|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
An open letter to Vermont legislators and citizens
By Neil Ryan
Rural Vermont is not just a “forest block” as defined by planners via GIS maps and undemocratic rule making. Rural Vermont is a human institution created with care by generations of men and women who were willing to work the land.
I am a third-generation Vermont farmer who has called three different farms in three Vermont towns home. Each of those farms—the foundation of my family’s livelihood—would be impossible under Act 181 and the emerging Act 250 revisions. Most Vermonters have no idea what’s coming.
My family started farming in Starksboro in 1981 with a dairy cow and a tent, purchasing an abandoned hill farm with a caved-in house and rotted barn. My grandparents raised Scot Highland cattle, planted 10,000 Christmas trees, and built for multi-family living. My uncle created Highland Sugarworks there—pioneering specialty glass bottles for Vermont maple syrup and helping establish organic standards for the industry.
They didn’t ask permission or spend tens of thousands navigating bureaucratic mazes. They simply did the hard work of farming.
Under Act 181, none of that would be possible. The multi-family housing would require navigating Tier 2 and Tier 3 designations. The roads to access the farm would trigger the 800-foot road rule requiring Act 250 permits. The diversified operation would run afoul of restrictions on accessory farm businesses.
In my twenties, I homesteaded in Roxbury. I built a quarter-mile driveway to reach another abandoned farm, constructed a barn on a 140-year-old stone foundation, and drew water from a prior generation’s stone-lined well. Under Act 181, a young person could not do this. The capital and time required to navigate permitting would make it impossible. Act 181 ends opportunities for the next generation to homestead on the only affordable land left to them.
Now I farm 200 acres in Corinth and Orange that the regional planning commission designated “Rural—Conservation: Land set aside for natural resources” without my meaningful input. This land—slated for Tier 2 and Tier 3 restrictions—was Governor Deane C. Davis’s boyhood farm. It has had four different home sites over two centuries. Ancient roads connected to a Norwegian commune, a brick kiln, and the early 20th century Maplewood Hotel with its bowling alley and swimming pool. My land has three vestigial sugarhouses, stone sheep pens from the 19th-century sheep boom, and barbed wire fencelines from when milk was shipped to the creamery.
Planners call all of this a “forest block.”
This is the profound ignorance at the heart of Act 181: distant authorities with computer models decided they know better than the people who work the land. They see static categories—”forest blocks,” “habitat connectors”—drawn on screens. I see two hundred years of human stewardship creating the biodiverse mosaic of field and forest that defines Vermont.
Beginning December 31, 2026, any construction in Tier 3 areas—including potentially a single-family home—will require full Act 250 permits. Want to build a house for your children or aging parents? Prepare to spend tens of thousands of dollars and wait a year for permission from five appointed officials who have never seen your property.
The road rule takes effect July 1, 2026: any private road over 800 feet triggers Act 250 review. Eight hundred feet—less than the distance from my barn to my round bale feeder. My home and garden are more than 2,600 feet from the town-maintained road. Under this rule, I may not access parts of my own land without state permission.
The on-farm businesses that keep me afloat? Farm stays aren’t clearly exempt. Events require permit review. Processing farm products requires proving 50 percent of sales come from my own production—a moving target that could leave me in violation without knowing it.
The mathematics are brutal: Small diversified farmers cannot afford the permits, the time, the lawyers, or the uncertainty.
Act 181 creates exemptions in Tier 1A and 1B areas making it easier for corporate developers to build housing. The burden of restriction falls on rural landowners least able to bear it. We’re being asked to subsidize development goals with our property rights while being denied the opportunities the wealthy enjoy.
This is cultural genocide through regulation. Rural Vermont culture—the knowledge of working this land, the social patterns of multi-generational continuity—is being systematically destroyed. When you make it impossible for young people to start farms, you break the chain of cultural transmission. When you lock rural land into regulatory categories, you erase human history and treat rural people as a problem to be solved.
Vermont had 3.3 million acres of farmland in 1925. Today we have just over 500,000 acres—an 85 percent loss. The state’s response is to make what’s left even harder to farm.
What Legislators Must Do
Repeal Act 181 or amend it radically:
- Exempt working farms enrolled in Current Use from Tier 3 restrictions
- Repeal the 800-foot road rule or raise the threshold to prevent actual sprawl, not farm access
- Restore full Act 250 exemption for all accessory farm businesses—stays, events, education, processing
- Require landowner consent before Tier 3 designation—make it opt-in, not imposed
- Provide compensation for regulatory takings—if conservation matters, everyone should pay, not just rural landowners
- Extend timelines and improve notice—many landowners don’t even know their land has been restricted
- Restore local control—let towns decide, not five appointed officials
- Ground decisions in reality—walk the land before mapping it; current draft maps are inaccurate
What Vermonters Must Do
Contact your legislators now. Attend the Land Use Review Board hearings. Demand to see if your property has been mapped as Tier 3. Ask your representatives: Do you want farms in Vermont or a playground for the wealthy? Do you want rural communities with young people and families, or further rural decline?
The final Tier 3 rules aren’t due until September 2026, but jurisdiction begins December 31, 2026. Most landowners don’t know what’s coming. By the time they do, it will be too late.
Farmers have a right to the land we own—not granted by government, but inherent in the labor we’ve invested and the care we’ve given. We have a right to pass this land to the next generation with its possibilities intact. We have a right to farm without begging permission from distant bureaucrats.
These aren’t radical claims. They’re about conserving a way of life that has sustained Vermont for generations and could sustain it for generations more—if we act now.
Neil Ryan is a third-generation Vermont farmer and consultant in Corinth. Contact your state legislators at legislature.vermont.gov. Learn more about Act 181’s impacts at act250.vermont.gov.
Discover more from Vermont Daily Chronicle
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Categories: Commentary
Act 181 is STATEWIDE ZONING by unelected bureaucrats and lobbyists for the Gang Green groups (radical anti-property rights and municipal planning Pro…stitutes).
Your property rights are an obstacle to their visionary zeal in pursuit of an “ecological core of roadless, primitive landscape” devoid of any human acivity…
Can you say: “Stolen Lands”? They want yoh to also apologize on your way to your new pod in Chittenden County….
YES! It is one more step toward Government takeover! Better known as Socialism! IMHO! This may be “the final straw” for me. If I appear to be upset-I am!
They know exactly what they are doing and they are hoping nobody notices. If you look a bit deeper this is part of their plan written out and implemented by the stooges in Montpelier who are following orders for the global organizations that are all looking to control every aspect of society, see the minimum wage differences also being passed in Vermont…..
This is fascism on the agricultural landscape.
fascism /făsh′ĭz″əm/
noun
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
This is all part of the New World Order, (Build Back Better) you will own nothing and be happy. What they forget to mention is they will own and control everything through regulation, making everything under their control.
You’ll notice, zoning has fewer and fewer uses by right. They have taken them all away. Now through other rules and regulations they want to control all your forest and farms, picking again winners and losers.
Fascism is first cousin to socialism, communism and cultural marxism, this is the nasty soup we are forced to swim in because of the puppets in Montpelier.
They do not represent the people. The represent the New World Order, which in one sense is feudalism, meanwhile the paid organizers are putting out No Kings protest when our entire state is being ruled by an oligarch of 10 people, doing nothing of what Vermonters ask for and everything that the Build Back Better crowd (new world Order) tells them to do.
Not to worry, your children will forever be happy once they are completely indoctrinated with envy, lust and greed, just keep marching in the same direction, you’ll get the same results as has been experienced for thousands of years.
Welcome to the New World Order, same as the Old World Order…..they are hoping you don’t notice.
OMG! That is my initial response after reading this. I am third generation on my farm. Same as Mr. Ryan. I am enjoying my retirement on this lovely property, or I was before Legislators have continued to make it more and more difficult, including taxes. My property is still being operated as a farm, and it is in current use, which is becoming more and more challenging.
I am still trying to process this information and I will stop commenting for now. I DO want to be involved with this however I might be helpful. We need to “stick together”!
You hit the nail right on the head……remote key board kings having zero to do with working the land saving us from ourselves. Cultural genocide thru regulation. Try eating your paper regulation manuals when there are zero farms after these regulations and PPPFU’s go into effect. This sort of job creation/regulations is what ultimately killed the former Soviet Union. We are not far behind sad to say.
Sad, and TOO true!!
The legislature is only in session until April or May, so time is short, and we must get on this bus to stop this insanity. It’s also an election year this November, so we have our marching orders to speak now or forever hold our peace.
We always have the capacity to reverse this garbage by our votes in a single election cycle, but a majority of Vermont residents continue to bring this socialist garbage down upon all of our heads…simply inexplicable how self-destructive liberals/socialist are.
This is why the Champion lands in Bloomfield Vermont should never have became another government operation.
Agree 100%. It is brutal to see. And I see no end. Another 10-12% property tax increase – ho hum. The VT state legislature is like Don Quixote chasing wind mills. What is terrifying is they don’t understand how their “the state knows best” laws are destroying the state writ large. Ted Laskaris Waitsfield, VT
Thanks Neil Ryan for this important commentary.
It is important to note that it was enacted over Governor Scott’s veto in 2024 by the Democratic Supermajority. It would never have become law in 2025 or 2026 due to more Republicans being elected.
It is of the utmost importance to keep electing more Republicans to the legislature in November in order to prevent any more flawed legislation and hopefully role back some of the more extreme measures already enacted.
This is why they’re running Pieciak, a “legit” opponent to Herr Scott.
With the supermajority gone, they now need a non-veto’ing governor. And th beat gos on. Adieu, VT.
This is outrageous. I don’t farm, but know a few.
I hope this can be repealed or amended.
Conservatives are so outnumbered in the legislature that it is hard to change things. I try to talk to people who don’t pay as much attention to this stuff as I do. I try to point out the ridiculousness of some laws and regulations. It can’t hurt.
I try to pay attention to all the crap they throw at us each legislative session, between trying to stay alive, work and live, and NEVER saw the damages of this bill. Probably because there was something else (the fuel tax??) coming up the pike. This DIRECTLY affects my property that I have lived on for 16 years, been a land and wildlife steward to, in the best sense, and paid ENORMOUS taxes on each year. AND NOW they tell me I can’t do what I want or intended without masses of red tape and expense???? I can’t even. smdh.
There is no limit to the Lefts control freak imagination. As noted by C. S. Lewis: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
Their control is particularly dangerous because it is unlimited by self-restraint:
Torment without end: They operate with the “approval of their own conscience,” making their oppression perpetual.
Benevolent disguise: They claim to act for the victim’s good, making resistance seem ungrateful or irrational.
Erosion of dignity: Lewis argued that being “cured” against one’s will—especially of states one doesn’t see as illness—reduces a person to the level of “infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals,” stripping them of moral agency.
You are so on target with this article.
They will not allow homesteading as done by our forefathers.
Handmade home with outhouse?….try and get a permit for that one! We are denied the right for basic shelter.
Meanwhile we are homeless and strapped for debt or trapped in subsidized government housing……oh wait, that’s the plan, what the hell was I thinking!
Yes, more tiff money and chips money (school education money diverted) for rental properties! Oh yes and we’ll make zoning changes for you guys, we’ll have all sorts of grant money for you guys and tax right offs for corporations….
But build a basic home with an outhouse or primitive water system, only then will you experience the full force and might of Vermont government.
But if you deal drugs in your free rent and sugar momma landing pad, we’ll let you operate without permits and without interference from the police. AND when the police actually get to do their job, we’ll let the drug dealers go because we don’t want to oppress illegal aliens (state wont’ allow that) and if they aren’t illegal, then surely the police profiled them, so we have to let them go on that one too.
It is all part of the wonderful colour revolution, the revolution Bernie wants to watch from his summer home deck…btw…..
This article is so right on…. it is also spot on for all landowners… To think that a 5 member board can determine what is best for the land in the entire state when in fact with all of the varied topography in the state there are no two parcels of land the same…. Hats off to you Neil for telling like it is
15 minute cities…That’s their end goal. This is not about “conserving” the land, it is about driving the people into stack and pack housing. They are taxing and regulating the next generation off the land.
Lets work together and network!! Join this page and fight back! https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1KAL5UtJWU/