going to cut it. A commentary in a right-coded media outlet, timed to blunt a nonpartisan rally and press conference on Tuesday, March 24, from the State House steps, isn’t even particularly adroit.

Rural Vermonters want:

Substantive changes. No more kicking the can down the road. In your words, “we must get this right—for the generations before us and the generations to come.”

We agree. Given that we all agree it’s imperative, then reform Act 181 now.

Address the Road Rule. The 800-foot trigger does not distinguish between a wealthy out-of-state developer building a private road into a lot and a family extending access to their own land. If the intent was always to target the former, fix the law to say so. Define it narrowly or eliminate it. Stop asking rural landowners to trust that the LURB can resolve something it cannot under the current statute.

Address the Tier 3 maps. The initial maps were released without direct notification to affected landowners. That is not “bringing Vermont along.” That is how you create the distrust you’re now trying to walk back. Ground-truth them, then junk them.

The Invitation

Senator Ram Hinsdale’s commentary is difficult to view as genuine outreach. It reads as an act of political deflection, as the economic justice story behind Act 181 continues to gain momentum.

While Senator Ram Hinsdale is increasingly viewed as an adversary of rural Vermont, we really don’t want her to be. She holds real power in Montpelier, and if she chose to use it on behalf of the people flooding Vermont’s legislature and media with letters, organizing on social media, and speaking up in their local meetings, she would be showing true leadership. She could compel genuine legislative reform this session. She could insist that the LURB’s jurisdiction be drawn with precision—not painted with a broad brush and refined only after public backlash.

Rural Vermont doesn’t need another ally who “hears the concerns.” It needs allies who change policy.

We are Democrats, Republicans, and independents. We are farmers, loggers, homesteaders, small business owners, and landowners. We are the people who have stewarded this landscape for generations largely without state permission, often without regulatory guidance, and without the assistance of outside advocacy organizations.

We are asking to be governed by people who understand what it means to own land in rural Vermont, who are free from conflicts of interest, and who treat a grassroots uprising not as a political problem to be contained, but as a signal worth heeding.

Senator Hinsdale: the invitation to join us is genuine. But joining us means asserting your leadership to get results—not publishing a commentary explaining why delay is the response we needed.

Come back with legislative recommendations, put pressure on your caucus to tackle the inequity of Act 181, and provide sustained effort to get better legislation over the crest. We’ll be your allies.