By Neil Ryan

“We’re dirt poor, but we have land. I thought I was doing the right thing for my children.”

That’s what Jim Bulger told me last Friday night when he knocked on my door.

Jim is 80 years old. For 50 years, he has raised sheep and vegetables in West Topsham. He ran a nursery out of his greenhouse, and more often than not, he gave seedlings away. He says he’d like to start plants again this spring if he can scrape together enough to replace the plastic sheeting on the greenhouse.

Jim has fostered more than 70 children in his lifetime. Some of the most vulnerable, at-risk kids in Vermont have found stability on his land. At 80, he is still taking them in.

He has served nine years as chair of the town select board. Until recently, he ran one of the last active Granges in the state. He handed it off to a 22-year-old cancer survivor because he believes in passing things down.

Along the way, Jim carved modest home sites out behind his old farmhouse so his kids could build and stay close. New rules treat him as an environmental menace—not because he’s developing a resort, not because he’s paving over farmland for a data center, but because he might need a few too many feet of gravel road through his own land.

Jim joins a chorus of Vermonters pleading for their Legislature to listen. The Legislature is refusing to hear from them.

Working Families Are Priced Out of Existence

Act 181, passed in 2024 and now rolling out through administrative rulemaking, rewrote Vermont’s 50-year-old Act 250 land-use law. It created a three-tier system. Tier 1 downtowns and village centers get fast-track or no-review permits. Tier 2 and especially Tier 3—triggered by ordinary features of the Vermont landscape—will drag tens of thousands of rural Vermonters into the Act 250 review process, destroying lives.

Proponents of Act 181 never wanted to talk numbers. Here are some:

An Act 250 permit for a rural subdivision to create one or two home sites, according to practitioner surveys, state records, and the Vermont Bar Association:

• Survey and subdivision plat: $8,000 – $18,000
• Legal representation: $12,000 – $35,000+
• Engineering (septic, stormwater, traffic): $8,000 – $25,000
• Environmental consultant: $5,000 – $20,000
• Application and recording: $500 – $3,000
• Expert witnesses if contested: $5,000 – $15,000+

Conservative total for a non-contested Tier 2 application: $38,000 to $116,000. Tier 3 can easily top $75,000 to $200,000.

That means the State of Vermont is requiring working families to surrender sums they will never possess—simply for permission to let their own child build a home on ancestral land.

Futures Are Stolen

For generations, the quiet deal in rural Vermont was simple: you work the place, you pay the taxes, and when the time comes, you carve out a couple of house lots so the next generation can stay or you can retire.

Act 181 revokes that deal. Vast swaths of Vermont’s land get pulled out of circulation for the working class. The wealthy pay to play with a wink and a nod. Existing homes get even more expensive. The next generation shuffles out of state or gets warehoused in yet-to-be-constructed urban housing units.

Impacted Vermonters Were Blocked from the Process

During committee consideration of the bill that became Act 181 in 2024, the Legislature did hold formal hearings where some stakeholders testified, but these were largely limited to institutional and technical witnesses. There is no publicly available record of widespread rural landowner panels testifying about their experiences before Act 181 became law, and no formal rural listening tours documented in the bill history.

They Want a Playground for the Wealthy and Visitors

Last fall, the Vermont Natural Resources Council penned an editorial for VT Digger cheerleading the legislation they helped to write. In that commentary, Kati Gallagher of VNRC first touted the benefits of urban lifestyles encouraged by Act 181 and then represented her own interest:

Hiking and mountain biking trails are also easily accessible from my house, and this proximity allows me to venture deep in the woods where Vermont’s breathtaking natural resources are on full display. This reality—being able to access a thriving community center and open spaces—is the magic that drew me to this corner of the world.

Her VNRC-backed admission to being an enjoyer of other people’s land is at the heart of Act 181. Activists and politicians who don’t live rural lives have decided that rural Vermont does not belong to its tens of thousands of landowners; it is their recreational amenity, their ecosystem to manage, and their chosen beneficiaries.

They Want Working Families Gone

More than ten years ago, I sat at a dinner with a Boston academic working on climate policy and a U.S. Forest Service administrator. The Boston professor stated, without a hint of embarrassment, that “the highest and best use of the northern forest of New England was to be a carbon sink for scenic enjoyment, and the people living there should be moved out of the forests.”

Calling for the forced displacement of rural people over his glass of wine, the academic echoed some of the most disturbing reform movements in our history—things like Urban Renewal of the 1950s–1970s, often called “negro removal,” or the concentration of Native Americans on marginal reservations.

As shocking as it seems, their fantasy of human displacement is being implemented in slow motion in Vermont.

Act 181’s proponents speak the language of sustainability, climate resilience, and environmental stewardship. Vermont’s landscape, agricultural soils, and water resources do deserve protection. But when the costs are borne disproportionately by those least able to bear them, Act 181 ceases to be an environmental policy and becomes a weapon of cultural exclusion. The language is progressive. The outcome is barbaric.

Rural Vermonters Are Still Being Silenced

As the rulemaking process progresses, Vermont’s Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy and House Committee on Environment and Energy are hearing from more and more concerned Vermonters. Legislative fixes exist, but Chairs Senator Anne Watson (D/P) of Washington County and Representative Amy Sheldon (D) of Addison-1 have not yet accepted calls for in-person testimony.

A New Low for Vermont

A century ago, the State of Vermont, supported by academics, decided many rural Vermonters were undesirable. Families were targeted not for individual behavior but for class markers: poverty, non-conforming lifestyles, residence in marginal rural areas, and reliance on traditional subsistence practices rather than wage labor. Today, that is known as the Vermont Eugenics Movement.

Without repeal or significant reform, future generations will likely look back on these legislators and the NGOs who wrote Vermont Act 181 with the same horror.

The Bottom Line

Jim Bulger has given this state a lifetime of stewardship and service to others. He has raised sheep, fed neighbors, chaired meetings, and fostered children left behind.

He should not need a team of consultants and a six-figure budget to let his own children and grandchildren live on his land. If Vermont cannot find a way to protect families like his, then we are not protecting Vermont—we are entering a dark new chapter of social engineering.

The clock is ticking: we currently have until July 1, 2026 (800-foot road rule), and December 31, 2026 (Tier 3), to fix this.

Get Informed On What Act 181 Does:
HUMAN RIGHTS, REGULATORY EXCLUSION, AND THE RURAL WORKING CLASS

This week: Join Vermont Act 181 on Facebook. Call Watson and Sheldon. Contact your legislators.

This month: Submit public comments on Tier 3 rules:
https://act250.vermont.gov/tier-3-rulemaking-and-report

This spring: Organize your community. Demand legislative action before the damage begins.