Can Vermont get it right on managing our river systems?
Global heating has come to Vermont with a vengeance in the past year. One major flood and an almost major flood, along with five mud seasons, over the past eight months, should focus our attention. We need massive efforts aimed at responding to what will be a future cascade of climate events for which we currently have no preparations. In that regard, I would like to offer hats off to the Vermont Senate for passing S.213. This bill recognizes a physical reality that is now glaringly obvious, by giving state management control of our increasingly flood-prone river systems. This initiative takes, head on, the incompetent patchwork of local river regulations (or lack thereof) now offered on a town-by-town basis.
I am saddened, however, that the current legislation doesn’t address the management of this effort, which will actually require an appropriate level of governance our state sadly lacks. By this, I mean a county government that often conforms to the towns in given state watersheds. For instance, Washington County largely overlays the various tributaries of the Winooski watershed. Were we to have a functioning county government, such an entity would be the logical location for river management efforts.
Instead, the Vermont Legislature will place the management of this notable effort directly in the lap of the Agency of Natural Resources. The secretary of that agency has said she doesn’t have the capacity to actually manage the act’s required governance. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, the Scott administration’s overall capacity to actually notice or respond to the growing environmental crisis is guaranteed to be poor to none. Phil is still waiting for the private sector to step up and provide the housing and services we so critically need. He will bring the same laissez-faire sensibility to this watershed challenge To expect anything different in the area of actual environmental management would just continue the administration’s proud history of being late or absent from the critical parties.
If our Legislature actually wants real-world outcome from this water management effort, they really need to come to some conclusion of how the effort should be managed. While I would love to see this as the moment when we, as an engaged populace, would understand that county government could save our towns and cities a lot of time and money on such environmentally and structurally critical management issues, I fear our Legislature and towns are not up to the task.
We should all be well aware that the issue of “local control” will sink any sensible effort to create a county-structured governance level. This is sad, because all the towns in the county are going to be affected by increasing floods, destroyed infrastructure and service disruptions, etc. As the burgeoning tax demands of our such “local control” have become evident in the recent school budget failures, we can see our current approach as failing, One might hope that some smart folks, somewhere, should be addressing the economic and environmental demands in the increasingly uncertain future of our 200+ cow towns So far, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
For now, as the Legislature may have the votes to pass out this important legislation over a predicted Scott veto, I can only urge that some sensible management of this effort be specified in the legislation.
If we can’t create county structures, perhaps the legislation could give more power to the Regional Planning Commissions. They at least have the purview of the larger geographic area. Perhaps the legislation could give them something that looks like enforcement capacity in a way that is more binding than the current voluntary association support and management from the towns.
While I applaud the Senate’s effort to create a larger management initiative for our flood-swollen rivers of the future, it is still lacking. Without a hard-eyed consideration of realistic ways management must happen, I fear this initiative will become inconsequential when assigned to a bureaucratic system that is incapable of the needed focus.
Our disrupted environmental future is going to demand more from our state than the 19th-century patchwork of cow-town jurisdictions, which now define Vermont. The same is true for our educational structures, but that is for another day. Would that our Legislature could take this moment to start looking at our state as an interlocking set of watersheds and bioregions, which will create increasing demands as the climate and economic crises grow.
We are beyond the moment when Vermont needs to be looking at new structures of management, such as robust county governments. Keeping things operating, as they have been for 200 years, will not provide the capacity for us to respond to the critical demands clearly seen on the horizon. Of course, we could wish for a massive change in the structure and management of our state government, but I don’t see that happening. Do you?
Dan Jones lives in Montpelier.
