By Rep. Troy Headrick

I have come to appreciate Rep. Greg Burtt during my time in the Vermont House.

Greg and I probably disagree on policy more often than we agree. He is a Republican from Cabot. I sit considerably to his left on most issues. One of the more profound lessons I have gained from my time in the Legislature is that the roll call only captures a small portion of the relationships that develop among 150 people trying to make public policy together.

Greg has quietly supported me on issues where there was little political advantage for him in doing so. Some of that support has occurred in hallway conversations that will never appear in a legislative journal or roll call. Two very specific instances come to mind with ease. I have tried to return that same courtesy by listening carefully when he brings something to the floor that deserves consideration on its merits.

On May 6, he did exactly that.

We were debating S.325, legislation intended in part to address problems that had emerged from Act 181 and Vermont’s ongoing effort to modernize Act 250.

Greg offered an amendment addressing accessory on-farm businesses.

The existing law specifically withheld an Act 250 exemption from improvements associated with certain educational, recreational and social events on farms. Greg proposed striking that restriction and allowing improvements associated with activities featuring agricultural practices or qualifying farm products.

This was not an attempt to dismantle Act 250. It wasn’t an assault on environmental regulation. It was a relatively modest recognition of something Vermont farmers have been telling us for years.

Farming has changed. The economics of farming have changed. And if we want working farms to remain working farms, they need room to adapt. Farmstands are nice for the produce you’ll need for the coming week, but they’re not enough to keep the farm itself alive.

That prompted some remarkable objections on the House floor.

We heard warnings about enormous wedding venues. Traffic. Lights. Noise. Concerts. We heard the possibility of “humongous concert and wedding venues,” potentially operating “every single night of the year,” along with enormous concerts damaging agricultural soils.

Listening to the debate, you could be forgiven for thinking we were about to turn every Vermont dairy farm into a branch office of Live Nation.

There was a remarkable amount of pearl clutching over an amendment intended to give working farms some additional room to adapt.

Fortunately, some legislators on the left were listening to something else.

Rep. Kate McCann, a Democrat from Montpelier and someone with whom I share considerably more political ground than I do with Greg, stood in support of the amendment.

“As climate changes,” she told the House, “farms need to adapt to grow and thrive in Vermont.”

Precisely. I voted yes.

So did enough Democrats, Progressives and Independents to join Republicans and pass Greg’s amendment, 77–66. The full roll call is public, and it is worth reviewing.

At the time, I was pleased that we had made a sensible change. Looking back at that vote now, with another election approaching and after watching what has happened around Act 181 across Vermont, I see something else in it.

It was a warning.

Vermont Democrats are badly underestimating the political meaning of the rural backlash to Act 181. The Burtt amendment offered an early glimpse. A modest proposal acknowledging that working farms must adapt became a fight over hypothetical concerts, traffic, noise and development. Enough legislators on the left listened to pass it. Too many still haven’t understood what that vote was telling us.

Rural Vermont is angry.

More importantly for anyone preparing for November, rural Vermont is organized, motivated and paying attention to who listened.

I worry that a portion of the Vermont left has developed a profound blind spot about the people who work the land it so desperately wants to protect.

There is a particular brand of environmentalism that can become exclusionary once people have secured their own piece of Vermont. The house is built. The view is protected. Financial security is established. Environmental regulation can then become one more tool for preserving the Vermont that those of us fortunate enough to be economically secure want to experience.

It is relatively easy to demand that Vermont remain bucolic when your relationship with that landscape consists primarily of driving through it in an EV on the way back to a comfortable home (I should acknowledge that I am describing one of my own favorite ways of experiencing Vermont). It looks different when the land has to pay the mortgage.

And it looks very different when it has been paying the mortgage for generations.

The people pushing back against Act 181 include farmers, foresters, hunters, anglers, outdoor enthusiasts and families whose relationship with the Vermont landscape extends much deeper than admiring it. Their families have worked it. Built livelihoods from it. Protected it. Adapted to it. And, in many cases, struggled mightily to keep it intact for another generation.

There is another history that should humble all of us in this conversation. The land we are debating is unceded Indigenous land. Long before any of the relationships with Vermont’s landscape I am describing here, the Abenaki people were its caretakers. And Vermont has compounded that history by extending state recognition to self-identified groups whose claims to Abenaki identity are rejected by the Abenaki First Nations at Odanak and Wôlinak, the documented descendants of the people whose homeland includes what we now call Vermont. I have written extensively about that controversy elsewhere, and it deserves more space than I can give it here.

Acknowledging that history does not diminish the generational connection that Vermont’s farmers, foresters, hunters and other rural families have developed with this land. It should make all of us a little more circumspect about claiming ownership of what Vermont ought to look like, or assuming that our particular relationship with the landscape gives us exclusive authority to determine how it should be protected.

There is an arrogance in assuming that environmental concern belongs primarily to the regulatory left while resistance to regulation represents hostility toward conservation.

Farmers know something about stewardship.

Foresters know something about stewardship.

Hunters and anglers know something about stewardship.

People whose livelihoods depend upon healthy land have rather powerful incentives to care what happens to it.

That doesn’t make every objection to Act 250 or Act 181 correct. It doesn’t make every proposed development appropriate. It certainly doesn’t eliminate the need for environmental regulation. Vermont has spent decades developing protections for its landscape for good reasons, and I support many of them.

It does mean that when hundreds of Vermonters whose lives and livelihoods are connected to the land tell us that something isn’t working, our first response cannot continually be to explain to them why they don’t understand the policy.

Yet I fear that is precisely what too much of the Democratic establishment is doing.

The political danger here extends beyond Act 181.

I see the same problem in the Democratic Party’s increasingly complicated relationship with organized labor. Democrats continue to identify themselves as the party of working people while too often discovering reasons to retreat when standing with workers becomes politically inconvenient. Vermont’s rural backlash and the national erosion of working-class support for Democrats are not identical phenomena, but I think they share something important.

Too much talking about working people. Not enough listening to them.

Party politics compounds the problem because it encourages legislators to decide what the correct position is before fully considering the people asking them to reconsider it.

That is among the reasons I became an Independent.

I didn’t stop sharing values with people on the left when I stopped identifying with a political party. I still do. What I have become increasingly unwilling to do is presume that those shared values tell me what the answer must be before I have listened to the people living with the consequences.

The Burtt amendment is a small example.

Greg Burtt brought an amendment to the floor. I listened. Kate McCann listened. Enough legislators from across the political spectrum listened.

And 77 of us voted yes.

Since then, the voices demanding broader changes to Act 181 have become considerably louder. Rural Vermonters have shown up at the State House in numbers that should command the attention of anyone interested in understanding the political environment heading into November.

I am not convinced Democratic leadership has read the room.

And there is plenty of evidence available for anyone willing to look.

What began as a Facebook group organized around opposition to Act 181 has developed into Rural Vermont Rising, a network that grew to more than 16,000 members by early August. It has developed local chapters, brought hundreds of people to Montpelier, and begun moving explicitly into electoral politics. Vermont Public described the Act 181 effort as one of the most well-organized advocacy campaigns the State House has seen in recent memory.

That organizing has already begun showing up in elections.

In Bennington County, sugar producer Amy Moore said Act 181 and the organizing around Rural Vermont Rising helped propel her decision to challenge incumbent Democratic senators Seth Bongartz and Rob Plunkett. She didn’t win the Democratic primary, but she received nearly a quarter of the vote.

In Windsor County, Rural Vermont Rising members were actively scrutinizing incumbent Democratic senators over Act 181 and discussing how to exert influence in the Democratic primary. The movement wasn’t simply asking legislators to reconsider a land-use statute anymore. Its members were learning how to use elections to make themselves heard.

I don’t know what that will translate into on November 3. Neither does anyone else.

But dismissing it would require ignoring a rather impressive list of developments. Thousands of Vermonters are organized, hundreds have shown up at the State House, local chapters are forming around the state, and candidates are emerging from the movement. Along the way, there is an increasingly sophisticated understanding that changing policy sometimes requires changing the people who make it.

Even Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale offered an assessment that should probably be printed out and taped to a few doors in the State House:

“We weren’t doing enough listening. Maybe too much lecturing and not enough listening.”

Exactly.

Some Democrats appear to believe this anger will dissipate once people better understand Act 181. Some seem to regard the backlash as another episode of rural resistance to necessary environmental regulation. Others appear confident that Vermont’s political alignment will protect them from meaningful electoral consequences.

I think that confidence is badly misplaced.

There are people preparing to vote this November for whom Act 181 isn’t an abstract debate about statewide land-use planning. It has become evidence of whether the people making decisions in Montpelier have any interest in hearing from them.

Those voters have already demonstrated that they are willing to drive to Montpelier, fill the State House and make themselves heard.

They are going to have another opportunity to make themselves heard in November.

Democrats would be wise to listen before then.