Vermont Sidewalks

Compared with the other 49, Vermont is a healthy state. Vermonters live longer, have a lower infant mortality rate, and are more likely to have health insurance than most other Americans.

It is even (compared with the other 49) a thin state, with only (if "only" is the right word) 58.5 percent of the people (and 26.7 percent of the children) overweight, and 23.9 percent obese.

But when it comes to health and fitness, "compared with the other 49" sets a low bar. Compared with the rest of the prosperous world, Americans in all states are more likely to be overweight.

Furthermore, Vermont's earns its (relatively) good rating on keeping its weight down largely because the folks in Chittenden County are thinner, with "only" 20.3 percent of adults considered overweight (this from the Center of Disease Control and Prevention in 2009). Rural Vermont is fatter. In six counties, more than 25 percent of adults are overweight or obese. Orleans County tops the list at 28.8 percent.

The experts and plain old common sense agree that while there are several reasons people are overweight, two of the biggest are that they don't eat well and they don't exercise enough. Many Vermonters exercise regularly; some of them exercise obsessively. But it seems that the most common form of exercise is performed relatively little in this state: walking.

Again, experts and common sense agree that there is more than one reason why so many Vermonters appear averse to getting from here to there by putting one foot in front of the other, then repeating the process. But part of the answer has to be that in much of the state, there's no place to walk, at least not safely. There are no sidewalks.

"If you build it, they will come," said Nancy Schulz, Executive Director of the Vermont Bicycle & Pedestrian Coalition, using the old movie line to point out that if towns build sidewalks, people will walk more. If not, they won't. Maybe Chittenden County residents are thinner because they walk more. Maybe they walk more because they have more sidewalks.

Actually, all nine cities and most of the larger towns in the state have at least some sidewalks. And by some measurements, Vermonters actually walk more than most other Americans.

According to a study for the Washington-based Alliance for Biking and Walking, 6.7 percent of Vermonters walk or bike to work, the second highest ranking in the country after Alaska.

But satisfaction with Vermont's present level of physical fitness and its rank in the walking world would be "settling for mediocrity," said Chapin Spencer of Local Motion, the Burlington-based organization that supports more sidewalks and bike paths.


Besides, that high ranking could mask a more sedentary reality. It's no secret that Vermont is chock-full of people who care about both their health and the environment. Many of these people have the kind of flexible job schedules that makes it more convenient for them to walk to work, and most of them live in sidewalk-endowed cities. It's in the rural towns and villages where walking is both difficult and rare.

A statewide survey by the Center for Rural Studies at the University of Vermont found that only 42.3 percent of the state's towns have any sidewalk at all. The best sidewalk coverage was in Chittenden County, the study found, where three quarters of the municipalities had sidewalks. At the other end of the spectrum, only 18.2 percent of n Addison County towns had sidewalks.

That figure probably overstates the extent of the sidewalk shortage, less because the survey was taken seven years ago – there hasn't been much sidewalk building since – than because it included the tiniest rural towns, gores and unincorporated hamlets, even those that have nothing resembling the kind of settled town or village center where sidewalks make sense.

But there aren't that many of those tiny towns in the state. So it seems that at least half of Vermont's towns and villages lack sidewalks, including some that had sidewalks a few decades or even a century ago.

"West Charlotte and lots of other Vermont towns had sidewalks 100 years ago that don't have them now," said Jim Donovan, who pored over some old maps in the course of leading the unsuccessful effort to get Charlotte to approve construction of a sidewalk along Ferry Road. "As far as we can tell, the sidewalks came out when the town widened and paved the road."

Because there is no sidewalk, Donovan said, "a lot of people will drive to one spot and then get back in their car and drive to another two blocks away."

That's common behavior in small towns all around the state, where it is inconvenient and unsafe to walk, say, from the general store to the Post Office, even if they are only 50 or 100 yards apart.

And would walking 50 or 100 yards (meaning 100 or 200, assuming round trips) now and then really matter when it comes to losing or gaining weight?

Could be. The data, while not conclusive, are persuasive. In general, where and when people walk more, obesity rates decline. And vice versa. One study showed that people who rode a bus to work were far less likely to be overweight than those who drove; apparently the short walks to and from both ends of the bus ride mattered.

A study published in 2006 in "Pediatrics," the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, found that, for children, "reduced access to facilities…was associated with decreased (physical activity) and increased over- weight." (That study was about physical activity facilities in general, not just sidewalks; but the conclusion would seem to apply to sidewalks).

According to the Alliance for Biking and Walking, based on official statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health departments, "between 1966 and 2009, the number of children who walked or bicycled to school fell 75 percent while the percentage of obese children rose 276 percent."

As the saying goes, correlation is not causation, and the kids of 2009 were also eating more fast food than their counterparts in 1966, and probably spending more time in front of a screen and less on the playground. But all that walking and biking back then – and sitting in school buses now – must have had an impact.

Officials obviously think so, which is why both state and federal governments are trying to convince more children to walk to school. Part of that effort requires convincing more towns to build or improve sidewalks, so the kids can get there and back safely, and providing some money for them to accomplish the task, mostly through the Safe Routes to School program financed by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Patti Coburn, the program's Vermont coordinator, said the state gets $1 million a year, most of which goes for building sidewalks. That's a lot of money, but, she acknowledged, not nearly enough to build all the sidewalks that could convince more parents to let their children walk to school.

Still, as the recent example of Charlotte shows, there is substantial opposition to building sidewalks in Vermont. To begin with, they cost money, both to build and to maintain, and while it isn't a huge amount of money (the Charlotte project would have cost $70,000 at most, Donovan said) without federal or state aid, "the burden falls mainly on local municipalities, so mostly on the property tax," said Local Motion's Chapin Spencer.

"I would argue," said Nancy Schulz, "that the tax money going to fund health care is going to go through the roof because obesity leads to so many chronic diseases." Weighing the cost of sidewalks against the alternative of higher health care costs makes the sidewalks a money-saver, she said.


That could be, though quantifying it would be a daunting task. Either way, a project financed by the local property tax is immediate and easily perceptible to the taxpayer. Health care is financed over time, and mostly by the Federal Government, where it is obscured by a host of expenditures ranging from defense to National Park rangers.

Besides, money is not the only reason some Vermonters don't want sidewalks. Some are also concerned that installing sidewalks would alter the character of a rural town or village.

"It was a lot more than just the money," said Tom Nola, the Charlotte retiree who led the forces voting down the sidewalk proposal there. "Charlotte is a rural town and it does not make any sense to have sidewalks."

Sidewalk advocates acknowledge that even where there are sidewalks, some people, including those who live only a few blocks from their work or a store, would rather drive. It just seems to be their default position.

But Schulz insisted, "if we provide places to walk, people will walk."

To a considerable extent, rural Vermont's lack of sidewalks is the consequence of decisions made decades ago, and not easily reversible. With the development of regional school districts, fewer schools were built in the settled village centers, more out on the highway. No one is proposing miles of sidewalks along rural roads.

The sidewalk question, then, is about more than just sidewalks. It's about how communities are envisioned and designed. For decades, Vermont and most of the rest of the country envisioned and designed communities around the automobile. But as Chapin Spencer said, "our vision for our community's shifts over time." He and others hope the shift includes recognition that maybe it would be a good idea, once one has driven to town, to walk from the library to the post office to the market, an idea that would seem even better were there a sidewalk.

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Vermont's Trout Rivers After Tropical Storm Irene

Vermonters, Deb Markowitz noted, are notably self-reliant, which is good. As might be expected of self-reliant people, they are well equipped. They have tools. They have energy. They have know-how. Some of them even have heavy earth-moving equipment. In and of itself, that’s also good, noted Markowitz, the Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources.

In the days after Tropical Storm Irene flooded so much of Southern and Central Vermont last summer, some of those self-reliant, well-quipped Vermonters “thinking they were helping,” she said, took their bulldozers and bucket-haulers into the rivers to scoop out gravel, straighten out banks, and otherwise “improve” Vermont’s rivers.

Not so good.

In this case, the know-how of these self-reliant Vermonters had to do with running the machinery, not with the science of riparian zones, nor with what fish need to thrive. As a result, scientists say, the fish populations – already degraded by the flooding – are likely to stay degraded far longer.

As will the satisfaction of the thousands of Vermonters and visitors who try to catch those fish. A dredged-out stretch of stream is an aquatic wasteland where fish can neither feed nor hide. Those well-meaning, self-reliant Vermonters may have played havoc with one of the state’s most celebrated past-times, not to mention one of its more important tourist attractions.

“In some places, people over-did it,” Markowitz acknowledged.

Perhaps even in lots of places, at least if 406,000 feet, or 77 miles of stream is considered lots of places. That’s how much ended up “with major degradation of aquatic habitat resulting from post-flood stream channel alteration activities,” according to a report by biologists at the Fish & Wildlife Department, part of Markowitz’s Agency.

That’s a small percentage of Vermont’s total river length of roughly 7,000 miles, Markowitz said. But it’s almost 10 percent of the 800 miles of river affected by Irene and its floods. And that official estimate may be low. After examining the list of degraded river in the F&W report, Kim Greenwood, the water program director at the Vermont Natural Resources Council, said it missed a few spots she knows of that were badly torn up by earth-moving equipment.

The controversy over the “managing” – and over-managing – of Vermont’s streams last year has smoldered rather than flared, partly because the administration of Gov. Peter Shumlin was at first divided over the question in a peculiar and – potentially at least – politically embarrassing manner, one its officials would just as soon not discuss.

The peculiarity is that while the scientists at Fish & Wildlife were dismayed when they saw or heard about free-lance gravel-removal and bank-straightening, one prominent state official was not.

“We’ve got to get in here and get this work done,” said none other than Peter Shumlin at the time. “Irene left a mess behind and it’s got to be cleaned up.”

Irene did leave behind a mess that had to be cleaned up. In emergencies, such as clearing a road for medical vehicles, rescuing people whose homes were cut off from services, or clearing debris that might endanger a bridge or overpass in case of another heavy rain, a certain amount of digging in the rivers was no doubt necessary.

But Kim Greenwood, a scientist with a degree in aquatic resources, said some dredging was still going on more than a month later, after the roads had been open and the stranded people had been rescued.

“It went far beyond what was necessary,” she said, adding that at first the state sent a mixed message.

“The Governor was definitely not helpful,” she said. “He sent the message, ‘go ahead and dig.’”

After complaints from within the Agency of Natural Resources and from leaders of Trout Unlimited and other fishing groups, Markowitz stepped in, ending the emergency period in which towns or individuals needed only spoken permission from ANR staff to send heavy equipment into rivers.

Now the Governor does not mention dredging, but no one is denying that there was too much of it and that it was not good for the rivers or the fish. The regular trout angling season began last weekend. Markowitz said she both saw and heard about anglers catching some nice trout. Nature, she said, is “very resilient,” and Vermont can boast of some good fishing spots.

But not as many as before the front-end loaders and the trucks went into the streams.

“Where aquatic habitat has been severely altered through…channel widening and straightening, complex habitat features will need to re-establish before improvements in fish and aquatic populations can be expected,” said the F&W report.” While relatively short reaches of impacted streams may recover in a matter of years, the recovery of longer reaches may take decades…”

State officials, though, might be less conflicted and less likely to be in denial abut what happened last September than many a dweller of the river valley areas where most of the dredging took place. Or at least so it seemed to two anglers trying to find stretches of river that had been dredged and other spots where they might catch a fish.

According to the F&W report, no watershed was more heavily “managed” than the White River’s, and no branch had more work done it than the Third Branch, which basically parallels Route 12 north of Bethel. More than 55,000 feet of the Third Branch were damaged by “post-flood channel alterations,” the report said.

But the reaction from the locals was, in effect, “dredging? What dredging? Nobody saw any dredging around here.”

Finally one person, who will not be identified to avoid causing him/her any trouble, said the river had been heavily altered, and specifically referred the anglers to the spot where Camp Brook enters the Third Branch, which had been made wider and deeper by dredging.

“If you want some other spots,” came the advice, “ask the town manager, Delbert Cloud.”

“Dredging? There was no dredging,” said Delbert Cloud. “If there’s any problem with dredging, ask ANR.”

Told there was not necessarily a problem at all, Cloud said, “there was dredging all up and down these rivers. The governor said to.”

Perhaps some of the same people who so enthusiastically brought the earth-moving equipment into the rivers last fall now see the errors of their ways.

The river where Camp Brook entered it was indeed wide and deep, and seemingly dead. Catching a fish can never be guaranteed, but this was a stretch of river in which an experienced angler wouldn’t even bother to cast. It was straight, deep, devoid of any obstruction or variety.

Fish & Wildlife Commissioner Patrick Berry said the Vermont division between those who would “manage” rivers and those who would leave them alone does not reflect the familiar (clichéd?) “woodchuck-versus-flatlander” split which characterizes some environmental battles. In this case, he said, the traditionalists in the rod and gun clubs agreed with the scientists.

“There was an outcry from the angling community” over the dredging Berry said.

But some Vermonters – no doubt like some people everywhere – appear convinced that rivers should look neat and orderly, should flow evenly over an even bed, should be straight and unobstructed, bordered by banks uncluttered by dead trees or big boulders.

The scientists say the opposite condition is closer to the truth, that a healthy river with a healthy fishery curves this way and that, is shallow here and deeper there, is obstructed by fallen tree trunks and boulders, and flows over a bed rich in vegetation, sustaining the aquatic insects which in turn are eaten by fish.

Deepening a section of river with a bulldozer, they say, might reduce flooding right along that section. But it will also increase the river’s velocity, making flood conditions worse downstream.

Above all, the scientists say, a river’s flood plain should remain as intact and as natural as possible. Starting with its state capital, much of which covers Winooski River flood plain, Vermont has developed along its riversides, covering up thousands of acres of flood plain.


“Downtowns are not going to move,” said Kim Greenwood. Settling along rivers is “part of our legacy.” People live near rivers because they love them, she said, but development along riverbanks increases the need to keep as much flood plain elsewhere in its natural condition. Flooding is natural, and a river will recover from it. Recovery after a scouring by earth-moving equipment takes longer.

There are indications that many Vermonters – officials and ordinary citizens alike – have learned a lesson from last September’s activities, and that in the next big flood (and few doubt that there will be one), river bulldozing will be limited to real emergency conditions. There have been no expressions of regret from Shumlin. But Markowitz acknowledged that before Irene hit, the state “didn’t have a system in place” to deal with controlling what could and could not be done after the water receded.

Next time, she said, it will.

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Vermont Firefighters

Being a firefighter, Tim Girard was saying, isn't easy.

"There's a background check, and you have to do training," said Girard, a officer of the Swanton Village Fire Department and the President of the Vermont State Firefighters Association.

And nobody, he said, does it for the money. Even though the Swanton firefighters were among the few in the state who get a small hourly wage, "you're not going to do it to get rich," Girard said. Some are attracted by "seeing the trucks go out, the firefighting gear, the red lights and sirens." For others, there's the "satisfaction of helping the community," whether by putting out a fire or helping a homeowner with water in her cellar, and….

BEEP!

So much for that. Even sitting there in his blue dress uniform, Girard was not in the Swanton Firehouse primarily to get interviewed. Firefighters fight fires, and that alarm was alerting Girard and the two other department members in the building that they had work to do.

In about a minute, all three of them had on their firefighting garb – waterproof overpants and long coats, heavy boots, brimmed helmets. In one more minute, up drove a pickup truck, yellow light flashing, of another member of the Department. Then another. And another. Maybe five minutes after the alarm sounded, the fire truck pulled out of the garage, headed for the fire.

Not, this time, in Swanton. Or even in the United States. The Swanton Department, Girard said, is part of the Franklin County International Firefighters Association, a Mutual Aid system that includes the Canadian towns just across the border, the site of this fire.

"We were lucky in the timing," Girard said later. The call came late in the afternoon, when enough members were home from work so a big enough crew could assemble quickly.

That's usually not a big problem for Swanton, whose fire department has 30 members on its roster, sufficient even though Girard said, "we're always looking for more."

Not every volunteer department in Vermont – or elsewhere for that matter – is in such good shape. There is a firefighter shortage in Vermont that is only likely to get worse over the next several years.

At last count, Vermont had 5,746 firefighters, the vast majority of them volunteers, according to the Department of Public Safety's Division of Fire Safety.

That's not enough. There are 249 departments, and to be fully effective, fire experts say, even a small department should have 25 members. Do the math. There should be at least 6,225 firefighters. That's "only" a shortage of 479. But that still puts the state's overall deficiency at close to eight percent, and the shortages are not evenly balanced, being worse, Girard said, in "the very small towns."

Firefighting officials are not in denial about the problem. "A lot of departments do not have enough people," said Michael O'Neill, the Executive Director of the Division of Fire Safety.

Thanks to Mutual Aid systems, this does not mean that homes and businesses in small towns are in danger of being reduced to ashes before the fire trucks arrive. Fire protection is one of the basic necessities of civilized society – public fire departments go back at least to 19th Century Britain – and is likely to be provided one way or another.

But one way might be more professional – and therefore more expensive – fire departments.


There's nothing mysterious about why Vermont's volunteer fire departments are short of volunteers. Both O'Neil and Girard point to the same social changes that have made it more difficult to recruit men (and, these days, some women) to join fire departments.

A few decades ago, Vermonters were more likely to own their own farms or to work in one of the many factories or shops right in town. If the siren sounded, they were only a few minutes away from the firehouse.

Now, many of those farms, factories, and shops are gone. People are working farther from home, many of them driving a half hour or more to work. When the siren goes off, they are too far away to respond in time.

Furthermore, in the rural areas, there simply are not as many people in what might be called their firefighting years. Vermont's population is rising – if slowly – but largely because of in-migration – the state has one of the lowest birth rates in the country – and many of the newcomers are retirees. Younger newcomers tend to flock to Burlington, which has a fully professional fire department, or its environs, where the firefighter shortage is not as acute.

Though firefighting officials hope that recruitment will pick ups as the economy improves, all indications are that the social trends holding down the number of volunteers – an aging population, job sites increasingly scattered -- will not just continue but accelerate. Finding enough firefighters could get more difficult in the future.

This does not mean fire officials can't do anything about the problem. They can, and they are doing it. For one thing, they are recruiting more actively. "Aggressive promotion," is what O'Neil calls it, and it includes holding open houses at fires stations and visiting high schools. But there's no simple "magic bullet" solution to the shortage, O'Neil acknowledged. "If there were, somebody would have found it," he said.

Firefighting has changed a lot since the days, as Girard put it, when "you just rode in the truck and put the wet stuff on the red stuff." Technology has made the job both a lot safer and a lot more complicated.


But it has not, O'Neil said, really reduced the need for people to do the work.

"The reality is that most of the advances have improved safety," he said, "but they have not necessarily improved efficiency."

One obvious answer to the manpower problem is more centralization. It's a subject Vermont fire officials discuss delicately. As with the question of Vermont's many school districts, O'Neil said, "no one wants to give up local control."

Girard noted that many rural rescue services have started hiring full-time dispatchers, a step some volunteer fire departments might have to consider as the number of people who have the time and inclination to sit in the fire station all day dwindles, perhaps to zero in some small towns.

At some point, as costs rise, several nearby small towns could decide to share that full-time, paid, dispatcher, which could be a step toward consolidating fire departments, and perhaps toward hiring a few more full-timers. Possibly, O'Neil said, a county-based firefighting system of fewer, larger, and perhaps more professional departments, looms in Vermont's future. At this point, no one seems to know much more that might cost.

Despite the shortages, O'Neil said, "Vermont is a pretty safe place," much safer, in terms of fire protection, than it used to be. Not that long ago, he said, "we had the highest fire death rate in the country." Now Vermont has one of the lowest, thanks to education and regulation. Firefighters held fire-prevention lessons at public schools. Laws passed under Gov. Howard Dean require all homes sold or re-rented to have hard-wired smoke detectors. As a result, there are fewer fires – prevention, after all, is the most effective fire fighting – and when there is a fire in a house, its residents are more likely to have time to escape.

Still, that house is more likely to burn to the ground unless an adequately staffed fire truck can get to it fast enough. Finding enough volunteers willing to face the hardships, inconvenience, and in some cases danger to ride on those fire trucks remains a challenge.

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Vermont's Renewable Energy Goal

Can it really be done?

Can Vermont - can Vermonters - get 90 percent of its - of their - energy from the wind, the sun, the rain (and maybe some wood chips) by 2050?

That's only 38 years away, meaning Vermont would have relatively little time to figure out how to replace a lot of oil, natural gas, and uranium and even some coal as the source of its lights, its warm houses, and its getting from here to there.

But that's what the state's ambitious "Comprehensive Energy Plan" calls for.

"We intend to set Vermont on a path to attain 90% of its energy from renewable sources by mid-century," says the plan, officially a draft but slated to be put into final form within days.

In its own words, the Plan is "comprehensive…requiring action in all sectors regarding all energy sources." [Download the Vermont Comprehensive Energy Plan]

A big job, but, according to the plan, not really optional.

"It is imperative," says the plan, "that we take more control over our energy future."

"Imperative," to be sure, does not necessarily mean "feasible," and the state could "take control" and still fail to meet that 90 percent by mid-century goal. Already, there are critics who argue that the goal is not only unattainable, but not even desirable. They also ask just how much it will cost.

They have a point. The Plan doesn't say how much it will cost. But then, the critics don't say how much it will cost not to move toward less reliance on coal, oil, and gas. Over the next 38 years, burning all that stuff is likely to get a lot more expensive, not to mention dirty. The "challenge of climate change" and the obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions lie behind the Plan's call for switching to non-polluting renewable sources.


A price tag is not the only thing the Plan lacks. Anyone looking for a specific, mathematically precise outline explaining just how the state can reach its 90 percent goal will be disappointed. This is a plan as strategy not as detailed diagram, a general roadmap rather than a precise blueprint.

"The point of a plan is to move in the right direction, to set a goal that appears to be both ambitious and achievable, and to make sure you continue to move in that direction" said Elizabeth Miller, the Commissioner of the Public Service Department, the Plan's creator.

Not that the Plan is nothing more than a warm and fuzzy wish list. Its pages - 19 in the Volume I summary, 368 in the more detailed Volume II - are chock full of graphs, tables, and statistical analysis. The authors used models to try to calculate likely energy use, living patterns, and costs over the next few decades.

But models are created by using assumptions about the future, all plausible but none certain, and many beyond Vermont's control. The section about using less energy for transportation, for instance makes clear that success would depend on federal policy and on how much progress the auto industry makes on developing electric (or part-electric) autos. "We must make significant changes in the types of fuels our vehicles use and in the infrastructure that we rely upon to move around," the Plan says.

On its own, Vermont can't do that.

"That's why we model," Miller said.  "All models are wrong, but some are useful. The point of modeling is to set policy. A model is not a crystal ball."

It can't be, she said, because there will be so many changes in technology, the economy, and human behavior over the next few decades that any effort at precise prediction would be foolish. That, she said, is why the Plan's authors rejected suggestions to set interim "sub-goals," for instance, "to say by 2023 we have to be producing 17 percent of our electricity with biomass, three percent and with wood chips." Conditions will change over time. Does that mean there shouldn't be a goal? No. We need to move in the right direction."

Furthermore, even when the Plan is declared final, it won't really be…final. It's a work in progress. As new technologies are developed, as national policy changes, as new economic models are accepted, the Plan will continue to be re-adjusted.

Some of the criticism is very specific. Fuel oil dealers, who obviously want more homeowners to heat their homes with the product they sell rather than being served by a natural gas pipelines, are unhappy that the Plan suggests expanding a natural gas pipeline. Some business groups fear that the focus on renewables and climate change will mean less emphasis on controlling costs, leading to higher utility bills. They are especially unhappy that the Plan assumes the impending closing of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which now produces about a third of Vermont's electricity for a low price and without polluting the air.

"Rate-payers would be forced to buy an expensive source of power…(based on) an artificial construct," said Guy Page, the communications director of the Vermont Energy Partnership. Referring to the state's insistence that electric utilities buy a certain amount of power from wind projects, even though that electricity is more expensive, Page said, "That's an un-level playing field. Wouldn't it be better to build in renewables on a level playing field?"

In energy, though, there has never been a level playing field. All fuels and systems have been subsidized for more than a century. Nuclear power, which Page and his allies support, is perhaps the most government-subsidized industry in the history of the world. Its original research and development was the Manhattan Project; it still relies on government loan guarantees and a legal cap on its liabilities.

Another specific complaint against the Plan comes from some environmentalists unhappy that the draft version would have ended an eight-year ban on large-scale wind energy projects on state-owned land.

"This land was protected for a reason," said Will Wiquist, the executive director of the Green Mountain Club.  Much of it, he said, is among the state's "most fragile high-elevation lands," and should not be developed.

After Agency of Natural Resources Deb Markowitz said she thought the current policy "works and is consistent with the goals of the energy policy," the plan was "modified," Miller said (by email), to provide that," all renewables continue to be allowed consideration on state land where appropriate."

That would seem to tolerate smaller wind installations, such as the single tower that just went up on state-owned land at Burke Mountain, but not "industrial" wind projects such as the controversial development being built on Lowell Mountain.

The broader criticism of the plan was articulated by University of Vermont economist Art Woolf, who said, "There is no estimate out there of what this thing's going to cost." The Plan, Woolf said, is "looking at the positives and totally ignoring anything that might cause a problem. It only looks at the benefits, not the costs."

For instance, Woolf said, meeting the Plan's goals for using less gasoline would require many more Vermonters to drive cars powered by electricity. Right now, at least, those cars are far more expensive than gasoline-powered autos.

"If I bought $40,000 Chevy Volt (I'd have) $20,000 less to spend than if I bought a standard Chevy," Woolf said. Thousands of Vermonters reducing their disposable income by $20,000 each, he noted, would be a substantial drag on the state's economy.

The Plan hardly avoids the matter of cost, which is mentioned hundreds of times, almost always with the goal of holding it down. But as Miller acknowledged, there is no total net cost estimate of how much money - or whose - it would take to get from here to there.

But it would be close to impossible to provide a detailed cost estimate for the same reason that the Plan does not provide that specific, precise blueprint for achieving its goal: too many variables. For instance, Miller said, "there are…unknown…market forces that will allow vehicle penetration and pricing to change…Those are acknowledged in the plan and rough estimates are provided to allow Vermonters to understand the challenges and benefits."

It may be significant that both Woolf and Miller used automobile transportation examples. Thanks to controversies over Vermont Yankee and the Lowell Mountain wind project, electricity has dominated Vermont's energy debates. But Vermonters us far more energy driving their cars than lighting their homes or running their clothes dryers.

"Transportation accounts for the highest share of overall energy use," reports the Plan, and adds more to greenhouse gas totals than anything else Vermonters do. In Vermont, transportation essentially means individuals driving their cares, usually all alone, and the Plan suggests that the state consider not only cleaner-burning, more fuel-efficient cars, but some more profound (if gradual and cost-effective) alterations in how Vermonters live: more public transportation, more carpooling, walking or biking to work or shop where practical, and - perhaps to make it practical - more people living in "compact centers."

As the Plan says, "the simplest way to reduce emissions from motor vehicles is to use them less."

To some extent, the difference of opinion here is one of attitude as much as analysis. The writers of the Plan appear optimistic that energy technologies will improve fast enough to help them meet their goal. Others are less certain.

"I'm skeptical that anybody knows what energy technologies will be available," Woolf said.

Or course, nobody knows. Up in Canada, Joshua Pearce, adjunct professor of York University's Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, said  solar photovoltaic systems are near the "tipping point" where they can produce energy for about the same price other traditional sources of energy.

But professors have made such projections before, and solar energy remains more expensive than power produced from coal or gas.

Considering Vermont's demographics, at least half the people of the state probably won't be around in 2050 to find out whether Vermont can really succeed in reaching that 90 percent goal.

But there's also the matter of how to define success. If by then Vermont gets 85, or even 75 percent of its energy needs from renewables, will the Plan have been a failure?

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Vermont's Doctor Shortage

It is 2025, and somewhere in rural Vermont a child gets hurt.

Big deal. Kids get hurt every day. This kid's mother drives him to the hospital emergency room or perhaps to the office of the family's own health care providers.

Either way, they walk in and are…given a number and told to sit down. It will take awhile. There aren't enough doctors.

Good thing this kid isn't so badly hurt that he needs emergency surgery. In that case, they'd have to rush him to Fletcher-Allen in Burlington or Dartmouth Hitchcock over in New Hampshire. The nearby hospital hasn't had an emergency surgeon on the staff for decades. To put it bluntly, by 2025, Vermont will not have enough doctors.

Actually, according to most experts, Vermont already doesn't have enough doctors. Or at least it doesn't have enough primary care physicians in most of the state.

"We're probably short 25 FTEs (full-time-equivalent) when it comes to family practitioners," said Dr. Charles MacLean, a primary care physician who is also Associate Dean for Primary Care at the University of Vermont's College of Medicine, where he heads Vermont's AHEC (Area Health Education Centers). AHEC was created by Congress 40 years ago to try to increase health services in poor and rural areas.


Twenty-five is not a big number, but according to the State Health Department there are only 492 primary care physicians to begin with, so Vermont is already about five percent short of the family practitioners it needs.

"The number of primary care physicians falls short of the number needed to care for all Vermont residents," said a report released in August by the Association of American Medical Colleges. The report found shortages "in all counties," but Dr. Harry Chen, Vermont's Health Commissioner, said, "there is a maldistribution of physicians," with doctors "more available" in Chittenden County and a few other pockets of the state.

Elsewhere, then, the shortage would be greater than 5 percent.

That shortage is likely to grow, and not only for primary care physicians. The doctors said they also expected shortages in general surgery and mental health care, where the state needs more doctors but also more physicians assistants, nurses, and other therapists.

Vermonters are getting older, and older people need more medical services. Furthermore, Vermont doctors are getting older, meaning many of them will be retiring. Furthermore, if the new national health care law is not repealed, more Vermonters will be able to afford health care. And if the projected state health care plans take effect, even more people - especially lower-income Vermonters who tend to have more health problems - will have access to the system.

If the system can accommodate them.

"If we cover everybody," said Dr. MacLean, "the shortfall would probably double." The potential shortage of primary care physicians, he said, could be "severe."

In Vermont, at least, the medical establishment does not disagree.

"We have a shortage of physicians especially in primary care, and also general surgeons and orthopedic surgeons and it's only going to get worse," said Paul Harrington,  the Executive Vice President of the Vermont Medical Society. Harrington listed the same three reasons - older doctors, older patients, more patients with health insurance - to explain why the doctor shortage would get worse.

So what, exactly, is Vermont doing wrong?

Probably nothing. The doctor shortage is a nationwide problem, worse in many other states than in Vermont. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has 243 physicians per 100,000 people, substantially lower than the 298 average for all OECD countries. One of the few countries with fewer doctors per person is neighboring Canada, which has only 218 physicians per 100,000 people. France, whose health care system is considered the world's best by many international health care experts, has 337 doctors for every 100,000 people.

States in the U.S. don't compile statistics allowing a precise comparison with the OECD's. For Vermont's 630,000 or so people, Harrington said, about 1,880 physicians practice in the state.

Both Dr. MacLean and Dr. Chen said that the physician shortage was less severe in the New England and Northeastern states than in most of the rest of the country, especially the Southeast.

That would seem consistent with the answer given by the two doctors to the question of why the doctor shortage is worse in rural areas than in and around cities. To some extent, they acknowledged, money might be a factor; perhaps doctors earn more in metropolitan areas. But mostly, Dr. MacLean said, in and near cities is simply "where people want to live."

Or at least where doctors want to live. Being educated, physicians tend to have high- (or at least middle-) brow taste. They want to live and raise their families where there are good schools, gourmet restaurants, theaters (and not just for movies), concerts, and like-minded neighbors, all more common in larger cities or university towns. In Vermont, Burlington is both. Many out-of-staters come to Vermont to attend UVM's highly-rated College of Medicine, fall in love with the state and the city, and never leave. Enticing a young doctor to open a practice in Burlington is easy; convincing one to move to the Northeast Kingdom or the White River Valley is not.

So the state and the doctors are trying harder. Dr. Chen described a process a bit like a college coach who is tipped off about a hot basketball prospect in eighth grade and keeps tabs on him through high school.

"We take a multi-faceted approach," Dr. Chen said. "For instance, if someone who's interested in being a doctor grows up in the Northeast Kingdom, we'll follow them (through college and medical school) and focus incentives" designed to make it more appealing for the young doctor to open a practice or join a hospital near his or her home town.


Those incentives include partial loan repayments, which the state has been making for some young doctors with the help of money from both the federal government and private foundations.

Student debt is no small consideration for young doctors, many of whom emerge from their 10 or more years of training (college, medical school, residency) owing $150,000 or more, and almost 30 years old before starting their careers. It's one reason many young physicians choose a specialty such as cardiology or ophthalmology, where they can earn twice what a family practice primary care doctor earns.

There is some dispute about the root cause of the nationwide doctor shortage. Some critics argue that over the years the American Medical Association has deliberately held down the number of medical school openings to control the supply - and therefore prop up the price - of providing health care.

The AMA was formed in 1847, partly because some of the then 400 medical schools were diploma mills churning out unqualified graduates. Today's 133 medical schools graduated 16,838 students in 2010, a small increase over the 15,676 who graduated in 2002. Thousands of applicants, many of them presumably capable, are turned away every year for lack of space.

Whatever the reason, US doctors do earn substantially more than their counterparts elsewhere. According to a chart posted by economist Greg Mankiw, physicians in the U.S. earned an average of just under $200,000 in 1996, roughly twice the average income of a Canadian doctor and almost four times the average in France.

Another reason for the doctor shortage is that even if there were more medical school graduates, there aren't enough intern slots to handle them. One reason for this is federal budget cuts. Most of those intern positions are funded through Medicare, and in the 1990s Congress started cutting back on those expenses.

One way or another, Vermont's ability to attract new doctors will depend on how the new Green Mountain Care Board chooses to revamp the state's health care system under the sweeping law the Legislature passed earlier this year. At the Medical Society, Paul Harrington worries that if the Board does not heed the recommendations of "the physicians actually providing care, it will create a system with too much uncertainty to attract new doctors."

Dr. Chen, though, thinks that "medical students overwhelmingly support" Vermont's effort to change a "clearly dysfunctional" health care system, and that the kind of system envisioned by the new law can attract young physicians from around the country.

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Wilderness in Vermont

Vermont, as almost everyone knows, is a nature lover's delight. Green both in its politics and on the ground, the state is chock full of farm land, forest land, wild land, lakefront land, riverside.

WHOOPS! Let's back that one up a little.

Farms, forests, lakes, all true enough. And lots of green space.

But wild land? Not so much.

Less, as a percentage of its total area, than many other states. Not only the Western states with their thousands of square miles of wilderness, but also less than neighbors New York and New Hampshire.
Or even – would you believe? – New Jersey.

"It's an illuminating statistic," said Emily Boedecker, the Deputy State Director for Nature Conservancy Vermont, pointing to a map on the wall of her Montpelier office which notes how much land each Eastern state has categorized as wild. New Jersey, thanks largely to its preserved coastal wetlands, has set aside more such land than Vermont.

According to the estimation of Sweet Water Trust, a foundation that supports wild land conservation in the Northeast, only 2.83 percent of Vermont's 9,249.56 square miles have been preserved in their wildest state, with another 1.54 percent given protection as "primarily natural." Altogether, 16.74 percent of the state is "conserved land" in one form or another.

What Is Wilderness?

As originally defined in the 1964 Wilderness Act, wilderness is an area "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man," effectively limiting it to remote public lands in the West. Nine years later, President Gerald Ford signed the Eastern Wilderness Act adding parcels that had been trammeled in the past, but were to remain wild from then on.

Anyone can go into any wilderness area, but only on foot or horseback, and only "non-invasive activities" are permitted. This includes fishing, hunting, backpacking and some scientific research, but not logging, mining, roads, mechanized vehicles (No, not even bicycles), or other development.

In New Hampshire, those figures are 4.28 percent, 5.68 percent and 29.51 percent. In New York, they are 4.10 percent, 5.83 percent. and 17.85 percent. Vermont's share of protected land is smaller than the combined average of all the "Northern Appalachian states" (New England plus New York).

Those are the statistics. As to why Vermont keeps less of its land wild, there are diverse explanations – natural, historical, political, cultural. To begin with, almost all land protected in its wild state was public land to begin with, and Vermont just has less public land than many of its neighbors. The Green Mountain National Forest – the only large, contiguous tract of public land in the state – is smaller than its White Mountain counterpart in New Hampshire or the "forever wild" expanses of the Catskill and Adirondack Parks in New York.

The natural causes are simple and obvious. Vermont has better farmland –"the soil is sweeter," said Boedecker – leading to more agricultural development. The Green Mountains are gentler than the Whites or the Adirondacks, so "New York and New Hampshire just have better wild land than Vermont," said Jim Northrup of Northeast Wilderness Trust in Bristol. "They have more rugged, remote, wild land which gives people a sense of solitude, and made it easier to set aside those areas as wilderness."

And at least in the past, Vermont also never had the same kind of powerful (and well-heeled) conservationist lobby that helped preserve the wild land in the Adirondack and Catskill regions of New York.

In the view of some wilderness advocates, Vermonters may be more hostile to preserving land in its wild state than are many of their neighbors. George Wuerthner, a photographer and ecologist who lives in both Richmond and out west, decried (via email) what he called "the uncritical adoration of the ‘working landscape,' (which) "by extension implies that what one may call ‘non-working landscapes' are somehow less desirable…just lazy, shiftless and obviously not holding their own."

From an ecological perspective, Wuerthner said, these wild lands "are working very hard producing clean water, wildlife habitat, clean air, flood control, functioning ecosystems and so forth."

There does seem to be some antipathy in Vermont to ‘non-working landscapes,' as though some Vermonters think that leaving land in its natural state is somehow…unnatural. The "current use" law gives landowners a lower tax rate on forest land, but only if they have an active plan for logging it. If they just leave it alone, they pay the higher rate.

In 1998, when Gov. Howard Dean and the Conservation Fund arranged to buy and protect 133,000 acres of Northeast Kingdom forests from the Champion International paper company, opposition centered around the fear that some of the land would not be logged. As a result, the Legislature insisted that most of the land be retained as "working forest" and only a 12,000-acre "core area," part of the West Mountain Wildlife Management Area, was set aside as wild land.

Ben Rose, the Northeast Regional Director of the Wilderness Society, doubts that there is more anti-wilderness feeling in Vermont than elsewhere. The Champion Land debate, is said, is by now "ancient history" which occurred "in the political context of the aftermath of the Civil Unions" controversy, when the Republican House of Representatives "was very sympathetic to folks in the Northeast Kingdom who were upset that things were changing. They tried to lock in the status quo, which was the working forest. I wouldn't extrapolate too much from that one case."


But as recently as 2006, anti-wilderness sentiment persuaded Gov. Jim Douglas to block passage of a Vermont wilderness bill until some land had been stripped from the proposal. And even now, Rose and other wilderness advocates seem reluctant to call for any additions to the Federal Wilderness Protection System in Vermont. There are now eight areas of the state protected under that system, totaling about 101,074 acres. Rose said there would probably be no effort to add more land to the system at least until work begins on the Green Mountain National Forest's new Forest Plan.

Work on that plan will not begin until at least 2018, said Melissa Reichert of the National Forest.

The old wilderness fights may be over, though, at least in Vermont, where wild land advocates are focusing less on adding to the Federal system than on what Emily Boedecker called "the character of wilderness," with or without official designation. In cooperation with other public and private agencies, including Vermont's Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Nature Conservancy is coordinating an initiative called "staying connected," to provide "linkage areas" so that wildlife as small as salamanders and as big as bears can move from one large protected area to another.

It's a town-by-town local-option proposal, Boedecker said. No town has to participate, and some, she acknowledged, have said "they are not ready for a conversation."


But in Salisbury, for instance, she said, the local conservation commission has inspired people to "start walking the roads in the winter," and has created a map showing two primary routes where wildlife crosses from a swampy area to the Green Mountains. It will be up to residents of the town, she said, "to decide what they want to do about it."

Local control would not necessarily avoid controversy. Among the options would be zoning or regulation, in either case limits on the use of private land, always a dicey proposition in Vermont.

But another potential wild land initiative seeks not only to engage private landowners, but possibly to enable them earn a profit by keeping their land wild. Jim Northrup said Northern Wilderness Trust has a plan under which landowners can sell carbon credits "by placing forests under a Forever Wild easement, thereby ensuring the avoidance of conversion to non- forested conditions or the removal of carbon by logging."

The buyers would be universities, foundations or individuals seeking to offset their own carbon imprint. The transaction would be handled by the California Climate Action Reserve (CAR), through which carbon offset credits will be bought and sold starting in next year. The Trust is already "setting up a system to qualify those credits so they will be available for sale," Northrup said.

Northrup said the Trust "hasn't listed a carbon project in Vermont yet," but is "talking with some landowners" about the plan.

To some extent, the attraction of wilderness is aesthetic and abstract. People like the idea of wild land as much as they like visiting it. Even wilderness advocates acknowledge that land which is less wild often has more striking vistas and other scenic beauty. It's also easier to walk through for both people and large animals. That explains why there are fewer deer on wild land, which in turn explains why hunters often oppose creating more wilderness.

But as there is also a scientific argument for wild land, which, as Wuerthner noted helps keep air and water clean and protects biodiversity. In Northrup's view, global warming creates another imperative for protecting wilderness. Keeping parcels of the northern forests wild, he said, could preserve some cold-weather stretches of land and retard – or at least mitigate –the impact of a hotter world.

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Subsidizing Transportation

Hop into your car. Get behind the wheel, start 'er up, and pull away.

You're in control. You're the classic (cliched?) free American, out there on the open road, going where you please, alone with your thoughts or whatever radio program/CD/podcast/app you chose. Yeah, you have to obey the speed limit (sort of) and stop at red lights and stop signs. For the most part, though, you're independent, sovereign, autonomous. Right?

Wrong. Actually, what you are is: government-subsidized.

The car owner, driver, or even passenger is as dependent on government largesse as is the Midwestern grain farmer (and quite a few Vermont dairy farmers) or the welfare recipient. No automobile driver or passenger pays the total cost of his or her ride.

If auto users did pay the full costs of building, maintaining, and protecting roads as well as for what economists call the "externalities" of their transportation system, gas taxes and/or vehicle registration fees would be much higher, or more roads and bridges would charge tolls, or some combination of the above.

This may come as a surprise, but the Vermont Agency of Transportation knows all this, and is thinking about (though not yet proposing) taking some of those steps.

The reason it might be a surprise is that for decades, state transportation departments have been essentially highway departments, singing praises of the highway. Now Vermont's Transportation Agency envisions a state in which "people will have to use their cars less."

So said Deputy Transportation Secretary Sue Minter, who acknowledged that one way to get people to use their cars less is to have them pay more for using them. She said the Agency wants more Vermonters to take the bus to work, more kids to walk or bike to school (partly to fight the growth in childhood obesity), and is even "looking at selling roads and bridges to the private sector."


That last one is not about to happen. Neither is charging tolls on the new Champlain Bridge when it opens later this year. But the very fact that Agency officials thought about tolls, and that Minter volunteered the information, indicates that the state's top transportation officials are aware that the status quo of subsidizing car use may not be sustainable.

Not that the status quo is necessarily undesirable. This report is an explanation, not an expose. If there is an "enemy" in this account, "he is us," in the famed words of Walt Kelly's Pogo. Most adults drive, so most taxpayers are subsidizing themselves. Event those who neither drive nor ride buy goods trucked to the store over the public highways. To say that government subsidizes those highways might say nothing more than that government helps organize and pay for our entire economic system.

It does, loath though some are to acknowledge this reality.

Still, if heavily subsidizing auto traffic is not a malicious conspiracy, it is a policy choice, and one peculiar to the United States. In other prosperous countries, the driver/car-owner pays far more for the privilege.

In Germany, for instance, it costs more than $2,000 just to get a drivers license. Applicants first have to complete driving lessons offered by private schools. In Vermont, an adult need only pass a driving and written test. Applicants under 18 do have to take driving lessons, but they are offered – free – in many high schools. German license fees and auto sales taxes are also higher, and gasoline taxes are higher in almost every other "first world" country than in the U.S.

The Germans, according to a 2009 study done for the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, set their policies deliberately to encourage the use of public transportation and discourage driving. It works, according to the study. American policy-makers don't actually say that they follow the opposite path to encourage more auto use. But it seems to work out that way.

In the view of some experts, though, it may not be able to work out that way for long.

"I don't think it's sustainable," said Justine Sears, lead author of the Vermont Transportation Energy Report released annually by the Vermont Clean Cities Coalition and the University of Vermont's Transportation Research Center, where Sears is a research specialist. "It's expenrive. It's inconvenient, and it's the number one cause of greenhouse gas emissions."

Sears acknowledged, though, that "there's a tension that exists" in Vermont between her vision of sustainability and many a Vermonter's dream of living "in some farmhouse ten miles from town." But, she said perhaps people who do that "should be paying a truer cost."


The exact true - as opposed to "truer" - cost of the auto subsidy, either in the aggregate or per car-owner, is all but impossible to determine. But in the aggregate it is surely in the tens of billions of dollars nationally. More than 15 years ago, a study by the World Resources Institute, limited only to the cost of highway construction and maintenance, estimated that the general revenue subsidy exceeded $20 billion.

By that standard, Vermont would appear to be a low-subsidizing state. Through user fees - the state gasoline tax and license and registration fees -Vermont drivers pay for the entire cost of building, maintaining, and patrolling the state's highways. In fact, they pay more than the entire cost, also financing the aviation, railroad, and public transportation functions of the Agency of Transportation.

Altogether, the user fees – plus a smidgen from a jet fuel tax and railroad leases – will bring an estimated $273.4 million into the state's "T-Fund" for the coming fiscal year (2012), according to Neil Schickner, the transportation expert at the Legislature's Joint Fiscal Office.

From that total, roughly $25 million is transferred to the Education Fund, and another $25 million to the Department of Public Safety. But that doesn't mean motorists are subsidizing schools or cops. Schools spend $53 million on buses, and the Department of Public Safety's State Troopers patrol the highways.

The T-Fund does not send any money to the courts, though a substantial (if uncountable) percentage of the time and expenses of the court system are spent on traffic cases.

But, along with some $322 million from the Federal Government (mostly from the federal gasoline tax), the Fund does finance all the costs of the Agency of Transportation.

So even taking into account the $4 million from the General Fund for the operating expenses of the Interstate rest areas, how does it work out that the general taxpayer is supporting the cars, trucks, and the roads on which they travel? If anything, it would seem to be the motorists who are subsidizing the other modes of transportation.

But only on the state level. Local government in Vermont also spends millions to keep the cars and trucks rolling. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's most recent Census of Governments State and Local Finances, in 2006-07, Vermont's localities spent more than $161.1 million of their own taxpayers money plowing, smoothing, sanding, salting, and clearing roads.

That seems like an awful lot of money. But Steven Jeffrey of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns said it made sense.

"Our municipal property taxes bring in $330 million," he said, "and about 60 percent of town expenses are for roads."

There's a certain amount of equity here. The owner is paying to be able to get to and from his own property. Still, it is general revenue going to support the road system.

Then there are the externalities.

An externality is what economists call a cost which is not covered by the price of a product, and which is borne by people who had nothing to do with making, selling, or buying the product. When it comes to motor vehicles, the biggest externality by far is air pollution. The car buyer, of course, pays the cost of the pollution controls in the car. But beyond that, state and federal government spend billions to reduce air pollution.

Not in Vermont, where not one penny of the cost of controlling air pollution from motor vehicles comes from the General Fund, according to Tom Moye, chief of the Mobile Sources Section of the Department of Environmental Conservation's Air Pollution Division.

But because auto-caused air pollution can only be reduced, not eliminated, another externality is the cost of treating those who get sick from the pollution that oozes through the government regulatory systems, plus the lost productivity stemming from those illnesses.

Trying to figure out exactly how much all this costs is close to impossible. Dr. Austin Sumner, the epidemiologist for Vermont's Health Department, said the most common health consequence of air pollution is asthma. Over the ten-year period ending in 2006, he said, the cost of asthma hospitalizations in Vermont "when asthma was the primary diagnosis," was about $23 million. Where asthma was just part of the diagnosis, it was more than $300 million.

But he said it would be "grossly wrong" to assign all that cost to air pollution in general, much less the percentage of the state's air pollution that comes from auto emissions. The root cause of asthma, he said, may be genetic.

But it would seem to be about as wrong to deny that motor vehicle emissions contribute to the cost of treating asthma. There is a "growing body of evidence," Dr. Sumner said, that "diesel exhausts may actually contribute to the development of asthma."

Then, of course, there is global warming, which has been called "the greatest example of market failure" ever, with incalculable costs to both the public and private sectors. Cars and trucks are not the only cause of greenhouse gas emissions, but Sue Minter said "the transportation sector is the largest contributor."

OK, now pull over and park.

In most of Vermont, parking is free. That means it's subsidized. The driver is using a piece of public property which has a financial value but for which the driver does not pay. The worker who parks for free at her job site enjoys untaxed employee compensation. Back in 1989, a California scholar estimated that failing to tax this benefit cost governments at all levels $85 billion.

In Vermont, even some of the paid parking does not cover its costs. Steve Goodkind, who heads Burlington's city parking operation, said fees at the city garages cover the operating expenses, but not the capital costs of building the garages. The parking fee does not help amortize that capital investment. Taxes do.

Bon voyage.

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What's New in Vermont Agriculture?

Everybody knows what's new in Vermont agriculture. It's the small farm, the niche market, the "artisanal" cheese-maker, the "farm-to-plate" producer growing food sold to the increasing corps of "localvores," a word that did not exist a decade ago and is now part of the everyday lexicon.

As is often the case, what "everybody knows" isn't exactly true.

Oh, it isn't exactly false, either. That "very upstart agriculture," as one local farming expert put it, is thriving and growing in Vermont even more than in most other states.

But so – without getting nearly as much attention – is conventional large-scale agriculture, which in this state mostly means dairy farming.

From one perspective, it may seem strange to say that dairy agriculture is "growing" in Vermont, where the demise of another milking operation seems almost a daily occurrence.

But those are the small and medium-sized farms. Like farming (and many other businesses) elsewhere, Vermont dairy farming is not diminishing; it's consolidating. There are more cows being milked, but on fewer farms. What farm economists call "industrial agriculture," is becoming more industrial, more centralized, more dominant.

In fact, perhaps the most significant development in Vermont agriculture is the increasing supremacy of the "factory farm," the gigantic spread milking 1,000 or more cows whose hooves rarely touch natural ground and whose teeth never munch grass.

According to Food & Water Watch, a Washington-based advocacy group, dairy farming is even more consolidated in Vermont and elsewhere in the Northeast than in the rest of the country, even if a big Vermont dairy farm would seem puny compared to some 20,000-cow operations out west.

"We think it's partly because of concentrated buyer power," said Patrick Woodall, the organization's research director. In any business, a giant, dominant, buyer (in this case the milk processor) encourages development of giant, dominant producers. In the Northeast, Dean Foods last year effectively acknowledged that it comes close to monopolizing the dairy processing business. With no real competitors to bid up the price of their product, dairy farmers have little choice but to get as big as they can, so they can produce as much as they can.

By Food & Water Watch's assessment, the "density level" of factory farm in two Vermont counties – Addison and Franklin – is "extreme" while it is "severe" in Orleans County and 'high" in Orange and Windham Counties. Factory farms, Food & Water Watch argues, are more likely to overuse antibiotics in their animals, pollute the air and water, force farmers to "get big or get out," and lead to "corporate control" of agriculture.

Those are value judgments, as is the "factory farm" label itself. Food & Water Watch's facts – based on U.S. Department of Agriculture census figures – are accurate, and its description of the increased dominance of "factory farms" is significant. Its value judgments – like those of all advocacy groups – are open to debate, and at least in Vermont's case, one of its fears – the one about corporate dominance – appears to be misplaced.

"All Vermont farms are family farms," said Marie Audet, the business manager of Blue Spruce Farms in Bridport.

Hers certainly is. Her father-in-law, Norman Audet, started the farm in 1958, milking 35 cows. She, her husband, his two brothers and one brother-in-law now run it. Her son and one nephew are working there, and will probably take over one day. It's a real family operation.


It's also a real big operation, with 2,400 cows, half of them being milked, the other half younger animals who will one day be milked. The farm now covers 3,000 acres (not contiguous), most of it used for growing the corn and hay the cows eat.

Because corn and hay are not a cow's natural food, some large beef and dairy operations routinely inject their animals with antibiotics to keep them from bloat or other digestive ailments. Hence Food & Water Watch's concern about excessive antibiotics in livestock.

At Blue Spruce, Audet said, only a sick cow gets antibiotics.

"We have very specific protocols to ensure that no antibiotics enter the food supply," she said. "Dairy farmers, as well as anyone, are aware of the possible effects the over-use of antibiotics can have."

If Blue Spruce Farm is a "factory," it's a locally-owned factory that sells its product in Vermont. Every day at least one truck comes to the farm and takes the milk, Audet said, "eight miles down the road to Middlebury at the Agrimark/Cabot Cheese plant."

To be sure, the Cheddar cheese the plant produces goes everywhere. In that sense, Blue Spruce Farm is part of the global economy. But those are Vermont jobs in Middlebury the dairy is helping create. The farm itself employs 25. So Blue Spruce creates "value-added" wealth for Vermont. It also preserves a lot of open space. Without Blue Spruce Farm, some of those 3,000 acres might be turned into housing subdivisions or an office park.

Besides, as Laura De Pietro of the State Agency of Agriculture noted, those smaller, "upstart" farms depend on the big farms because they "support the infrastructure," the feed and supply stores and the services all farms need.

Valuable and local though it is, Blue Spruce and the other big farms are "industrial." The cows at Blue Spruce Farm, Audet said, do not graze. They get a carefully calibrated and regular diet of grains so their human owners can be sure of the quality and consistency of the milk produced. The cows, by all indications well-treated, are not individuals; they are units of production.

Less than 10 miles from Blue Spruce Farm but an agricultural world away sits Golden Russet Farm, 84 acres – only ten of them actively cultivated – owned by Will Stevens and his wife, Judy. Stevens moonlights (well, also serves) as a member of the State House of Representative, an Independent representing Shoreham, Benson, Orwell, and Whiting.

The Stevens operation is part of that "upstart agriculture" that Dave Rogers, former lecturer at the University of Vermont's College of Agriculture and Life Science, now a policy advisor to NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Association) Vermont, said had recently "reached a critical mass of energy and political support for alternative forms of agriculture," enabling farmers like Stevens to make a living off the land.

Golden Russet's vegetables are raised organically and sold locally. "I think what we do is consistent with traditional Vermont values of local control and personal accountability," Stevens said.


Neither Rogers nor Stevens has harsh words for conventional agriculture. "We're not in the business of bashing large farms or denigrating work those farmers do," Rogers said. "They work hard trying to make a living."

Stevens does, though, have his own way of describing the difference. Not large or small, conventional or "upstart." He calls them "commodity agriculture" and "relationship agriculture." One "relationship" is with his ultimate customers. Marie Audet never knows who buys the cheese made from Blue Spruce Farm's milk. Stevens and his wife sell some of their vegetables at a farm stand.

"Relationship agriculture is not anonymous as it is in the commodity world," he said. "In the relationship world you have to present yourself to the public. You're judged on your personality to some extent, and you're required to be a marketer as well as producer."

Stevens also has a relationship with the market that Vermont's big diary farmers lack. "I have some control over mx price," he said. Marie Audet, as she concedes, has none. Ironically, the farm "upstarts" with their politically liberal image, operate in a market economy, where prices are set by the interplay of supply and demand, while the big commodity dairies, often considered conservative, operate in a regulated economy, their prices set by the federal government. "We have no control over our price," Audet said. "We don't have the mechanism to respond to demand."

(All three Vermonters in Congress have proposed legislation, to alter that situation. It is not expected to go anywhere).

Both kinds of Vermont agriculture face problems. For the "upstarts," the key question seems not to be survival (though no doubt some will fade away), but survival without losing their independent, improvisational, character. Look what already happened to Stoneyfield Farm, the yogurt company that started at an organic farming school in New Hampshire and is now part of the Evian Water/Dannon Yogurt corporate empire.

David Rogers said he hoped that the new breed of farmers could avoid the "kind of squeeze that makes farmers have to get bigger to get more cash-

flow. They don't seem to be on that treadmill. They seem satisfied to be on the scale they're at or the scale where they're able to manage. That's what attracts young people to local production. The can make a living farming."

But big money is always tempting. And as the commodity farmers can attest, modern economic and technological realities (the economies of scale) tend to reward the large, centralized, enterprise, especially if it is big enough to have some influence over its market.

In the long run, the challenges facing the big commodity farms might be even more threatening. David Rogers said he thought large-scale farms might be "unsustainable economically, socially, environmentally." The big farms (and the taxpayers) spend millions to combat the pollution that thousands of cows inevitably create. But even as sympathetic an observer as the Agriculture Agency's Laura DePietro acknowledged that farms cause 40 percent of the pollution that leads to excessive algae in Lake Champlain. Forty percent isn't most. But it's a lot.

Vermont's "factory" farms also depend to some extent on federal subsidies, and as anyone who has been following the budget debate in Washington should be able to see, they may not last forever. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican, said direct federal payments to farmers might be eliminated next year.

Farmers are often uncomfortable discussing subsidies, and like so many of them, Marie Audet said she'd rather they did not exist. But exist they do. Most of them go to the biggest farmers (81 percent of Vermont's farmers got no subsidies in 2009), and no one seems to turn them down.

According to USDA figures compiled by the Environmental Working Group, Vermont farmers got $252 million in federal subsidies from 1995 through 2009, $42,436,000 in that last year for which figures are available. The biggest checks, for $565,444, went to Mead Farms in Newport Center. Among the other recipients was the farm owned by Doug Nelson, famed for being the keeper of "Pete the Moose," whose farm got $285,215. Blue Spruce, with $221,046, was 15th highest on the Vermont list.

Could they survive without the federal aid? Probably, though Ranson Mead in Newport Center gladly concedes that he "tries to get into every government program we can so we can stay afloat." If the big farms lose

income from any source, with no control over their price they would have no choice except to try to produce even more milk, which would reduce the price of their milk (aggregate demand does affect price, even if the individual producer can not).

Most factories are easier to manage.

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Poverty in Vermont

For all her troubles, Alice is cheerful.

She's sitting at a desk at the Northeast Kingdom Community Action (NEKCA) Parent-Child Center in St. Johnsbury, helping out with some clerical chores.

"I like this," she said. "I'd like to do secretarial work. I think that'll work out."

By her own admission, not all of Alice's employment experiences have "worked out." She tried a fast-food job, she said, and stitching in a shoe factory.

"They didn't work out," she said.

But Alice is not giving up, and NEKCA is not giving up on her. She's multi-tasking at the Center this day, doing some work, which entitles her to her "Reach Up" grant, also known as TANF, (Temporary Assistance To Needy Families, once simply "Welfare"), but also taking a class in how to fill out an employment application.

Students in the NEKCA's Head Start program
prepare for the day. Photo: Jon Margolis

Alice (not her real name) is 23, and has been at NEKCA - and depending on Reach Out - off and on since she was 16, a high school drop-out, and a single mother.

Despite not keeping a job, she's made progress. With NEKCA's help, she got her high school diploma. Her hope is to get a job, not another gig flipping burgers at a fast-food joint, but one paying a reasonable wage.

She needs it. A minimum wage job would pay her $8.15 an hour. Even if she worked full-time all year (by no means a given in these jobs) her gross pay for the year would be $16,952. With three children, Alice needs, according to the official assessment of the federal government, $22,050 to escape poverty.

There's a word one doesn't hear much these days. The economy is much discussed - budget deficits, taxes, the housing market, the middle-class squeeze. But poverty? It seems to have receded into the mist, as though most people would like to forget that it exists.

It does, even in Vermont, where at last count (from December 2010, but reflecting 2009 figures), 69,137 people lived in households with incomes below the poverty line. Almost one quarter of them, 17,371, were under 18.

The state's total poverty rate in 2009 was 11.5 percent, according to the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's one of the lowest poverty rates in the nation. But it's higher than it was a couple of years ago as the Great Recession has thrown more people into poverty.

Actually, it's more than that, perhaps substantially more. First of all, the 2010 numbers, when they are compiled, will almost certainly be higher. And some of the poorest Vermonters, young and old, may not have been counted. A "Profile of Vermont Residents in Deep Poverty" prepared by Dartmouth College undergraduates last year found that "many individuals in deep poverty may not have any connection to government benefits or support systems," meaning they have not been found.

Not to mention that there is something close to a consensus among those who deal with poverty that "the federal poverty level is so low," in the words of Shaun F. Donahue, Vermont's Chief Administrator of the Office of Economic Opportunity, that it is unrealistic. In fact, Donahue said, federal officials are considering the creation of a new category of a "supplemental poverty measure," using it not determine eligibility for aid, but to provide a more accurate picture of the poverty situation.

As Alice's case demonstrates, some of the poor are at least partly responsible for their plight. No one made her get pregnant at 16, or have two more children since then, while still unmarried. She probably could have kept those jobs that "didn't work out," but for whatever reason, she did not.

But as Agency of Human Services Secretary Doug Racine noted, "a girl makes a mistake; do we condemn her to poverty? We try to provide support."


Besides, with the income Alice was earning, she'd still be poor. Poverty has several causes. One of them is low wages.
In one sense, though, Alice is not typical of Vermont's poor. Her children are, and their poverty isn't their fault. There are more poor adults, but the poverty rate for children - 13 percent - is higher. A simple examination of the numbers reveals that a substantial majority of Vermont's poor are the children and their parents, mostly one parent, mostly the mother.

More than one of every three of these children - 7,000, or six percent - live in households where the annual income is less than half the poverty line, or just a little more than $11,000 for a four-person household. Alice and her kids would appear to be in that "deep poverty" classification. Statewide, 4.9 percent of Vermonters live in households whose income is less than half of the official poverty threshold.

It isn't that all poor people in Vermont are unmarried mothers and their children. The poor come in all shapes, size, and genders - men and women, young and old, rural and urban, even fully employed individuals who have held the same job for years but don't earn enough to escape poverty.

The poor are all over the state. The rates (in 2009, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service) range from 9.4 percent in Grand Isle County to 16.9 percent in Essex County. Caledonia (14.9) and Orleans (13.5) also have high rates, making the Northeast Kingdom the poorest part of Vermont. In Chittenden County as a whole, the rate is 10.6 percent. But in the city of Burlington it is 26 percent, with half of those between 18 and 24 living in poverty. More than 12 percent in Burlington are in the "deep poverty" category.

Some 30 percent of the Burlington's African-American population is poor, as are 35 percent of Hispanics and almost 45 percent of American Indians and Alaska natives. But those minorities are such a small percentage of the total population, that even in Burlington, the vast majority of poor people are white. The poverty rate among whites - just over 20 percent - is lower. But there are 7,500 of poor whites, compared to a few hundred poor among all the minorities combined.

In Burlington as elsewhere, the biggest chunk of the poverty population - 69 percent - is made up of unmarried women and their children. Advocates for the poor like to stress the diversity of the poverty population. It is diverse. But it is unmarried young mothers with no more (and often less) than a high school education who are the majority.

And the hardest to remedy. Even with help, a young, single mother without a college degree has a hard time making a living.

"The big barrier is transportation," said Sally Hafer, the head of the Head Start program at the Central Vermont Community Action Council in Barre. "We have very little public transportation, and it's very expensive to put a car on the road."

Then there's child care. Even if she lands a job and figures out how to get there, the mother of a baby or toddler has to find - and sometimes pay for - someone to care for her child.

For this, she often has help. The general public may not be noticing the poor. But it is paying to help them escape poverty, or at least endure it. Determining exactly how much, said Donahue, is effectively impossible because so many state and federal programs benefit low income people whose incomes are slightly above the official poverty line. In addition, there is such a broad - and perhaps confusing - array of state and federal programs funneled through different agencies, that figuring out precisely how much money goes to anti-poverty efforts in Vermont would strain the abilities of the most skilled accountant.

But clearly several million dollars of state and federal money are directed toward the officially poor. Some of it is cash benefits, but much of it is in services provided by the state's five regional community action agencies - food shelves, emergency shelter, employment counseling, Head Start classes, and more. NEKCA Executive Director Joe Patrissi said his agency alone serves 180 Head Start children. At $8,400 a child, that's more than $1.5 million just in the Northeast Kingdom.

That sounds like a lot, but perhaps it's not enough. Patrissi said there are 60 more children on the Head Start waiting list, but there is no room for them because there is no more money.

And likely to be less after Congressional budget cuts. Though very few politicians anywhere - and fewer yet in Vermont - oppose anti-poverty programs, many think they should be more efficiently operated, and some wonder how much good they do.

Sometimes, so do the people working in the anti-poverty field, many of whom have no illusions about the people they serve. To some extent, they know, anti-poverty programs offer a palliative, not a cure. Some do escape poverty; many more simply live more tolerably within it thanks to welfare grants and services.

"We do often-time wonder" about the behavior of some of the parents of the children in the Early Head Start program, said Corey Kelly, one of the teachers who visits the homes of toddlers of poor mothers. Some of those mothers, she said, "transition into (disability benefits) when from our perspective they're perfectly able to get a job." The same applies, she said, to some of the men with whom the mothers are "in and out of relationships."

But neither she nor her colleagues seem to get discouraged. Anti-poverty workers aren't in it for the money; top "executives" at NEKCA don't earn much more than $40,000 a year. But they're determined, and they think they're doing some good. They track their victories: two or three mothers a year get their high school diplomas; perhaps 40 a year get jobs, though admittedly most of them aren't very good jobs.

But then there's the Post-Secondary Education program. At the same time Alice was doing her clerical work and learning how to fill out a job application, two other young, single, mothers, were in another room at the center working on their college applications.

"With a college degree," one of them said, "I can make a real living."

Education, says Secretary Racine, is the best long-range answer to poverty in Vermont and elsewhere.

"So many of these kids start off behind," he said. "The odds are stacked against that kid" born into poverty. Racine supports Gov. Peter Shumlin's call for universal pre-kindergarten schooling to keep poorer children from falling behind before they even start kindergarten.

That's for the future. Alice, though, has already missed her chance to catch up as a toddler, or not to fall behind as a teenager. She's still behind. But she hasn't quit. Neither, thanks to the folks at NEKCA, has she been quit on. She could get that decent job yet, which, if nothing else, would make it much less likely that her daughter will get pregnant in high school, drop out, and need Reach Up.

Any opinions expressed in this story do not necessarily reflect those of Vermont Public Television.

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