By Rep. Rob North 

The House is voting today, Wednesday May 6, to repeal the Road Rule and other rural property restrictions in Act 181. You might ask, what’s the next environmental injustice we need to correct?  The answer is Act 59.  

Act 59 was passed in 2023 by the legislature supermajority and put into law without Governor Scott’s signature.  It established the legal goals to permanently conserve 30% of Vermont’s land by 2030 and 50% by 2050.

 “Permanently” is the operative word.  That’s a long time.  Vermont has one of the most successful citizen-led environmental protection mechanisms in the US called the Use Value Appraisal (UVA) program, more commonly known as “Current Use”.  

Vermonters, being very environmentally conscious, have voluntarily opted into this conservation program by enrolling 2.6 million acres of Vermont’s approximately 5.9 million acres of land surface into this program, that’s 44%.  The UVA program prevents development of the land, requires adherence to a land conservation management plan, and has stiff penalties to remove it from the plan.  

As chart 19 from this presentation to our House Environment committee by the Vermont Dept of Forest Parks and Recreation shows, the quantity of land in this program has been ONLY INCREASING for the past 30 years without decreasing. In other words, this is an essentially permanent method of conserving land by Vermonters and allowing them to continue to own and steward it for ecological benefits.  

Yet the word “permanently” in Act 59 prevents this land from being counted toward the goals!  Act 59 conservations consider the UVA land “unconserved”!  There is already 27% of Vermont’s land permanently conserved under Act 59, so we’re nearly at the 30% mark, but further progress has largely stalled simply due to market saturation. 

There’s only a finite amount of land in Vermont and this is making what remains more and more expensive.  Of the 2.6 million acres in UVA, 0.5 million is already also permanently conserved in Act 59.  If we add these values together we get approximately 60% of Vermont’s land either in UVA or permanently conserved or both. 

 If we include the UVA land toward Act 59 goals, we’re already there! And that’s what the deep-pocketed conservationist backers are concerned about. They would lose their motivating factor to continue to consume more of Vermont’s limited land.  

Alexsys Thompson has written an excellent article following the money trail on this and our committee took fabulous testimony on this topic.  So, the next environmental injustice we need to correct is passing H.70 which simply counts UVA land toward the Act 59 goals.

The author represents Vergennes and Ferrisburgh in the Vermont House of Representatives.