VNRC isn’t listening to Vermont. They’re doubling down.

by Neil Ryan

The Vermont Natural Resources Council recently published what they’re calling an informational guide to Act 181, the sweeping land use overhaul passed in 2024 that has rural landowners and farmers across the state asking hard questions.

You can read their post here: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1CLS1WqkP6/

It’s worth reading. Not because it answers questions honestly, but because it’s a masterclass in misinformation. If anything, it demonstrates just how immune to feedback VNRC actually is. Too bad.

Buried inside reassuring language about housing affordability and clean water are a set of assumptions that rural Vermonters should find deeply troubling, about who gets to make decisions about Vermont’s working landscape, and whose judgment is trusted to make them.

Here’s what they got wrong, what they left out, and what they’d rather you didn’t notice.

Factual Claims That Don’t Hold Up

“Tier 3 does not ban development.” Technically true, but misleading. Triggering Act 250 review is not a neutral event — it’s expensive, time-consuming, and often fatal to smaller projects. For a large developer with lawyers, it’s a speed bump. For a farm family trying to build a cabin for a grown child, it can be prohibitive. The document quietly assumes that “review” is costless.

“The LURB’s current guidance indicates that access serving one house would be considered a driveway, not a road.” “Current guidance” is doing enormous work in that sentence and it’s not even true. The LURB’s definitions are still being finalized — the document admits this in the same paragraph. Reassuring rural landowners with guidance that isn’t legally settled is not a factual claim; it’s a vague promise. In fact, at present the LURB’s definitions of road vs. driveway are growing even more complex. If your proposed driveway uses a right of way, it’s no longer a driveway. It’s a road!

Logical and Rhetorical Weaknesses

The “outside investor” strawman. The Road Rule section is almost entirely built around a villain: “wealthy landowners carving out their remote slice,” “profit-driven subdivisions,” “McMansions.” This is a classic misdirection. The Road Rule doesn’t distinguish between an out-of-state developer and a fifth-generation Vermont farmer building a road to access the back forty of their own land. The emotional framing does the work that the legal language can’t.

“Getting this right matters more than getting it done fast.” This sounds reasonable, but notice what it implicitly concedes: the law as written isn’t right yet. They’re essentially asking rural Vermonters to absorb legal uncertainty that will affect your abilities to use your land while the state takes its time refining it. That’s not patience; that’s asking you to bear the cost of their incomplete work. Furthermore, there is no satisfactory outcome that can emerge from the delay. The “road rule” and Tier 3 are still statute.

The unanimous committee vote as proof of wisdom. “The Senate’s Natural Resources and Energy Committee voted unanimously to advance S.325.” A unanimous vote to pass a bill delaying and modifying Act 181 is presented as validation of Act 181’s core framework. But a legislature scrambling to extend deadlines and fund additional public engagement because communities feel blindsided is not a ringing endorsement — it’s a quiet admission that the law is problematic.

Hidden Assumptions and Framing

Rural land is a problem to be managed, not a legacy to be respected. The entire document frames Vermont’s rural landscape as an ecological asset that the state must protect from the people who own it. Forests, farms, and waterways are described as things “Vermonters have fought to protect” — but the implicit actor doing the protecting is the state (or VNRC), not the landowners who have actually been stewarding that land for generations. Your family’s judgment about your own land is never acknowledged as legitimate.

“Vermont’s landscape isn’t just scenery.” This is aimed at out-of-state developers, but it lands on farmers too. The framing assumes that without Act 250 review, rural landowners will make decisions that harm the land. It skips entirely over the reality that farmers and rural families have the strongest possible incentives, both economic and cultural, to maintain healthy land and water. The state is positioned as the steward; you are positioned as the risk.

The housing crisis is real, therefore this law is the right response. This is the document’s foundational sleight of hand. Vermont’s housing shortage is genuine and urgent. But the document uses that urgency to justify the entire package including Tier 3 and the Road Rule, which have nothing to do with housing supply. The housing provisions make the environmental restrictions politically palatable, and the document bundles them together deliberately.

“This is a work in progress, and that’s okay.” It’s okay for the legislators drafting it. It’s considerably less okay for a landowner who needs to know whether a planned road, outbuilding, or family subdivision will trigger a review process that could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

The bottom-line critique: VNRC is pursuing advocacy dressed up as information. It systematically muddies the waters while treating rural landowners as either bad actors to be regulated or passive beneficiaries of housing policy — never as people with legitimate authority over their own land.