The “Cave Dwellers” are catching on.

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By Rob Roper

I read the Vermont Democrats’ post mortem report following their 2024 election debacle in which Republicans picked up nineteen house seats, six senate seats, and the lieutenant governorship (the first time an incumbent LTG was ousted from office since 1815), ending their supermajority status in both chambers.

The key insight in the document leaves me wondering if any Democrats read the thing in light of their clinging support for their anti-rural land-use law, Act 181, passed in the waning hours of their veto-proof majority status. It reads:

“It was not MAGA Republicans or independents or the wealthy elite who flipped 26 legislative districts – it was Democratic voters in predominantly working-class and rural communities who feel like they aren’t being represented in Montpelier by anyone other than Phil Scott – whom they frequently see Democrats attacking.”

Or maybe the Democrats did read the report and decided the solution to their rural voters problem was and is to simply drive them out of the state.

The attitudes on display from the smaller but still majority party would indicate the latter conclusion, most pointedly articulated by Senator Alison Clarkson (D-Windsor) who is quoted referring to the Vermont population as being divided into “urban dwellers and the cave dwellers.” Cave dwellers, assuming that after Act 181 takes full effect rural Vermonter could even get an Act 250 permit allowing them take up residence in caves.

The smug condescension doesn’t end there. The Senate Majority Leader, Kesha Ram Hinsdale (D-Chittenden SE) recently referred to the areas most negatively affected by Act 181 as “no man’s land.” Which, of course, it is not. It happens to be the land of many mans and womans and their children. All of whom are rightly pissed.

What Act 181 does under its Tier 3 designations is force almost any type of development in rural Vermont down the construction of a shed subject to an onerous, expensive, and time-consuming Act 250 review. Effectively, this kills any significant development from taking place in the parts of our state that most desperately need economic development, population growth, and the housing needed to support it. It also decimates the value of rural Vermonters’ property – usually the most valuable asset people own – because if you or no one else can do anything with your land, or it becomes prohibitively expensive and complicated to do anything with it, its resale value plummets.

This is cruel.

Thankfully rural residents around the state are waking up to what this policy means for themselves, their neighbors, and in the case of farmers their livelihoods. It means that parents can’t subdivide their property to give a parcel to their children to build a home. Or sell a portion of it to pay their increasingly onerous property taxes. A farmer couldn’t build a barn or another structure to expand or modernize their business without and Act 250 review. The law even restricts recreational trail maintenance which will impact tourism.

The plight of rural towns is summed up brilliantly by Hanna Burrill, who wrote an open letter to the legislature about the impact on her own home town of Burke, Vermont.

[To benefit from Act 181] A municipality must have permanent zoning, subdivision regulations, an approved municipal plan, municipal water and sewer infrastructure, and sufficient staff capacity to administer development review. Towns like Newark, Granby, Averill, Maidstone, Glastenbury, and dozens of others across this state have none of these things. The exemption that is supposed to help rural communities is structurally inaccessible to the rural communities that need it most. It was designed for places that already don’t need it.

And it is not just the smallest or most remote towns that fall through this gap. Burke — a growing, thriving, economically active community that people actively want to move to — does not yet have municipal water and sewer. Under Act 181, Burke cannot qualify for Tier 1B exemptions. Burke gets the road rule. Burke gets Tier 2 triggers. Burke gets the full weight of a permitting system designed to discourage exactly the kind of organic, community-driven growth it represents. What is Burke supposed to do? Wait? Wait for what, and for how long, and who decides when Burke has earned the right to grow on its own terms?

We all have the right to grow on our own terms. But the Democrats in Montpelier believe that is a right reserved for the “urban dwellers.” The “cave dwellers” living in “no man’s land” not so much.

Governor Scott’s veto of Act 181 was overridden in 2024, and he and his fellow Republicans are calling for its full repeal in 2026. But they are still outnumbered, so they’re not going to get their wish. As Senator Seth Bongartz (D-Bennington) defiantly told the Vermont Daily Chronicle, “The road rule [one of the most controversial aspects of Act 181] is not going anywhere.”

Let’s make sure the same can’t be said of Bongartz, Ram Hinsdale, Clarkson, and the rest of their colleagues. Send them all packing on November 3, 2026.