by Libby Moyer

I live in one of the two smallest towns in Orange County, Vermont: Vershire. About 670 of us live here. People say “Vurshur.” Dirt roads, hills, long driveways. Four buildings constitute downtown: the church, the town clerk’s office staffed by part-timers; the Town Center Hall, used for everything from summer camp, to the food shelf, to Town Meeting; and the historic Church Orr House, now a hostel. Streams feed the Ompompanoosuc.  This town was built to support a copper mine. When the vein ran out, the hills stayed. 

Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission (TRORC) draws my region’s planning maps. Vershire is one of thirty towns in that picture. That is how fifteen to seventeen acres of private farmland here were classified and color-coded in a restrictive Future Land Use category. 

The map is not my deed. It is also no longer just a picture on a screen. That is the  problem.TRORC’s maps classify a certain stretch of this farm is poorly drained Cabot silt loam. They colored it lavender-pink on the screen. I look out the window. The fields are emerald, green, edged with goldenrod and milkweed. No one from the commission came with a shovel to test the soil. The label comes from opening a portal that digitally models a soil survey, not from a field determination of this ground. Out the window is the farm. On the screen is the farm again, already classified and decided in multicolors.

The viewer I used was marked outdated. It noted that Tier 3 work had been suspended.  There is no licensed surveyor’s seal on TRORC’s work. At a public meeting in Bradford, I asked the executive director, he and his staff craft these maps, whether he himself holds credentials as a surveyor. He said no. Neither do the digital mapmakers. 

I will not treat this map as a survey. I will not treat it as a deed. I will not treat it as a substitute for walking the ground, or for knowing what it is to live with the creatures great and small who call this place home. 

Vermont already says what kind of map defines rights in land. Making or altering maps used to fix rights in real property is the practice of land surveying. Tax maps and assessment maps are allowed when they are clearly not the legal boundary line. A state board created and funded in 2025 to oversee regional planning and Act 250 may find those pictures in “conformance.” 

Conformance to what? What is the ideal this parcel is supposed to match? Whose idea is it that this two-dimensional, multicolored plane is the actual landscape? This is private property, a working landscape that also works with Mother Nature. Whose data set are they using? It is not the idea rural Vermonters describe. It is not the idea that fills public meetings who disagree with the colored picture maps. The picture does not rewrite the deed. It changes the colors, the rules, and the players that follow the parcel around.  

The digital interface supplies no key as to what the colors mean across dozens of map views. You click. Another layer, another shade, another office. People who defend the time and millions of taxpayer dollars spent on these maps say they are only guidance for the future. The future is unknowable when weather and water are involved. Mother Nature dances in her own time. Then the maps should not be used to decide which desks get a say in what happens next on the land. 

I sat with our TRORC regional Future Land Use draft. It is 220 pages. Maps are issued separately as fourteen additional PDFs. There are fifty or sixty hot links to supporting materials. In the draft, the words shall and must appear a staggering number of times.  One rural reader counted more than two hundred. Guidance does not shall. Guidance does not must. A document written in the language of duty is a rule. A document that can raise costs, delay, and counsel is not a poster. If it is going to do that work, it owes the land the dignity of measurement. 

This is not just Vershire. The same pattern of classifications in color — wetlands, soil, forest, rare species, conserved land, even “rural recreation” — runs from the Northeast Kingdom to Bennington County. When eleven regional planning commissions slip from working with local taxpayers who know their own ground, the picture starts to govern the ground. 

I filed objections where the process said they belong: a 120-signature objection from people across the TRORC region; our Selectboard and local planning commissioner went on record; and formal objections to the Land Use Review Board and to TRORC. 

Washington will not rewrite Vermont law. It can look at a record sent. This is private working land across the state, and not one digital plane with a fixed pixel. A thirty-town region is varied. The needs of a working hill town are not the same as those of a resort town. 

Whose vision is the map? Out the window: a driveway, wind on the pond, pasture, house, barns, goats, a chickadee, woods on the edge. On the electric screen its a stack of paints. Lavender wetland wash over a house built in 1975 whose deep basement is forever dry. Purple “highest priority interior forest” laid across mowed fields. A navy-blue polka dot classifies a vernal pool on a dry hillside. A pink rare-species circle on the town’s old dump site across the road. An ash-borer stain over pasture that has no trees.  A bat-range overlay that swallows the barns without a nest survey. Butterscotch conservation blocks and pea-green protected lands on a viewer still stamped outdated.  Sixteen colors on one SPAN. 

The analogue world still locates the parcel with a deed and a pin. The digital class only knows how to open another door. Act 152 repealed the road rule and Tier 3. Yet the maps remain live. So does regional-plan conformance. So does the missing page town treasurers and the people would still like to see: cost to towns, effect on the tax base, effect on Current Use. Forests are already doing the carbon work the plans describe.  That work did not wait for a color. 

I try to repurpose the farm’s former bakery shop, the colors hand me a roster — town zoning, the Agency of Natural Resources, possibly Act 250, Fish and Wildlife, and the scientists, engineers, and lawyers I would have to hire. That is multiple expensive stops before the first hammer hits the board. Vermont elects 180 people to write statewide law. Most of the desks that create, read, and rule on the colored pictures are not among them. They are administrators, commissioners, consultants, and board members, many with degree titles after their names, few ever brushing a goat or cutting a woodlot on the parcel they have just painted. Any desk can say no at any time. 

A tool for governing land should be cheaper than the harm it prevents, clearer than the custom it replaces, repairable by the people who live with it, and grounded in the field. It should not replace the family that works and keeps the place, the town that taxes it, or the forest already doing the public work. 

TRORC already had a regional plan good through 2033. Yet, the Legislature required every region to complete a new plan by the end of 2026. That clock is paid for by families who needed to pay attention to the seasons for work, by seniors doing generational planning of their own private land, and financing that outlasts any one owner. Hours spent clicking colored areas on a screen are hours not spent building, making, and doing.  

If the commission wants a map I will respect, label the drawing a drawing. Take the shall and must out of guidance. Restore deference to towns. Publish what the colors cost the tax base and Current Use. Then planning can serve the land instead of coloring over it.  The goats instinctively know the path to the barn. The GIS map’s instinct is to color in the blank on a spreadsheet. 

Libby Moyer lives in Vershire and works in communications. She advocated for C PACE Vermont, privately funded commercial clean-energy financing, at no cost to taxpayers, which became Vermont law July 1, 2026.