Three forces — Vermont’s Act 181, the UN’s 2030 Agenda, and Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership — are converging on the same outcome: the managed hollowing-out of rural life.

by Alexsis Thompson

This week, hundreds of rural Vermonters descended on the Statehouse. They were angry — and they were right to be. The Vermont Senate just passed S.325 to delay Act 181, the sweeping 2024 land use law that critics say funnels all investment, housing, and development into Vermont’s cities and towns while locking rural areas under tightening environmental review. Governor Phil Scott, who vetoed Act 181 when it passed, summed it up plainly: “This hurts rural Vermont. And now they’re just waking up to the fact that, yes, indeed, it will.”

But what most of those protesters don’t yet know — and what this article is going to name plainly — is that Act 181 is not an isolated Vermont political fight. It is the local expression of a global and national blueprint, decades in the making, to concentrate population in designated urban centers, free up rural land, and reshape who lives where. The Pandora’s box is already open. You need to understand what came out of it.

Act 181 is not an isolated Vermont political fight. It is the local expression of a global and national blueprint to concentrate population in urban centers and reshape who lives where.

Addison County Regional Map- 2018 to 2026 proposed. You can visit their website and type in any address you want to look at impact.

Act 181: Vermont’s piece of the puzzle

Act 181, passed by the Legislature in June 2024 over Gov. Scott’s veto, does two things simultaneously. It loosens Act 250 — Vermont’s landmark environmental review law — for development in designated urban and village growth centers. And it extends Act 250’s reach across virtually all of rural Vermont, shifting the trigger from the size of a project to the location of the land. One house, one driveway, on the wrong coordinates of a state-produced map: Act 250. The map itself was published with its two most consequential layers hidden by default — collapsed and unchecked, invisible to anyone who didn’t know exactly where to look.

The communities most penalized are the ones that have done the most. Towns with the highest voluntary conservation enrollment — Current Use, private easements, generations of land stewardship — are precisely the communities most heavily mapped into the new restricted zones. The law rewards designation and punishes stewardship.

The coalition defending Act 181 is not a grassroots environmental movement. It is a coordinated network of professionally staffed, nationally funded organizations — and they have direct access to the legislators who wrote the law.

The Vermont Natural Resources Council, Sierra Club Vermont Chapter, Conservation Law Foundation, Vermont Conservation Voters, VPIRG, and ACLU Vermont have formally aligned to support Act 181 and block its repeal. The Sierra Club’s Vermont chapter has explicitly named Act 181 a legislative priority — in the same sentence as the Global Warming Solutions Act and the Climate Superfund law. These are not local conservation clubs. They are organizations with professional lobbyists, litigation arms, and decade-long relationships with the legislators who drafted this law. Rep. Amy Sheldon, Act 181’s primary author and chair of the House Environment and Energy Committee, holds a lifetime score of 100% from Vermont Conservation Voters. The organizations defending the law gave a perfect score to the legislator who wrote it, every single year she has served.

On the other side of that coalition: rural landowners finding out by accident. Most of them still not knowing their rights have changed. No lobbyists. No litigation teams. No access to the committee room. Just a map they weren’t supposed to read.

The organizations actually doing the work on Vermont’s land — the ones that have been stewarding forests, farms, and working landscapes for decades — were not at the table when Act 181 was written. The paid advocates were.

The Vermont Farm Bureau — whose members are the farmers, foresters, and rural landowners most directly affected — has formally opposed Act 181’s Road Rule, collecting documented stories from across the state. Farm Bureau president Mary White told the Legislature plainly: “In rural Vermont, we measure land in acres, not feet. The road rule itself will cripple our rural communities and hinder growth where we need it to flourish.” The Bureau submitted to the Legislature a real-world account of Ian and Caitlin Ackermann of Cabot — fifth-generation Vermonters who built a home and an 18,000-tap sugaring operation on 150 acres, their driveway well over 800 feet from any town road. Under Act 181 as written, their story would be impossible for the next family that tries it.

NOFA Vermont — the Northeast Organic Farming Association, founded in Vermont in 1971 and the oldest organic farming association in the United States — has raised specific Act 181 concerns, arguing that the law must not compromise Vermonters’ fundamental right to grow food regardless of what tier their land falls in. The Vermont Woodlands Association, Vermont’s oldest forestry nonprofit, has long championed the Use Value Appraisal program — the very voluntary conservation enrollment that Act 181 uses as the basis for mapping restrictions. Rural Vermont, the statewide agricultural advocacy organization, is actively fighting to protect farm operations from the same regulatory overreach that Act 181’s framework enables.

These are not organizations that appeared last month in response to a Facebook post. They have been doing the actual work of stewardship — on the ground, in the soil, in the sugarbush — for decades. Some for generations. What they know about Vermont’s working landscape cannot be produced by a GIS model or a Montpelier planning meeting. And they were not meaningfully included in the process that produced this law.

The Vermont Farm Bureau, NOFA Vermont, Vermont Woodlands Association, and Rural Vermont have been stewarding this landscape for generations. They were not at the table when Act 181 was written. The paid advocates were.

The map doesn’t lie: two roads, two Vermonts

Act 181’s defenders have a ready answer for critics who say the law punishes rural Vermonters. The Road Rule, they say, targets wealthy outsiders punching long private roads deep into Vermont’s backcountry — McMansion builders carving up the forest for profit. VNRC calls it Vermont’s way of making sure those decisions “get the review they deserve.” The Sierra Club describes the Road Rule as aimed at “a wealthy landowner carving out their remote slice of the Vermont landscape.”

Then look at the map. And look at who is actually being exempted.

Route 17 runs across Addison County from the Lake Champlain Bridge through Bristol and Starksboro, climbing into the Green Mountains and flowing directly into the Mad River Valley — home to Sugarbush Resort and Mad River Glen. It is a Vermont State Scenic Byway. The farms, woodlots, and working family land along Route 17 are home to multi-generational Vermonters. A family that wants to carve 5 acres off their own land along this corridor to build a home for their child — on land their family has owned and stewarded for generations — may face a full Act 250 state environmental review under Act 181’s Road Rule if their driveway exceeds 800 feet. That review can take months and cost thousands of dollars. The family building the modest home on inherited land pays. The corporate resort developer up the road does not.

Route 100 runs north through the Mad River Valley and continues to Stowe — Vermont’s most expensive real estate market, where the median luxury home price is $2.85 million and home values have skyrocketed 121% since 2010, the highest appreciation in the state. Route 100 and Route 17 share the same Vermont Scenic Byway designation. The same state recognition. The same official acknowledgment of scenic and cultural value.

And yet the Stowe Mountain Road corridor — the access road to Spruce Peak, the Stowe Mountain Lodge, and Vermont’s highest-priced resort real estate — is actively pursuing Tier 1B designation: the maximum Act 250 exemption available in Lamoille County.

STOWE MOUNTAIN ROAD — EXEMPTED | Tier 1B: Maximum Act 250 Exemption

Vermont’s #1 luxury real estate market. Median luxury home price: $2.85 million. Spruce Peak development owned by AIG Global Real Estate — an $18.8 billion international investment corporation. A $400 million resort development on land partly leased from Vermont taxpayers. Pursuing maximum Act 250 exemption — and getting it.

ROUTE 17 — BRISTOL TO WAITSFIELD — RESTRICTED | Tier 2 / Tier 3: New Regulatory Burden

Multi-generational Vermont farm families. Same state scenic byway designation as Route 100. A parent carving 5 acres for a child’s home may trigger full Act 250 state review. Communities that have stewarded this landscape for generations — mapped into restriction zones.

Here is what makes this comparison not just ironic but structurally dishonest. The Spruce Peak development at Stowe — the luxury resort corridor now pursuing maximum exemption — is owned by AIG Global Real Estate, the real estate arm of American International Group. AIG is not a Vermont family. It is an $18.8 billion international real estate investment corporation — the same AIG that required an $85 billion federal government bailout during the 2008 financial crisis, the largest corporate bailout in American history. AIG retained the Stowe Mountain Lodge, Stowe Mountain Club, and future development rights after selling ski operations to Vail Resorts for $41 million. The land under part of this development is owned by Vermont taxpayers — AIG was leasing state land.

VNRC says the Road Rule protects Vermont from wealthy outsiders carving up the backcountry. AIG Global Real Estate — an $18.8 billion international corporation that needed a federal bailout — is being exempted. A Vermont family building a home for their child on their own land is potentially not.

That is not a McMansion problem. That is a power problem. And the map proves it.

AIG Global Real Estate — an $18.8 billion international corporation that needed a federal bailout — is being exempted from Act 250. A Vermont family building a home for their child on land they have stewarded for generations may not be. The Road Rule was sold as protecting Vermont from wealthy outsiders. The map tells a different story.

The Vermont Legislature’s own study flagged this risk — noting that the Tier opt-in system “could result in wealthier and higher opportunity municipalities maintaining higher barriers to affordable housing than others.” The prediction came true before the ink was dry.

SDG 11: The global framework nobody mentioned

To understand why Act 181 looks the way it does, you have to understand the policy framework it mirrors. SDG 11 — “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” — is the cornerstone of the global smart cities movement. It is the UN framework under which trillions of dollars in public and private capital are being directed toward urban infrastructure: IoT sensor networks, digital twins, AI traffic systems, smart grids, automated transit, and green-certified buildings. The global smart city market is projected to grow from $699 billion in 2025 to over $1.4 trillion by 2030.

The 2030 Agenda explicitly calls on governments to “take account of population trends and projections in national, rural and urban development strategies.” That is policy language for managed urbanization — nudging people, investment, and services toward cities, away from dispersed rural settlement. The UN framework promises that “no one will be left behind,” but in practice, the tools it deploys — smart growth zoning, location-based permitting, designated development corridors — systematically favor urban density over rural dispersal.

Vermont’s Act 181 is, whether its authors intended it or not, a near-perfect local implementation of SDG 11. Future land use maps. Designated centers. Tiered jurisdiction. Investment flowing to compact, walkable, connected communities. Protective restrictions everywhere else.

The global smart city market is projected to reach $1.4 trillion by 2030. The tools it deploys systematically favor urban density over rural life.

Project 2025: The Federal side of the squeeze

Here is where the story gets uncomfortable for people across the political spectrum. Because while the UN 2030 Agenda is a progressive global framework, the pressure on rural America is coming from the right as well — through Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page federal blueprint that has already shaped the current administration’s policy agenda.

Project 2025 does not call for pushing people out of rural areas. It doesn’t need to. What it proposes is the systematic elimination of every federal program that makes rural life economically sustainable. The effect is the same.

The document calls for eliminating the Conservation Reserve Program — a primary income source for small family farms across Vermont and the rural United States. It proposes ending the Agricultural Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage programs that protect farmers from catastrophic price drops. It targets SNAP food assistance, Medicaid, Head Start, Title I education funding, and the Small Business Administration’s disaster recovery loans — programs that disproportionately sustain rural communities where private alternatives don’t exist.

Rural communities were nearly 15 times more likely to lack broadband access before the Biden-era infrastructure law. Project 2025 calls for repealing all unspent infrastructure funds. Rural health care, already threadbare, faces Medicaid cuts and voucherization. Sixty percent of rural Americans already live in child care deserts — and Project 2025 proposes eliminating Head Start, which provides between 21 and 59 percent of all child care slots in rural communities.

Project 2025 doesn’t call for pushing people out of rural areas. It doesn’t need to. It simply eliminates every federal program that makes rural life economically sustainable.

The convergence Vermonter’s didn’t see coming

What is happening in Vermont is not a conspiracy. It is something more mundane and more powerful: convergence. A global sustainable development framework pointing investment toward cities. A federal policy agenda stripping the supports that keep rural communities alive. And a state land use law that, whatever its drafters intended, channels Vermont’s limited development capacity toward designated urban centers while placing the rest of the state under tightening restrictions.

Vermonters who thought they were immune — who moved here, or stayed here, precisely because Vermont felt apart from all that — are now discovering they are directly in the path of it. The rural-urban divide surfacing at the Statehouse is not just a fight over permitting thresholds and tiered jurisdictions. It is a fight about who Vermont is for, and who gets to stay.

When the people most affected by a law are consistently characterized as too confused to understand it by the people who wrote it — that is not a communications problem. That is a power problem.

What makes this particular convergence so corrosive is the attitude embedded within it. When Act 181’s supporters are confronted with rural opposition, the response has been remarkably consistent: the concerns are overstated, the arguments misguided, the protesters simply don’t understand the law. Rep. Sheldon told reporters that opponents’ arguments were “overstated and misguided.” VNRC’s own FAQ characterizes rural landowners as responding to “misunderstandings.” The Sierra Club frames the Road Rule as aimed at wealthy outsiders — not the multi-generational Vermont families building homes for their children on land they have stewarded for generations along roads like Route 17. The same families the Stowe map just exempted from review — except it wasn’t families at all. It was AIG.

This is the tell. The rural Vermonters showing up at the Statehouse, packing listening sessions, and pulling up the LURB map for the first time are not confused. They are reading the map. They parsed the hidden layers that their own legislators apparently never turned on. They tracked the methodology revisions. They asked questions their regional planning commissions couldn’t answer. They did the work.

They just weren’t supposed to notice.

Rural Vermonters are not confused. They are reading the map. They tracked the methodology revisions. They asked questions their planning commissions couldn’t answer. They just weren’t supposed to notice.

The protesters at the Statehouse this week were right to be angry. But the fight is bigger than S.325. It is bigger than Act 181. What is being contested — in Vermont, across rural America, and in the gap between the UN’s 2030 promises and its policy instruments — is whether rural life, rural communities, and rural people have a place in the future being designed for them.

Vermont has been a rural state, shaped by the relationship between its people and their land, for 300 years. The Vermont Farm Bureau, NOFA Vermont, the Vermont Woodlands Association, and the farmers and foresters who have worked this landscape through every season for generations — they are not a special interest group. They are Vermont. That is not nostalgia. It is the foundation of everything here that is worth keeping.

That question deserves a direct answer. And Vermonters, who have always had a stubborn, independent relationship with the land they live on, are exactly the people to demand one.

SOURCES CITED IN THIS REPORT

Vermont Act 181 (H.687, 2024) — Vermont Legislature
VTDigger / Vermont Public: “Act 181 debate pokes at the heart of Vermont’s rural-urban dynamics” — March 27, 2026
Vermont Farm Bureau testimony: Mary White, president — S.325 hearing, March 11, 2026
Stowe Reporter: “Planning commission: expand Act 250 exemptions in Stowe” — October 30, 2025
Stowe Selectboard meeting packet: Tier 1B designation request — November 5, 2025 (stowevt.gov)
Vermont Legislature Act 181 Study Group Report (CPR Final Report) — January 14, 2025
Vershire Act 181 Citizens’ Briefing: Michelle Massa & Debra Kingsbury — March 2026
Vail Resorts / AIG: Stowe Mountain Resort acquisition announcement — February 21, 2017
AIG Global Real Estate: $18.8 billion AUM, Spruce Peak future development rights retained
Vermont Business Magazine: AIG $400 million Spruce Peak development, state land lease
Green Light Real Estate: Vermont luxury market — Stowe median luxury home price $2.85M
Home Stratosphere: “25 Most Expensive Towns in Vermont” — Stowe #1, $949,452 median (2025)
Mad River Byway Corridor Management Plan — Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission
NOFA Vermont: nofavt.org — founded Putney, Vermont, 1971
Vermont Woodlands Association: vermontwoodlands.org
Rural Vermont: testimony on municipal regulation of agriculture, March 2026
Neil Ryan: “Save small farms from Act 181” — VTDigger, February 24, 2026
United Nations: Transforming Our World — The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (sdgs.un.org/2030agenda)
Heritage Foundation: Mandate for Leadership — The Conservative Promise (Project 2025, 2023)
Center for American Progress: “Project 2025’s Plan to Gut Checks and Balances Harms Rural America” (2024)
Sierra Club Vermont: “Vermont Sierra Club at the Legislature” (sierraclub.org/vermont)
Vermont Conservation Voters: Legislative Scorecard — Amy Sheldon, Addison-1
StartUs Insights: “10 Emerging Smart City Trends 2025–2026”