Vermonters enjoyed carnival rides, comfort food favorites, farm animal displays, live music and more at the Tunbridge World’s Fair on Thursday. The annual event, which has been held since 1867, is taking place until Sunday in the Orange County town it’s named after. Scroll down for more photos of the festivities.

Read the story on VTDigger here: PHOTOS: The Tunbridge World’s Fair kicks off in central Vermont.

This story by Darren Marcy was first published in The White River Valley Herald on July 10.

A judge ruled Tuesday that towns in Vermont have the right to maintain their public trails on private land in the long-running lawsuit brought by a landowner against the town of Tunbridge, but the landowner in the case has promised an appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Though Superior Court Judge H. Dickson Corbett ruled against John Echeverria and Carin Pratt in the lawsuit they filed against the Town of Tunbridge, Echeverria, in an email Tuesday evening, promised a swift reply.

“We will be filing a prompt appeal to the Supreme Court,” Echeverria wrote.

The Tunbridge Selectboard got the good news at its regular meeting when a town resident announced the decision.

Board Chair Gary Mullen said the board was happy to hear the news and it was exactly what the board had expected all along.

Mullen said he wished the lawsuit and legal battle had never happened, but believed it was money well spent to protect trail access not only in Tunbridge but across Vermont.

“It was the right thing to do,” Mullen said. “It’s a win for the people of Tunbridge and the whole state. We plan to continue this battle however [Echeverria] decides to do it.”

Selectboard member Michael McPhetres praised the decision.

“I am very pleased with the court order,” McPhetres said. “We (the town of Tunbridge) have spent a lot of time and treasure on what is a common sense issue.”

The two sides have been haggling over who has the right to maintain legal trails on private land for years.

Tuesday’s 15-page order settled a few things including granting the town’s motion for summary judgment and denying the landowners’ motion for summary judgment.

In a final order issued separately, Corbett wrote, “Based upon the separate written ruling of the court, final judgment is hereby entered for defendant as follows: the Town of Tunbridge has the authority to maintain and repair its legal trails.”

But, if the decision is appealed to the Supreme Court, the case will go on for at least a little bit longer.

The case took a little bit of a back seat for a few months as the Vermont Legislature took up the issue.

A bill introduced in the Senate by Alison Clarkson, D-Woodstock, aiming to clarify that municipalities have the authority to maintain a legal trail stalled in committee, but the language was eventually added into the Transportation Bill, S.123, which had broad support from legislators and trails groups around Vermont, as well as the Vermont League of Cities and Towns.

The bill made its way through the Conference Committee process and was signed by Gov. Phil Scott in early June, despite a letter from Echeverria urging him to veto the measure.

In the Conference Committee, the bill’s effective date was delayed until April 1, 2026.

Meanwhile, the legal case has been going on for more than two and a half years, which is only the latest of a more than four-year controversy.

Echeverria and Pratt, who live in Strafford, filed a suit against Tunbridge to prevent it from conducting maintenance on the Orchard Trail, one of two legal trails that cross the 325-acre Dodge Farm, which Echeverria and Pratt own.

Twice the suit filed by the landowners was ruled by Orange County Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Mann not to be “ripe,” or ready for the court to decide. But the second decision was overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Mann then recused herself and the case was assigned to Corbett.

Corbett’s ruling addresses a variety of arguments made by the landowners for reasons why the town should not be allowed to maintain the trails on their lands, but says, “the court determined that the arguments were either not persuasive or not relevant to its analysis and determinations.”

“The court’s final observation is that real-life experience has been that Vermont towns are maintaining their trails,” he continued. “More than 150 towns have at least one trail, and there are more than 540 miles of public trails in the state. And while at least some private landowners are helping maintain public trails, many towns are maintaining their trails to keep them open for public use. In other words, widespread contemporaneous interpretation has been that towns have the authority to maintain and repair their public trails … A reading of the statutes that authorizes towns to maintain and repair their public trails would be consistent with more than a century of both legal precedent and practical experience.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Judge sides with town in Tunbridge trails case.

This story by Emma Roth-Wells was first published by Valley News on Sept. 11.

TUNBRIDGE — A heavy dew covered the grass on Wednesday morning as 22 veterinary technician students from Vermont State University in Randolph deployed at the Tunbridge World’s Fair grounds.

The students, outfitted in coveralls and rubber boots, along with several faculty and staff members of the university, assisted the fair veterinarian in checking in sheep, goats and cattle who will live in close confines at the fair through Sunday.

“It’s definitely one of the more fun days,” said 19-year-old Des Pouliot, a second-year student at Vermont State University. “You get to get off campus and do actual work.”

The Tunbridge World’s Fair will showcase about 630 animals in total, according to Exhibitor Registration Superintendent Tracy Amell. Numbers are just starting to return up to where they were before 2020, she said. The animals will be the center of attention in events ranging from goat milking demonstrations, swine obstacle courses, poultry and rabbit shows, horse pulling and sheep shearing, just to name a few.

The first trailer hauling cattle pulled up around 8:30 a.m. and off came 3-year-old Alpine and her baby Amaryllis, who was born in December. These light brown Guernseys came from Rockbottom Farm in Strafford and will be shown by 14-year-old Eben Zoerheide.

As the cows came off the trailer, 18-year-old student Blakelee Hoffman used a radio frequency identification tag reader — a handheld, remote-sized device — to ensure the tag numbers in the cows’ ears matched the paperwork.

While other students checked to see if the animals had their vaccine records, Hoffman circled the cows looking for any physical signs of contagious illness, such as a runny nose, skin legion or diarrhea.

“Scrape on the back but I’m guessing it’s from the trailer,” she said, while examining Alpine.

Hoffman grew up on a farm and has shown cows at fairs herself. She said she’d always known she wanted to be a vet.

After about three minutes, the cows were all set and Zoerheide led them to their stalls, their home for the duration of the fair.

The relationship between the school and the fair began two years ago when Amanda Angell, a Vermont State University program technician, realized it could be a win-win opportunity.

Angell grew up on a dairy farm in Randolph and had visited the fair for years. She noticed there was not much of a veterinary presence, plus the students were not getting a lot of experience with large animals. That’s when she thought to herself: ‘Man, we could do cow exams pretty fast’.

“There’s a lot of paperwork with these animals and it can overwhelm the staff,” said Craig Stalnaker, a Vermont State University veterinary technology professor and program coordinator.

Having the students there quickens the pace, according to fair veterinarian Taylor Hull, of South Royalton.

“The students do a significant amount of legwork,” she said, “and it’s a really good opportunity for them to see what’s normal for a cow.”

After training for two years under the previous vet, Hull took over as fair vet in 2021, and incorporated the students into the check-in process. She said it’s rare for anyone not to pass check-in. Over the last two years only one calf had to be sent home — not for health reasons, but because it was too young.

Rachel MacAdams, of East Randolph, hosed down her 2-year-old cow Disco.

“We try to keep them clean for the judges,” she said.

The 34-year-old has been showing cows since she was 4, and has shown at the Tunbridge Fair for 29 years. She said she likes that the students have an opportunity to get experience.

By 10:30 a.m. there was a line of trailers and lots of mooing.

“It’s nice to see this side of the fair with everyone who cares about the animals,” said Vermont State University student Owen Hartman.

Hartman was born and raised in Woodstock and grew up going to the fair. He decided to go to school to be a veterinary technician after seeing some “depressing things” while working at a zoo in Pennsylvania that did not have a good veterinary team. The Vermont State University program is two years long and graduates receive an Associate of Applied Science degree.

“They’re eager, it’s good to see the students excited,” said Kristen Sayers, a program technician.

Not only did the students get valuable large animal experience, but Mark Whitney, the superintendent of oxen, also gave each of them a free day pass to the fair.

The fair kicks off Thursday from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and will be open Friday and Saturday 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Animals arrive for annual Tunbridge World’s Fair.

This story by Christina Dolan was first published in the Valley News on August 11. 

TUNBRIDGE — The Vermont Supreme Court is leaving it up to a lower court judge to decide whether the town of Tunbridge has the “right to maintain and repair legal trails within its borders.”

The 5-0 decision released Aug. 2 paves the way for a resolution to a long and costly dispute between the town of Tunbridge and the owners of a former dairy farm who have objected to bicyclists using a town trail that runs through their property.

John Echeverria and Carin Pratt, who have owned the 325-acre Dodge Farm at the top of Strafford Road since 2015, have argued in court that the Tunbridge Selectboard lacks the authority to maintain or designate appropriate use of legal trails in town.

The couple lives in nearby Strafford and rents the property to a Tunbridge resident.

“We are grateful that the Vermont Supreme Court is giving us the opportunity to resolve our dispute with the town,” Echeverria, a professor of property law at Vermont Law and Graduate School in South Royalton, said last week. “We are confident that we will prevail.”

“Our contention is that under the Vermont statutes, the authority to maintain and repair legal trails rests exclusively with the landowners,” Echeverria added.

Tunbridge officials argue that legal trails are akin to roadways and can be maintained as such.

“According to (Vermont) statute, we can allow anything we want” on town trails, Selectboard Chairman Gary Mullen said in an interview on Friday.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court referred to a town policy that “permits use of the public trails for walking only. In 2020 or 2021, bicycling advocates launched a campaign to persuade the town to expand the public uses of legal trails to include bicycling.”

Echeverria and Pratt opposed “opening the legal trails to bicycle use,” the court wrote. It’s led to more than two years of legal wrangling.

Echeverria and Pratt have twice brought their case to Vermont Superior Court, which dismissed their complaints as “unripe” for adjudication. In legal terms, that means the matter is premature, because there wasn’t a specific dispute for the court to intervene in.

Since the town hadn’t expressed any intent to perform maintenance work on the trail that crosses the couple’s property, the complaint was hypothetical, Judge Elizabeth Mann ruled.

In August 2022, however, the Selecboard adopted a new trails policy while the initial lawsuit was pending. The policy asserted the town’s right to repair and maintain trails. The Supreme Court found the policy to mean the town intended to “enter onto plaintiff’s property for the purpose of improving trails.”

As a result, the case is sufficiently “ripe” to be decided, the justices said, and both parties will “benefit” from having the question resolved.

The couple wants public use of the three-quarter-mile Orchard Trail — a former Class 4 road —to be limited to walkers and runners.

The Selectboard would prefer to allow “mostly foot traffic and possibly bicycles and horse riding,” Mullen said.

The town discontinued the Class 4 road on the couple’s property more than 50 years ago, rendering it a public right-of-way accessible for recreational use.

A town is not obligated to maintain a legal trail, according to Vermont statute.

Even on Class 4 roads that are typically not maintained, the town may have an interest in doing culvert work or ditching to prevent erosion, and “we would do the same thing on a legal trail,” if necessary, Mullen said.

For his part, Echeverria would like trees that naturally fall across the trail over time to remain in place, naturally restricting the use of the trail by bicycles and other wheeled vehicles.

The couple is concerned that allowing bicycles on the trail would be disruptive since the trail passes close to their house, Echeverria said.

“These are narrow, simple, primitive trails that cross our land and we want to preserve them,” he said. “We don’t want to see them expanded into recreational superhighways.”

Echeverria said that he would be willing to allow an alternate trail on his property for use by bicyclists that does not pass as close to the house.

Mullen dismissed that idea by asserting that “we already have a trail,” that belongs to the town and is open to public use.

“A public right of way is a public asset and the public is served by keeping it open,” he said.

The town has spent $35,000 in legal fees so far, Mullen said.

“We lost the Supreme Court decision, but that might be a good thing in the end,” he said, if it results in a resolution to the dispute.

Read the story on VTDigger here: End may be in sight for longstanding Tunbridge trails dispute.

This story by John Lippman was first published by the Valley News on March 5.

TUNBRIDGE — Voters added $40,000 to the budget to pay for expanded policing and gave the Selectboard the green light to draw up a noise ordinance and adopt a “declaration of inclusion” affirming the town welcomes everyone regardless of their race or other social and personal characteristics.

Voters conducted town business between helpings from more than four dozen home-baked pies so plentiful the leftovers were raffled off for lucky winners to take home.

Residents gathering for Town Meeting in a room that alternately serves as basketball court, cafeteria and auditorium at Tunbridge Central School also approved a $822,600 town operating budget and a highway budget of $1.2 million, along with a total of $19,576 for social services.

“Right now, Tunbridge receives a need for a police officer about once every 36 hours; domestic disputes, assaults, drugs seem to be the primary reason for that,” said Robert Childs, who proposed the amendment — which passed, 98-35 — requesting the additional funds from the floor.

“Orange County sheriffs, Windsor County sheriffs, Royalton police and state police in a lot of instances are more than an hour away,” explained Childs, “and the current $10,000 in the town budget for a few hours per week isn’t “enough to provide the policing services we need.”

The shortage of policing in Tunbridge is due in large measure to turmoil at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, which has suffered an exodus of officers in recent years under a new sheriff who was elected in 2022. But Vermont State Police, which normally would try to fill in the gaps, is also short on troopers, part of nationwide difficulties in recruiting law enforcement personnel at all levels, especially among rural police departments.

Childs said that the Windsor County Sheriff’s Department could provide Tunbridge with about 15 hours of policing per week — one of the department’s deputies is a Tunbridge resident — which would begin to address the chief issue of having a law enforcement officer present at ambulance responses, when the EMT is often “put in a dangerous situation” requiring the presence on scene of a police officer.

Selectboard members Gary Mullen and John O’Brien said they are currently in discussions with the Windsor County Sheriff’s Department and the Royalton Police Department about providing expanded coverage for Tunbridge and will be calling each back for a second round of discussion. The neighboring Orange County town of Chelsea has already contracted with the Windsor County Sheriff’s Department.

O’Brien estimated a total of $50,000 would raise the tax rate by about 3 cents.

But several residents pointed out that, with increases that will be coming with school taxes, every extra penny is a burden for people on fixed retirement incomes.

“With everything that’s proposed, my taxes will be going up $1,000 per year,” said Helen O’Donnell. “I didn’t get a 10% increase in my Social Security.”

And Stacy Dion agreed that while “policing is super-important,” she also hoped that “addressing the root problem” of crime would be included in whatever additional money the town allocates, adding that when it comes to problems such as “drugs and domestic abuse we should be looking at the whole picture.”

Apart from policing, the next issue that took up the most time in debate was the proposal for the noise ordinance, which passed 61-38.

Richard Barnaby, before the vote was taken, in arguing for the ordinance said he has “complained to the Selectboard and police several times” about neighbors riding their motocross bikes “when we’re having a cookout and making it miserable.”

Barnaby said each time he has complained, police have told him there is nothing they can enforce without an ordinance on the books.

If there is “no ordinance, we don’t care if it happens again,” Barnaby said he has been told.

Although most neighbors are respectful, there are some who are not, he said.

“All it takes is for someone new to wreak havoc,” Barnaby said. “If we don’t have limits, people are going to push the limits.”

Some town residents voiced concern about how such an ordinance would relate to their dogs barking or farm machinery haying in the early morning or even the Tunbridge World’s Fair. Some said that a noise ordinance would lead to a “slippery slope” that could have unintended consequences, such as whether people would run afoul of the regulation if they were sighting their guns or shooting target practice on their property.

Mullen, the Selectboard chairman, said he foresees town officials taking a light approach if any such regulation were to be adopted, with the first course of action talking with a purported offender and the proposed $1,000 fine slapped on only as a last resort. It would be possible to issue permits “to make noise” for a specific occasion or time, such as for the fair, “a bluegrass festival or dog show.”

O’Brien noted that could extend to “agriculture-forestry exemptions, too. All these things will go into it. … We want to get this right.”

Mullen also noted that the noise ordinance means only that the Selectboard is to begin the “process” of crafting a regulation, which would include debate at Selectboard meetings and a public comment period when town residents can provide information to shape whatever is drafted.

In town elections from the floor, O’Brien was reelected to a three-year term.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tunbridge votes to expand policing.

This story by Frances Mize was first published in the Valley News on Oct. 5.

WOODSTOCK — Itinerant slaughterer and sheep-shearer Mary Lake came of age among images of Vermont agrarian life.

Lake, who now lives in Tunbridge, grew up in South Hero, flipping through photo books like Peter Miller’s iconic 1990 “Vermont People” and his 2002 follow-up, “Vermont Farm Women.”

“I would look at the books and think ‘Do I want to take pictures like these, or do I want to be the people in the pictures?’ ” Lake, 39, said.

She ultimately answered her own question. In July, Plymouth, Vermont-based photographer JuanCarlos González released “Vermont Female Farmers,” a collection of portraits of nearly 40 women working in agriculture across the state. Lake is there among its pages, immortalized in black-and-white, shearing a sheep.

With the publication of González’s work, the lineage of storied Vermont photography books — with their renderings of rural, rough farm life — has gained a new member. The work is accompanied by an exhibit at the Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock, which opened in August.

González, 44, grew up helping his grandmother at her farm stand in his native Puerto Rico. More than once he heard customers approach her, after she had spent all day working on her land, only to ask: “Who’s the guy who owns the farm?”

In 2019, just after González and his husband moved to Vermont, he overheard a diner from a neighboring table at a restaurant ask a server: “Who’s the guy you get your meat from?”

“That was an immediate flashback,” González said. “I realized we’re still in the same mentality now as we were then. So if I can do something to amplify women in farming, I’m going to do it.”

A New York City transplant to Vermont, González — originally from Maunabo, Puerto Rico — worked in the pharmaceutical industry for over a decade. He cuts a different picture from Miller, who died at 89 in April, and in 2017 had to crowd-source donations to bankroll his final project “Vanishing Vermonters: Loss of a Rural Culture.”

González’s self-published book received a $2,000 grant from the Vermont Arts Council, but he put up the rest — around $52,000 — himself.

“The biggest thing for me was for people to learn the importance of supporting local farmers,” he said. Looking at the photos should inspire a mission, González added: “Buy local products from female farmers.”

All of the women González approached for the project wanted to participate, he said. The portraits, taken on the land they farm, often became a moment of reflection. “Some of these farmers, because there’s so much history, really opened up,” he said.

The forces behind Vermont’s farm economy have changed, and the photographic record of farm life in the Green Mountain State was due for an update, Lake said.

Women are the main producers on a third of Vermont farms, and nearly 70% of farms have at least one female operator, according to the University of Vermont Cooperative Extension program.

“When JuanCarlos called me, I was like, ‘This is exactly what should be happening,’ ” Lake said. Vermont farm women, especially now, aren’t just the wives of farmers, she said. “The farmers are two wives, or a group of friends, or the husband helps out at the farm.”

Becca Balint, the first woman and LGBT person to represent Vermont in Congress, penned the book’s forward. On the cover, small-scale dairy farmer Liz Guenther, of Three Cow Creamery in Corinth, poses with her cow, Blossom.

“This was a life goal, and a huge, honor,” Lake said of being included among González’s portraits. “This is now a part of Vermont farming history.”

“Vermont Female Farmers” is on display at the Billings Museum and Farm until Oct. 31. The museum, at 69 Old River Rd. in Woodstock, is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets are $17 for ages 16 to 61, with discounts for seniors, students and children ages four to 15. Admission is free for children under three.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s female farmers featured in new photo collection.

This story by Darren Marcy first appeared in the White River Valley Herald on Aug. 31.

Wildlife officials are awaiting test results on a feral swine that was killed in Tunbridge about a month ago to determine exactly what it was and whether it was carrying any diseases. The pig, which is expected to be a Russian boar based on appearance, likely came from Corbin Park, also known as the Blue Mountain Forest and Game Preserve, a 25,000-acre property that stretches across at least five New Hampshire towns southeast of Lebanon.

Corbin Park is known to have wild boars, which escape with some frequency as the fence gets damaged.

Officially, the pig that was removed by the United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services is considered a feral swine until tests return on its genetics.

But its appearance leans toward a wild boar. Its long, sloping snout, the hairy ridgeback, shoulder structure and tusks leaves little doubt in most minds, even if the officials cannot say for sure.

“Until we get the genetics back, we don’t want to make any assumptions,” said Wildlife Management Program Manager David Sausville, of the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department. But he said the animal definitely had “that look” with its darker hairy spine, tusks, and sloping snout.

Sausville said Fish & Wildlife is working with the Vermont Department of Health and Agency of Agriculture on the situation because wild pigs of all varieties are a concern to domestic animals, wild animals and humans.

Sausville said wild pigs can carry about 30 different diseases and about 40 different parasites that can affect humans, livestock and wildlife.

“It’s a big concern for us,” Sausville said. “There’s always a concern when one shows up.”

They’re also destructive to habitat and wildlife, he said. A solo wild pig is a concern, but an established population would be a disaster.

Once established, wild pigs are nearly impossible to eradicate and, in addition to the diseases, they’re also destructive to habitat and farmers’ fields, rooting and destroying the landscape.

“Feral swine are not something we want to have established,” Sausville said. “They’re destructive. We don’t want to become like some other states where they have significant populations, and they’re doing damage. We want to protect our domestic livestock, humans and wildlife.”

Brendan Popp, a biological science technician with USDA Wildlife Services, said samples have been sent out for disease and genetic testing. He was not sure how long it would take to get results back.

Popp knows of four wild boars that have been found in Vermont in the past four years. There have been many more reports but only four were confirmed.

“We’re trying to keep Vermont pig-free,” Popp said. “The damage they do is really bad. They’re highly destructive.”

This particular pig was seen by multiple people in Tunbridge. One of those sightings was at Gabe Freitag’s farm.

“It was the middle of the day, I was driving up my driveway and saw a Russian boar in the field,” Freitag said. “I was pretty surprised.”

Freitag said he went to get his gun, but the pig was gone when he went back, so he reported it to authorities. Freitag said the wild boar was checking out his two pigs but ran off. The USDA Wildlife Services folks shot it near Macintosh Pond Road.

Freitag’s son saw it in the back of a pickup and estimated it at about 90 pounds, which is right where authorities put it. They aged the male boar as a young adult. Popp said when it was first reported it came in with a photo, which was helpful.

“Having pictures is great,” Popp said. “We can say, ‘oh yeah, that shouldn’t be there.’”

Popp said they went to the location the day after it was reported and placed bait and cameras and then got a call from the Vermont Game Warden saying it had been seen in another location.

More camera traps were placed and then, a week later, found it was back in the original location. They set up tree stands and were able to shoot the boar soon after. The entire time span was 7 to 10 days.

Both agencies are continuing to monitor the area with cameras to make sure the young boar did not have a friend, but so far, it looks like it was the only one.

Sausville said South Royalton and Tunbridge seem to be the spots where these boars have been found recently.

If anyone sees a pig it should be reported to the local game warden or the USDA office, Sausville said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Wild boar killed in Tunbridge sent for genetics and disease testing.

This story by Alex Hanson was first published by the Valley News on July 14.

TUNBRIDGE — In Friday morning’s bright sunshine, Gordie Barnaby surveyed the flood-damaged Tunbridge Fairgrounds and said it could have been worse.

In fact, it has been worse, as recently as 2019, when ice jammed the First Branch of the White River and caused flooding that damaged several buildings.

“We’re lucky,” said Barnaby, who became president of the Union Agricultural Society, the nonprofit group that runs the fair, in December. “It didn’t take any buildings out.”

But the river gored a trench inside the larger of the two oxen barns and scored the ground along the backstretch of the harness racing track. Parts of the grounds are strewn with debris deposited by the river, and long stretches of grass are covered with water, a thick layer of dirt or both.

While the fair’s shareholders and friends have work to do, there is no question about whether the fairgrounds will be ready to host the fair, which is scheduled for Sept. 14-17.

“We’ll make this work,” Barnaby said.

While the ground under the oxen barn was damaged, the building is “still straight as an arrow,” Barnaby said. Marked on the outside is a 1978 high water mark, about head-high on Barnaby. That was another ice-dam flood, he said.

Regular flooding is a hazard of the fair’s location along the river, and organizers have learned to live with it. People moved picnic tables to higher ground before the flooding Monday.

Bob Gray called Hatch Crane Service, a Bradford-based company, to move a footbridge spanning the river by the oxen barn. They sent a crane from a job in Berlin and removed the bridge around 2 p.m. Monday. By 3:30 p.m., the water was up over the bridge abutments.

“If he hadn’t done that, we’d have lost our bridge,” Gray said. “That’s ($20,000 or $30,000). When I called him, he never hesitated.”

The agricultural society expects to take a hit to its revenue. The Woodstock Dog Club’s annual show was set for this week, Thursday through Sunday, but had to be postponed. Other events, right up until two weeks before the fair, likely will be canceled, too.

Not everyone got the memo that the dog show had been canceled. Barnaby spoke to a couple from Indiana on Friday morning who arrived for the show. And an RV with Rhode Island plates was parked on high ground.

“I called the president of one of the two clubs that were putting the show on on Monday at 11:30,” Jon Sowa, who drove up from the Ocean State with his wife, Pamela, and their 13 Havanese dogs, four of which they planned to show.

When the show was called off, “unfortunately, I didn’t get the word,” Sowa said. Not that it wasn’t sent out, he said, he just didn’t see it.

Sowa, who’s retired, said that they cannot go home, as their hardwood floors are being refinished while they’re away. “We’ll have to go someplace,” he said.

Work on repairing the fairgrounds is expected to be steady but not lightning-quick, with people occupied helping flood victims elsewhere in the state. A crew of half a dozen people were taking a break from the heat in an office under the grandstand Friday morning.

“I think we had it pretty easy compared to some of the rest of the state,” said Gray, a retired school administrator. The flooding at the fairgrounds was worse than in Tropical Storm Irene, in 2011, Barnaby said.

Most of the work involves moving dirt back to where it belongs. While the crew sat in the shade, Matt Loftus, a Tunbridge excavating contractor, stopped by.

“I’m going to bring my excavator down,” he told them. “I can scrape the dirt better with that.”

A road project on which he was working on the Strafford Road was held up for the afternoon, Loftus said, so he was switching gears. 

“It’s dry enough out there,” he said.

The fair is two months away, Barnaby said, and there are enough people who care about it to turn out and get the work done. Not that the fair workers would turn down volunteer help, but there are folks with bigger problems right now.

“I think there’s more important things for people who lost their houses and stuff,” Barnaby said. “Help your neighbors.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Organizers confident Tunbridge fair will go on despite flooding.

Editor’s Note: This story by Frances Mize first appeared in the Valley News on Dec. 23.

A Vermont Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit brought against the town of Tunbridge regarding its authority to manage trails on private property.

The lawsuit, filed by John Echeverria and Carin Pratt, who own the 325-acre Dodge Farm, argued that because a trail — like the Orchard and Baptist Hill trails that run through their property — “is not a part of the town highway system,” it isn’t in the purview of the Selectboard.

Echeverria and Pratt moved from Washington, D.C., to Strafford more than a decade ago. They purchased Dodge Farm in 2015 and rent it to a Tunbridge resident. The pair take particular issue with mountain bikes using the trail.

Before arriving in court, the dispute had been playing out in Selectboard and Planning Commission meetings for two years. A Tunbridge Trails Committee was formed to issue guidance, but the Selectboard never acted on any recommendations.

The town filed a motion to dismiss the case in August. The motion was approved by Judge Elizabeth Mann on Monday.

The plaintiffs’ “mere fears that the town may one day seek to maintain the trails on the Dodge Farm property are not sufficient” to issue a judgment, Mann wrote.

Due to the dismissal, no ruling was made on Tunbridge’s authority, or lack thereof, to maintain trails.

“It’s just these other entities that are suggesting ideas, but the Selectboard itself, the only entity with any authority, has done nothing,” the town’s attorney, Michael Tarrant, said in an interview.

This kind of issue regarding trails and private property shows up in court frequently, Tarrant said. Parties will dispute whether or not a municipality owns a right of way, but he’s never seen it predicated on the particular argument that the plaintiffs in this case were making.

“The answer at stake is normally whether a trail is actually a public right of way. It’s very rare that you see an argument like this, which asserts that a municipality can’t maintain its property rights,” Tarrant said.

The dismissal of the lawsuit doesn’t change anything about the Planning Commission’s work, cochair Laura Ginsburg said.

“The Selectboard still has the policy that says legal trails are just for walking, and the Trails Committee are continuing to do work on trails that are town owned, like those in the town forest,” Ginsburg said. “The Planning Commission remains committed to ensuring that the public has access to public rights of way.”

Norwich-based attorneys Geoffrey Vitt and Sarah Merlo represented the couple in court.

Neither could be reached for comment.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Judge dismisses lawsuit over Tunbridge trails policy.

TUNBRIDGE — The owners of a former dairy farm that dates back to the 19th century are suing the town of Tunbridge over a dispute regarding the usage of two public trails that run through their property.

John Echeverria and Carin Pratt say in the filing that they “have not posted the land to restrict hunting and have permitted use of the land by the public for a variety of recreational activities, including snowmachines, hiking, skiing and snowshoeing,” but they are opposing the use of wheeled vehicles including ATVs, motorcycles and bicycles on the 325 acres known as Dodge Farm.

The lawsuit cites concerns that include “potential damage to wetlands along the trails from bicycle use and risks to the safety of trail users (and potential liability for injuries),” as well as stating that “opening these trails to bicycle use would seriously interfere with the Plaintiffs’ use and enjoyment of their property” and also create a “safety risk for the Plaintiffs and others who live, work in or otherwise frequent” the area that the trail crosses through.

Echeverria and Pratt moved from Washington, D.C., to Strafford more than a decade ago. They rent the Dodge Farm property, which they purchased in 2015, to a Tunbridge resident. They also “have granted permission to a neighbor to pasture cows on the property” and use two barns.

Pratt was a longtime production executive with CBS’ Face the Nation. Echeverria is a professor at Vermont Law School and a property lawyer himself.

Norwich attorney Geoffrey Vitt is representing the couple.

The suit alleges that the Selectboard has not been open to taking into account the concerns about cyclists and continues to permit cyclists on the trail. Under state law, the suit maintains, permission wasn’t the town’s to grant in the first place.

The suit argues that because a trail, like the Orchard and Baptist Hill trails that cross Dodge Farm, “is not a part of the town highway system” it’s not in the purview of the Selectboard.

While the filing hinges on the technical legal definitions of rights of way, both parties stressed the common-sense issues at the heart of the lawsuit.

“Our position is that the authority to maintain the public trail remains with the landowner,” Vitt said.

“I’m not saying we have the right to say who gets to use it, but I am saying we have the right to make the decision about how, if at all, the public trail is to be maintained.”

Before the lawsuit brought it to a head, the dispute had been playing out in Selectboard and Planning Commission meetings for almost two years and saw the formation of a Tunbridge Trails Committee.

“I just think trails should remain open,” Tunbridge resident and cyclist Michael Sacca said. “They are increasingly useful for public access to land, and they are public right of ways.”

Sacca participated in public discussions with the trails committee, pushing for the trails to remain open to use by cyclists and even suggested that a group of residents, rather than the town, could be in charge of trail maintenance.

“It’s a good opportunity for conservation groups and local volunteers to get together and keep these trails in good shape for everybody,” Sacca said.

The passion behind the debate is not lost on town officials.

“Having hosted all of these public forums and gotten so much feedback — a lot of it’s on video record — it’s really easy to see the level of emotion that’s contained in this discussion,” said Laura Ginsburg, co-chair of the planning commission.

“Access to the outdoors is one of the things that makes this place special,” Ginsburg said, adding that people use various roadways in Tunbridge, from town highways to legal trails to private property, for outdoor recreation.

Montpelier attorney Paul Gillies is representing the town. Gillies, as well as members of the Selectboard, declined to comment.

Ginsburg stressed that the lawsuit has broader implications for the usage of trails that run through private properties across the state — an issue that’s had little attention in Vermont courts.

“It’s like this legal gray area that you don’t know exists until somebody pushes back against it,” Ginsburg said. “We’re keenly aware that what happens in Tunbridge is going to impact other towns.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tunbridge trails debate leads to larger issue of landowner control in Vermont.

Editor’s Note: This story by John Lippman was first published by the Valley News on July 5.

CHELSEA — A Tunbridge man will make a financial contribution to a nonprofit that trains service dogs for veterans as part of his guilty plea in the fatal shooting of a German shepherd in Tunbridge this spring.

Damon Dyer pleaded guilty to a charge of cruelty to animals (fatal) in Orange Superior Court in Chelsea on June 29, nine weeks after he shot an 11-year-old German shepherd named Scout at a baiting pit in a field off Russell Road.

Scout belonged to a nearby married couple, both Iraq War veterans, who had let her out for a routine break at 5 p.m. only to see her never return home.

Dyer, 31, was sentenced to one to three months, all suspended, and placed on probation for six months, according to Vermont state court records.

He was also ordered to participate in a restorative justice program, which includes making a $500 donation to Hollis, N.H.-based Operation Delta Dog, a nonprofit that rescues homeless dogs and trains them to be service dogs for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, Orange County State’s Attorney Dickson Corbett said.

“In this particular case, an important goal for the state was making efforts to restore the victim’s sense of safety and belonging and justice in their neighborhood and to acknowledge the specific nature of the harms that had been done,” Corbett said via email on Tuesday.

According to the probable cause affidavit filed in support of the charge against Dyer, a Vermont game warden officer was called to investigate an incident involving an owner finding his dog shot dead in Tunbridge on April 23.

The dog’s owner, Steve Mortillo, had been searching the area for his missing dog for several days when he found her about 400 yards from his home, shot in the head and “laying dead next to a carcass pile which contained a dead cow and a dead pig,” said the affidavit prepared by Warden Jeffrey Whipple.

Whipple asked Mortillo at the scene to return home to retrieve a blanket so that Scout could be wrapped for transport.

After Mortillo was out of sight, Dyer approached Whipple and identified himself as the farm manager and informed the warden that he had shot the dog because “the dog was chasing cattle,” according to the affidavit.

But that explanation did not hold up, the warden said in a sworn statement.

“It was later determined that the dog was not chasing cattle and Dyer shot the dog while it was at the carcass pile,” Whipple wrote.

After he shot Scout, Dyer “identified the animal as a domestic dog” but he “did not see a collar on the dog and assumed it to be a stray,” according to Whipple’s affidavit.

Mortillo took to the Lost and Found Pets of the Upper Valley Facebook group the day after Scout had gone missing for assistance in finding her.

Mortillo told the Valley News that he and his wife — he a veteran who served in the Army, his wife as an officer in the Marines — adopted Scout from a German shepherd rescue mission in Maryland when she was 1 year old.

She was named Scout, Mortillo said, because he had been a cavalry scout during his military service.

“We were with her for 10 years. She played an important role in our lives. She helped me to readjust to civilian life,” Mortillo said at the time.

For Dyer, however, the consequences of the shooting went beyond a suspended sentence and making amends to Scout’s owners.

Three weeks after he was charged with animal cruelty, the Sharon Selectboard voted to suspend Dyer as the town’s animal control officer on the grounds that the charges undermined his authority in the position.

Dyer, who resigned after the suspension, had been appointed to the part-time job only in March.

In the aftermath of the shooting emotions ran high on social media, but on May 10 Dyer posted on his Facebook page: “People who know me, know animals are my life …” Dyer’s post received 168 comments, the vast majority in support and defense.

Corbett, the state’s attorney, said the nonprofit to which Dyer is contributing was the choice of Scout’s family and that “additional components of the restorative-justice program will be determined by the restorative-justice panel that participates in the case. Orange County Restorative Justice Center will be the organization that convenes the panel.”

Michael Shane, Dyer’s court-appointed attorney, did not respond to messages seeking comment as of press time.

Read the story on VTDigger here: After fatal shooting of German shepherd, Tunbridge man pleads guilty, donates to charity.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 8:14 a.m. to reflect the latest story by Darren Marcy that appeared in the Valley News on May 17. An earlier version reflected a story that first appeared in the Valley News on May 16.

The Tunbridge man facing a cruelty to animals charge related to the shooting death of a German shepherd has resigned from his position as an animal control officer in the town of Sharon.

Damon Dyer, 31, was suspended without pay on Friday in a special meeting of the Sharon Selectboard.

Dyer’s suspension was based on the town’s personnel policy: “Conduct that impairs the efficiency and effectiveness of town government, or which could cause public mistrust of an employee’s professionalism.”

At the board’s regularly scheduled meeting Monday, board chairman Kevin Gish announced Dyer’s resignation following an executive session called for personnel reasons.

“I would like to acknowledge the resignation of our animal control officer, effective today,” Gish said.

There was no additional comment.

Dyer is expected to be arraigned on one count of cruelty to animals in Orange Superior Court on June 29 following an investigation by the Vermont Warden Service into the shooting of Scout, an 11-year-old dog that lived across the road from where she was shot.

Scout was last seen April 20 when she was let out and didn’t return. Her owner, Steve Mortillo, found her body April 23.

The investigating warden, Sgt. Jeff Whipple, said the incident has been mischaracterized on social media by both sides of the emotional debate. He said the incident was easily preventable and served as a reminder for a shooter to be positive about the identity of a target but described Dyer as taking responsibility and was remorseful.

Dyer posted a short comment on his Facebook page on May 10, “People who know me, know animals are my life.”

The post has 146 comments, the overwhelming majority of which are in support of Dyer.

Dyer was appointed to the $30-per-hour, on-call, part-time animal control officer position in mid-March after no Sharon residents expressed interest in the job.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Sharon animal control officer resigns after allegedly shooting German shepherd in Tunbridge.

Editor’s Note: This story by John Lippman first appeared in the Valley News on May 10.

TUNBRIDGE — A Tunbridge man has been cited to appear in court on an animal cruelty charge in connection with the fatal shooting of a dog last month.

Damon Dyer, 31, is to appear in Orange Superior Court in Chelsea on June 29 to answer a charge of one count of cruelty to animals, the Vermont Warden Service said in a news release.

“This was an unfortunate and tragic loss of a beloved family pet,” said Game Warden Sgt. Jeffrey Whipple, who conducted the investigation. “I hope in the near future the family can find some peace.”

The Vermont Warden Service was tasked with investigating the fatal shooting of an 11-year-old German shepherd named Scout after her owner discovered her remains on April 23 near his home on Russell Road. The dog had been missing since April 20.

Whipple said Dyer works as a farm manager at a farm near the dog owner’s residence and came forth to identify himself as the shooter while Whipple was investigating the scene on April 23.

“He realized he should have reported it,” Whipple said, adding that Dyer had “expressed remorse” but could not explain why he allegedly shot Scout.

A message left Tuesday on Dyer’s home phone seeking comment was not returned.

Steve Mortillo, Scout’s owner, said in an interview with the Valley News that he found Scout shot dead at the edge of a field about 400 yards from his home.

He said he had let Scout out at about 5 p.m. April 20. Mortillo and his wife began to worry when Scout did not return soon.

“We got concerned right away. That night we knew something was wrong. We looked extensively for her for days,” Mortillo said.

Mortillo said Scout likely went across the road following the scent of a dead hog and dead cow carcass, which were lying in a pit ner where she was shot.

Mortillo said he and his wife, both veterans of the Iraq War — he in the Army; his wife an officer in the Marines — adopted Scout from a German shepherd rescue mission in Maryland when she was 1 year old.

She was named Scout because Mortillo was a cavalry scout during his military service.

“We were with her for 10 years. She played an important role in our lives. She helped me to readjust to civilian life,” said Mortillo, who added that one of her favorite things was to go fishing with him in the White River.

“She was scared to swim at first but we taught her, and then she couldn’t wait to get out of the canoe and go swimming,” Mortillo said.

Mortillo said he wrapped Scout in a blanket and buried her on the family property. They planted a white oak tree at her gravesite.

Mortillo said he is grateful to the Warden Service for the way they handled the investigation. 

“This just shouldn’t have happened,” he said. “I don’t know what else to say other than that.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tunbridge man facing animal cruelty charge in shooting of dog.

Editor’s Note: This story by John Lippman first appeared in the Valley News April 28.

Vermont authorities are investigating the shooting of an 11-year-old German shepherd whose owner found her dead a few hundred yards from his home in Tunbridge.

The Vermont Warden Service said it has opened an investigation after the owner discovered the dog’s remains on April 23 near his home on Russell Road. The dog had been missing since April 20.

Jeffrey Whipple, a game warden with Vermont Fish & Wildlife who lives in the neighboring town of Vershire and responded to the scene Saturday, said the dog went missing after the owner let her out around 5 p.m. the previous Wednesday. He said the owner found his dog’s body about 400 yards from his property.

The Warden Service did not disclose the name of the dog or its owner. But Tunbridge resident Steve Mortillo posted on the Lost and Found Pets of the Upper Valley Facebook group on April 21 at 8:31 p.m. that his 11-year-old German shepherd named Scout had gone missing the day before near Russell Road.

Mortillo’s post, which was accompanied by a photograph of Scout, was shared by 216 other group members.

Then late Tuesday night Mortillo again posted another photograph of him and Scout, announcing “I found our beloved dog, Scout, dead on Saturday, April 23rd. Game wardens are investigating the circumstances of her death.”

Mortillo did not respond to a request for comment and said on his Facebook post that he and his family “are not taking media inquiries until (the Warden Service’s) investigation is complete.”

Whipple said the Warden Service does not typically become involved in the investigation of pet fatalities, but he took the lead because he was the first officer to respond and he is familiar with the area and its residents.

Prosecutions for cruelty to animals are rare but they do happen.

In 2014, a Newbury man was charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty-fatal after he shot and killed a neighbor’s 7-year-old German shepherd that became ensnared in one of his hunting traps.

The dog’s owner had found her shepherd in the trap with a bullet wound to his head by tracing his tracks in the snow after he had not come home on the prior evening.

The owner of the hunting trap told Vermont State Police that he tried to release the dog out of the trap but claimed it was “acting aggressively” and he didn’t know what else to do. Authorities said the trap owner had other options, however, such as calling the police or Vermont Fish & Wildlife.

The man, who had no prior criminal record, pleaded guilty a month later and was sentenced from three months to one year in jail, all suspended with one year probation, according to Vermont state court records. He also was prohibited from trapping or having any contact with the dog’s owner and ordered to be a $500 fine plus a $75 victim restitution surcharge.

Exceptions under Vermont statutes as to when a person may lawfully kill a “wolf-hybrid” is when a person is being attacked by an unrestrained dog or when “attendant circumstances” threatening livestock “are such that the killing is reasonably necessary to prevent injury to the animal or fowl that is the subject of the attack.”

In recent weeks the topic of loose dogs threatening livestock surfaced on the Tunbridge community Facebook group when a member posted a question asking whom she could contact if there are dogs are threatening her chickens. Several members posted reply comments calling out the alleged owner of the offending dogs.

The incident occurred in a different part of Tunbridge from where Mortillo resides, and a dog owner, not Mortillo, apparently acknowledged that one of her dogs was the culprit.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont game wardens investigate fatal dog shooting in Tunbridge.

Vermont Town Meeting usually unfolds during March maple sugaring and mud season. But more than 10% of the state’s 246 municipalities will decide on local leaders, spending and special articles this spring amid April showers and May and June flowers.

For a second year, the Covid-19 pandemic has prompted nearly 30 communities to reschedule proceedings until it is warm enough to open windows or move outdoors.

Kirby, for example, gaveled in its annual town hall meeting on March 1, when John McClaughry won re-election as moderator for the 56th time (a yet-to-be-disproven state record). The session then adjourned until its 575 residents can swing the doors wide May 7 to figuratively and literally air things out.

All of Vermont’s 28 cities and towns with 5,000 or more residents stuck to their usual March voting schedules to ask for a collective $100 million in special bond requests above and beyond their regular budgets. But most smaller communities with spring dates are asking for much less.

Jamaica, population 1,005, is scheduled to meet April 2 to consider spending $25,000 for a town administrator and joining about 20 other Vermont municipalities in assessing a 1% local option sales tax.

“Nothing too exciting, but different for us!” Jamaica Town Clerk Sara Wiswall said of the agenda.

Halifax, population 771, postponed its gathering to May 3, only to hear from locals they’d rather vote that day by ballot on such questions as whether to reduce the selectboard from five members to three.

Ripton, population 739, is set to hold a meeting May 9 and a ballot vote on local leaders May 10, with the agenda to be finalized this week.

“We may have a question about purchasing road equipment,” said Alison Joseph Dickinson, Ripton’s town administrator, clerk and lister. “The town does not currently own any equipment or have a place for it.”

Communities had hoped to return to business as usual earlier this year before the state’s coronavirus cases hit record highs with the arrival of the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

“The citizens of Vermont should be able to protect their health, safety, and welfare,” said a resulting temporary state law allowing changes, “while also continuing to exercise their right to participate in annual municipal meetings.”

Almost 75% of the state’s 246 municipalities replaced shoulder-to-shoulder decision-making with mailable ballots this month, while about 40 towns chose to hold some sort of gathering on or around the first Tuesday in March.

Several communities opting for spring meetings are scheduling them outside the box. Sheffield, population 682, will gather May 17 under a tent beside its municipal building, while Tunbridge, population 1,337, is set to meet May 21 at its World’s Fair grounds.

Not all municipalities and their school districts are voting on the same day or in the same way.

Vernon, population 2,192, cast ballots on local leaders, its school budget and two marijuana questions March 1 and is scheduled to consider the rest of its agenda at an outdoor meeting May 1.

Westminster, population 3,016, voted on some articles March 1 and is set to decide the rest at a meeting April 30, either inside a bay of its fire station or in a backyard across the street, depending on the weather.

As a result, election officials are urging Vermonters to check both the timing of all municipal and school meetings and votes and whether they have to request an absentee ballot or will receive one automatically.

Towns postponing proceedings until spring include Baltimore (June 7), Barnet (April 25), Belvidere (June 7), Brookfield (May 21), Corinth (May 17), Dover (May 17), Granville (May 17), Halifax (May 3), Holland (May 21), Jamaica (April 2), Kirby (May 7), Londonderry (April 30), Lowell (May 21), Ludlow (April 4-5), Pittsfield (May 3), Ripton (May 9-10), Sheffield (May 17), Stannard (May 10), St. George (April 30), Sudbury (June 4), Tunbridge (May 21), Vernon (May 1), Vershire (May 22), Wardsboro (May 21), Waterford (April 5), Waterville (June 7), Westminster (April 30) and Weston (April 5).

Read the story on VTDigger here: Some 10% of Vermont communities set for spring Town Meetings or votes.

Editor’s Note: This story by Claire Potter first appeared in the Valley News on March 22.

VERSHIRE — An ATV carved its way up a muddy road off of Route 113 to carry a patient to an ambulance; schools suspended bus service on gravel roads; the mud on some back roads swallowed up the stone that road crews poured.

“It’s of biblical proportion,” said Tim Murphy, the chairman of the Royalton Selectboard, of this year’s mud season.

He lived 5 miles from a paved road for 26 years, and his former neighbors say that the mud has never been so extreme. He has been grappling with some survivor’s guilt now that he lives on the South Royalton green, comfortably removed from the mud’s clutches.

The Royalton road crew pulled a 22-hour shift, from midnight Friday to 10 p.m. Saturday, as they tried to gain ground against the mud, he said. And their work is not done. In most mud seasons, the town can target one or two stretches of road. This year, the mud is everywhere.

The White River Valley School was forced to keep its buses off of all gravel roads in Bethel and Royalton through the end of the week, instead picking children up from the closest intersection with a paved road, according to emails to parents from school officials.

Mud season came quickly and violently this year, stranding people in their homes. And it is not just an anomaly — New Englanders may be in for a longer mud season as the climate warms, said Alix Contosta, a research assistant professor of environmental science at the University of New Hampshire.

Mud season takes hold in early spring because frozen ground melts from the surface down. Ice in the soil turns to water, but it cannot move past the still-frozen ground below it. A thick layer of mud pools, and it lingers until the water can percolate down into the groundwater or flow into rivers.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but frost penetrates more deeply in a warmer winter. When more precipitation falls as rain than as snow, snow melts faster and snow cover is scant, Contosta explained. While a thick blanket of snow insulates soil from cold air, exposed soil is vulnerable to the icy temperatures that still punctuate even a warm winter in New England.

This year, snowfall was well below average across the state, and the frost gained a deep hold in the soil, she said.

“This tends to result in a worse mud season in the spring because the deep frost is going to take a long time to thaw out,” she said.

But that is not the only environmental factor that she hypothesizes to be at play. She studies the lengthening “vernal period,” which begins with the melting snow and closes when green overtakes the landscape.

Historically, leaves began to peek out of branches as snow melted, she said. But there is a lag that appears to be lengthening, and Contosta expects climate change to be the culprit. Snow melts earlier as temperatures rise. Green-up is also inching earlier in the year, but it is beholden to factors that do not change with the climate, such as sunlight. The lag between snow melt and green-up may grow. Plants draw water out of soil as they bud, alleviating muddy conditions, so a greater lag may lead to a worse mud season.

While Contosta focuses on the science, some of her colleagues at UNH look more closely at the practical implications of a severe mud season.

For example, New England roads have a “winter weight premium.” A frozen road can bear up a heavy vehicle, she said. Meanwhile, there are spring load restrictions that keep trucks off back roads, she said. And a lengthy period with weight restrictions on roads has economic consequences.

“Clearing snow is a nuisance, and sustained snow can feel uncomfortable,” she said. “But that snow cover and persistent cold is important to the functioning of our society.”

Steve Ward, who owns Ward’s Garage in Vershire, said about 20 people have called since Saturday because they were stranded in the mire.

“We’ve never had roads this bad, never,” said Ward, who is also the Vershire fire chief. He joined the department in 1980.

His department had to unload an ATV to respond to the emergency call on Saturday morning, which it hasn’t had to do in “a while.”

In Royalton, high diesel costs and extra labor costs might take a toll on the municipal budget, although Murphy said he cannot capture what it will look like for about a month.

More than anything, though, he worries about emergency services on back roads.

Volunteers between Barnard and Bethel have their ATVs loaded in case they are called on to rescue someone on a back road, he said.

Brenda Field, Tunbridge’s fire warden and emergency director, echoed his concern.

“This certainly wasn’t on my list of emergencies, but it will be now,” she said. “FEMA will be scratching their head on this one.” She has scrambled to set up mutual aid agreements with other departments to make sure that all-terrain vehicles equipped with stretchers are on call.

The mud is so thick that road crews have had to shovel it off the roads or else it would keep consuming the stone they applied, she said. Field and Fire Chief Simon Bradford put in place a burn ban because fire trucks would struggle to make their way through the mud. The South Royalton Fire Department also put in place a burn ban, which it announced on Facebook.

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘It’s of biblical proportions’: Vermonters contend with mud season unlike any in recent memory.

Editor’s note: This story by Liz Sauchelli was originally published in the Valley News on Feb. 12.

TUNBRIDGE — In the 1860s, 100 like-minded people and families were asked to support a new endeavor.

For $5 in 1867, they could own a piece of the Tunbridge World’s Fair and have a say in how it was managed. That $500 provided the seed money for the Union Agricultural Society, the nonprofit organization that runs the fair.

“Most of them stay within families … so it’s kind of hard to get a hand on one usually,” said Gordon Barnaby, a director of the fair who owns a share through his wife, whose family — the Cilleys — was one of the founding families.

So the auction for a share of the Tunbridge fair, orchestrated on behalf of an estate by Thomas Hirchak Co. in Morrisville, is a rarity.

The share, made out to David and Annie Laber, was originally listed at $10 when the auction began on Jan. 14, said Toby Hirchak, co-owner of the auction house. That would have been a bargain in inflation-adjusted dollars, as $5 in 1867 is worth about $143 now, according to a mix of federal price index data and a historical study.

After about two weeks, the high bid had climbed to $10,000, where it remained as of Friday afternoon.

“We started the thing at no reserve at $10 and we’re going to see how it ends up,” Hirchak said in a phone interview last week. “There seems to be great interest in it.”

Twenty-four people had contributed 93 bids. Most were from Vermont.

Hirchak, who has been in the auction business full time since 1985, said it was the first time he’s put a share of a fair on the block.

“It’s a very unusual opportunity to acquire a very interesting, practical historical thing,” he said.

And that historical value likely outstrips the monetary value, according to Barnaby. Bidders looking for a return on their investment might be disappointed.

“The shareholder basically gets a meal and a couple tickets for the fair,” he said. “They’re not a gold mine to make money off. It’s more the fact to say that you own a piece of the Tunbridge fair I think.”

Then again, a $10,000 sale would be a 2,000-times multiple on the original post-bellum fiver. While Barnaby said he’s heard of shares exchanging hands for $5,000, $10,000 is a new high. Over the last couple years, three or four shares have become available, but it’s not unusual to go a decade without any movement.

“You don’t change a lot of hands by sale,” said Barnaby, who has been a director for 35 years. “There will be a few name changes, a family name … if you get one every couple years you’re doing pretty good and it’s usually something like this where it’s someone who’s deceased and there’s no one to pass it on to.”

The Essex Junction-based Champlain Valley Exposition also was funded by shareholders. Beginning in 1922, shares were sold for $50 to fund the annual fair, said Tim Shea, executive director of the nonprofit organization. There are roughly 1,000 shareholders who get to vote at the annual meeting and, if they fill out an annual survey, receive two free 10-day passes. While all shareholders are invited to the meeting, usually 30 to 40 attend.

“They’re cherished,” Shea said of the shares in a phone interview. “It’s kind of neat when someone comes in and says, ‘Hey, my grandfather willed this to me,’ and we transfer the share. It’s special to keep it in the family.”

Shea said he’s unaware of any shares of the Champlain Valley Exposition going up for auction and, if someone sold a share privately, the nonprofit organization wouldn’t be made aware of it.

“The Tunbridge Fair is a special event and Tunbridge is a special place in Vermont, so I can see why there’s so much interest in a share to that wonderful event,” Shea said.

While many Tunbridge fair stakeholders live in the region, “as time goes everyone expands a little further out,” Barnaby said. Some live as far as California. The annual meeting requires a majority of shareholders to be present, and those who are unable to attend can send proxy voters in their places.

“The Tunbridge Fair has been there for quite a while, so there’s a lot of people that want to say they own something of the fair. People have had shares for years and years and they say they don’t understand how they can be worth that much. But those same people wouldn’t sell their shares,” Barnaby said. “If somebody offered us $10,000 for it, we probably wouldn’t sell either.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Get your fair share: Auction offers a stake in Tunbridge World’s Fair.

Editor’s note: This article by John Lippman was first published in the Valley News on Jan. 29.

The small-town general store is hardly thought to be a growth industry. The business in recent years has been marked by closings and abandonments.

In few Upper Valley towns was this more evident than in Tunbridge, which was once served by two general stores — the Tunbridge Store in the village and the North Tunbridge General Store 2 miles up Route 110 — but both closed, leaving townsfolk inconvenienced when they needed to fill up on gas or grab a carton of eggs, a six-pack or a sandwich.

But Tunbridge may soon be a two-store town again.

John Houston, a Los Angeles filmmaker who relocated to Vermont during the pandemic, has purchased the Tunbridge Store building from Scott Terami, who stopped operating the store in 2019.

The store was put on the market last year with an asking price of $349,000, and the Vermont property transfer tax return filed with the town shows Houston purchased it for $295,000.

In recent weeks, Terami has been holding a “liquidation” of the building’s eclectic contents — vintage radios, antique furniture, wicker baskets, classic Schwinn bicycles, many of which he picked up at estate sales — and was hoping to wrap up and clear the way for Houston.

Houston’s purchase of the Tunbridge Store follows by a couple months the purchase of the North Tunbridge General Store up the road by Lois and Mike Gross. The longtime Tunbridge couple have been getting the store, which has been closed since 2016, ready to reopen later this month.

Houston began visiting Tunbridge in 2014, when his stepfather, Nick Nichols, acquired a couple of Anichini founder Susan Dollenmaier’s properties in a court-ordered auction after the luxury fabric products company ran onto the financial shoals of the Great Recession.

Houston, who made Tunbridge his home with his wife, Erica, and newborn son, Jack, now resides in one of those properties on Route 110, next to which he has had built a timber frame barn from where he plans to sell produce grown in the adjoining field.

“I fell in love with the town. We’re making it our home,” said Houston, who was reached on the phone in San Diego, where he was on duty with his Navy Reserve unit.

He labels the barn as “a community space” that will also have an “agriculture purpose” — he and his wife had the religious ceremony there following a civil marriage officiated by the late Euclid Farnham — although he is still mulling ideas on how it will evolve.

The purchase of the Tunbridge Store was an opportunity that presented itself, Houston explained, but he envisions it as offering a “hot food” menu and combining that with some kind of retail element.

But at the same time, Houston says he’s going to get feedback from people in the community to find out what they would like to see at the store.

“The most important thing is that it serve the Tunbridge community. I might come from L.A., and I could create something which looks nice but doesn’t do anything good for the town,” he said. “That’s not what I want to do.”

Houston also emphasized that he is not looking to compete with the North Tunbridge Store and wants to “work in concert” with the new owners to make sure they are not cannibalizing each other’s business.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tunbridge may soon go from no general stores to 2.

A pair of organic dairy farmers from Tunbridge testified before Vermont legislators Thursday morning, six months after they spoke publicly about the telecommunication wire that was left on their farm fields, sickening their cows. 

Three of Scott and Amber Hoyts’ cows died after consuming stainless steel lashing wire, which was inadvertently chopped and incorporated into their feed.

ECFiber, a communication union district looking to expand broadband in the Upper Valley, hired Eustis Cable to carry out construction of the project. Eustis then hired Crammer O’Connors Fiber Genesis, which worked on utility poles on the Hoyts’ fields in the fall of 2019. 

Only after the company completed that work did the Hoyts discover wire in their silage.

In response to the Hoyts’ experience, legislators in the Senate Committee on Judiciary are considering S.166, a bill introduced by Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, and Sen. Chris Pearson, P/D-Chittenden, that would “ensure that all construction contracts contain terms and conditions specifying standards and responsibility for worksite cleanup.” 

It also establishes that a utility is ultimately liable for incidents that cause harm during the construction of its projects. A violation of the cleanup rules adopted by the bill, which The Public Utility Commission would regulate, would constitute an unfair act or practice under Vermont’s consumer protection laws. 

Legislators said the bill would be increasingly important as Vermont, saturated with federal funding, carries out a large-scale broadband expansion amid staffing shortages that often require utilities to rely on contractors.

“We’re all worried that people will gain access to these lands, be hurriedly applying broadband, and perhaps will not be cleaning up the sites in the way that they should be,” said Steven Collier with the Agency of Agriculture, who testified before the House Committee on Agriculture and Forestry on Wednesday. 

The Hoyts said they have not been able to reclaim enough money to cover their costs following the alleged negligence of the subcontractor who worked their land. The farmers have incurred a number of related expenses and losses — replacing their organic feed, a reduction in milk production, loss of valuable herd genetics, contaminated fields and emotional distress. 

An insurance policy for Crammer O’Connors Fiber Genesis lapsed while the subcontractor was working on the Hoyts’ fields, and for that reason, the insurance carrier denied the Hoyts’ initial claim, according to the Hoyts’ legal counsel. 

Unable to pay for another season’s worth of feed and hoping their fields would be free of wire, the Hoyts cut hay this summer. Again, it was contaminated. 

“We’re going through assuming that all of our feed’s contaminated and our fields are still contaminated,” Scott told the committee Thursday morning. “We’re just trying to survive.”

The couple filed a lawsuit against the involved telecommunication companies last fall. Meanwhile, F. X. Flinn, chair of ECFiber, told VTDigger he worked throughout the summer to pull involved parties and insurance companies together and propose a settlement that would have covered the Hoyts’ ongoing costs. ECFiber has filed a motion to dismiss the Hoyts’ suit. 

The company filed the motion to dismiss because the Hoyts’ attorney’s complaint didn’t add up, Flinn said.

“The fact that we filed a dismissal has nothing to do with whether or not we want this solved,” he said. “We desperately want this solved.”

The Hoyts are not the only farmers to discover wire, apparently from utility projects, on their properties. Another Tunbridge farmer mowed over a similar bundle of wire, but it didn’t cause damage, said Clark Parmalee, who works for Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets; he testified to the House Committee on Agriculture and Forestry Wednesday.

Jackie Folsom, legislative director for the Vermont Farm Bureau, told the House Judiciary Committee that the president of the Farm Bureau found wire while brush hogging along his power lines in Cambridge — an hour and a half north of Tunbridge.

“It has been going on,” Folsom said. “It doesn’t mean it’s happening everywhere. It doesn’t mean that everyone is doing this. But it is a problem.”

Goats from Villa Villekulla Farm, also in Tunbridge, became sickened last summer by what farmer Lauren Gitlin believes to be copper naphthenate, a green, greasy substance used to preserve the base of wooden utility poles and prevent them from rotting. 

A subcontractor for Washington Electric Cooperative, a customer-owned operation based in East Montpelier, likely left the mostly-empty bag of preservative behind in 2005, a representative of Washington Electric told VTDigger last summer.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee debated whether the bill should apply specifically to broadband utilities or more broadly — and whether it could include a provision to compensate farmers affected by damage. 

“I think everybody’s in agreement that this is an issue that needs attention,” said Sen. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden, vice chair of the committee. “The bill is admirably efficient in how it goes at the rules that are governing this. But I do think that there’s a stitch being dropped in terms of awards for people who have been injured in these situations.” 

Those awards, however, would not include the Hoyts. 

“The farmers that you’re going to hear from today recognize that S.166 will not help them,” Folsom told legislators. 

Flinn, the chair of ECFiber, told VTDigger Thursday that he doesn’t object to the bill, but that his organization’s contracts already contain everything the bill stipulates. In terms of the way the bill attempts to change the accountability framework, “it wouldn’t do a thing,” he said.

“When ECFiber and ValleyNet contracted with Eustis for all the work that they’ve done for us, we wrote into those contracts that they have to clean up, they have to leave it the way they found it, they have to have insurance, they have to hire professionals, on and on and on,” he said.

Folsom suggested that legislators hear from utilities that are hiring subcontractors about what already exists in the contracts.

“I have not had access to the contracts, but my issue is not what’s in it,” she told the committee. “My issue is, if this stuff is in it, it’s not being enforced.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Following wire incident at Tunbridge farm, lawmakers consider bill on accountability.

Tunbridge dairy farmers whose cows became sick after ingesting stainless steel wire found in their feed last fall have sued the telecommunications companies they believe are responsible. 

Amber and Scott Hoyt’s complaint — filed by Arend Tensen, an attorney with the New Hampshire-based firm Cullenberg & Tensen — names four defendants: Eustis Cable Enterprises, ValleyNet, ECFiber, and Crammer O’Connors Fiber Genesis. 

It accuses those parties of negligence, nuisance, trespassing and consumer fraud, and asks for punitive damages and a trial by jury. It was filed Nov. 5 and served Nov. 18. 

In a statement, ECFiber Chairman F. X. Flinn said the telecommunications companies had been working for months to “resolve the matter, determine responsibility, and ensure that those who are responsible are held accountable.” He expressed disappointment that the Hoyts had gone ahead with the lawsuit.

“Attorney Tensen’s decision to file suit at this sensitive time, at the precise moment when the parties and their respective carriers had come to the table in good faith, has likely significantly delayed resolution of the Hoyts’ claim,” ECFiber officials said in a statement issued Friday. 

Donna McCann, a paralegal at Cullenberg & Tensen, which represents the Hoyts, said the firm has “no comment to make regarding our decision to file suit at this time.” Amber and Scott Hoyt also declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The problem remains unresolved for the Hoyts, who previously told VTDigger that the situation could be crucial for their farm. Three cows died after ingesting wire, and more than 70 have been exposed to the contaminated feed. 

In August, the farmers learned their insurance claim had been denied because the subcontractor who performed the work wasn’t fully insured at the time. 

ECFiber, a communication union district that serves the Upper Valley, has been working to expand broadband in the area. The district hired a contractor, Eustis Cable, to help complete the job, and Eustis hired a subcontractor, Crammer O’Connors Fiber Genesis, whose workers used a stainless steel lashing wire to “lash a cable or cables to a supporting strand” between telephone poles in the fields where the Hoyts harvested hay, according to the complaint. ValleyNet operates the line.

Crammer O’Connors Fiber Genesis worked in Tunbridge on five dates during the fall of 2019, and that’s when “lashing wire was discarded or left in the fields by Crammer’s installation crew,” the complaint alleges.

Then, in September 2020, the Hoyts found pieces of mangled wire, like needles, in their cows’ feed, which is made of hay mixed from several fields. It appeared the chopper that mowed their fields had inadvertently ground wire in with the hay. 

The Hoyts have taken standard measures to prevent so-called “hardware disease,” which can affect farm animals that inadvertently ingest metal or other farm equipment. Their chopper is equipped with a metal detector that collects metal pieces, and the cows swallow magnets that harmlessly sit in their stomach to collect stray hardware they might ingest. 

But the type of stainless steel wire found in the fields wasn’t magnetic, so it slipped through the farmers’ protective measures. 

Since last December, some of the cows have shown symptoms the Hoyts hadn’t seen before: sudden bloody noses, signs of discomfort, a high number of aborted calves and declining milk production. With their vet, the Hoyts performed necropsies of cows that died and pulled wire from their bodies. More than 70 have eaten the contaminated feed. 

“As a result of the feed being damaged in the fall of 2019, plaintiffs’ herd was exposed to the feed and all are at risk of dying or being injured,” the complaint says. 

Damages suffered by the Hoyts, according to the complaint, include the cost of replacing contaminated feed, reduced milk production, veterinary services, time spent caring for sick cows and investigating the problem, damage to their fields and a reduction in the value of their herd. 

“Plaintiffs have suffered personal injury and severe emotional stress as a result of witnessing the damages being occasioned by their dairy herd and operations, being unable to control the numerous problems experienced within their operations and engaging in extraordinary efforts in an attempt to correct those problems,” the complaint says. 

ECFiber’s statement said the district hopes to resolve matters by Christmas this year. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tunbridge dairy farmers sue telecom companies after wires left in fields sickened cows.

This story by Alex Hanson was originally published in the Valley News on Oct. 30.

TUNBRIDGE — John O’Brien speaks modestly of “Man With a Plan,” his 1996 feature film about a Vermont farmer who decides to run for Congress.

For a piece of Vermont artistry, the film was a resounding success, but in movie terms, where success is measured in tens and hundreds of millions, it was as modest as O’Brien is when he speaks of it.

“I think it’s holding up really well in light of the American political scene,” he said in an interview at his Tunbridge sheep farm. “It never seems out of touch or out of time.”

But it does seem a long way from here, from a time when gentle mockery of electoral politics seemed not only possible, but necessary. On Friday, a certain former president issued a statement that read, in its entirety, “INFLATION NATION!” Try satirizing that.

Satire might be dead, but “Man With a Plan” remains an indelible cultural marker in Vermont, and it led to one of the greatest episodes of political theater in the state’s — and maybe the nation’s — history.

O’Brien came up with the idea of putting Tunbridge dairy farmer Fred Tuttle at the center of a movie when Tuttle had a small, scene-stealing role in O’Brien’s previous film, “Vermont Is for Lovers.”

At the time, Ross Perot, the folksy Texas tycoon, was running as an outsider for president in 1992. Dissatisfaction with the status quo was in the air.

O’Brien is most often identified as a Tunbridge sheep farmer and filmmaker, but he has a political background. His father, Robert, was a state senator from Orange County and ran for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1976. He also studied political science and film at Harvard.

At various times, O’Brien has said that the classic Peter Sellers film “Being There,” and the Saturday morning cartoon character Mr. Magoo were also inspirations for the film. Tuttle exuded the same uncomplicated ease as those characters.

“Man With a Plan” features Tuttle more or less as himself, a 70-something Vermont dairy farmer with busted knees who’s behind on his taxes and needs money for medical bills. What can a guy with few qualifications do that will pay him enough to get by?

The answer, of course, is run for Congress.

“I’ve spent my whole life in the barn,” Tuttle says in the film. “Now I just want to spend a little time in the House.”

Tuttle, with his advisers, Kermit Glines, Edgar Dodge and Euclid Farnham, fellow Tunbridge residents all appearing in the film as themselves, fashion his campaign as a member of the fictitious Regressive Party. His opponent is a six-term incumbent, played by Bill Blachly, founder of Marshfield’s Unadilla Theater and a former state legislator.

O’Brien shot the film in a loose, improvisational style, giving his untrained actors a general idea of what he wanted, then letting them talk.

A Valley News reporter who visited the filming of “Man With a Plan” in November 1992 captured Dodge’s account of a conversation with Tuttle:

“Fred wanted to know, ‘What does John want? What does John want?’ ” Dodge said. “ ‘Fred,’ I told him, ‘John is trying to get something, he wants to get something down that will be real and tangible. He wants to capture a way of life that was so different. It’s a way of life that’s passing.’ ”

In that way, “Man With a Plan” is a kind of time capsule. With the exception of Blachly, who’s now in his 90s, the old men of the film are all gone.

O’Brien edited the film and got it into theaters in 1996. It premiered in the Hopkins Center’s Spaulding Auditorium in Hanover, New Hampshire, to a packed house, and had long runs in Montpelier, Burlington and Boston.

O’Brien and Jack Rowell, who helped make the film and shoot still photographs during filming, drove Tuttle around the region for Friday night film openings.

The Spaulding show sticks out in O’Brien’s memory.

“It was such a great experience when you have 900 people there,” he said. “That was the beginning of the whole self-distribution adventure.”

The film came out in the heyday of independent cinema. O’Brien cobbled together around $100,000 to make the movie.

But distribution was a challenge. As an independent filmmaker, he didn’t have the leverage of future films to wield against the theaters, making a wider release impossible.

The film made it to New York, playing on one screen in Greenwich Village. The New York Times published a review on Nov. 1, 1996, praising it as a “slight, goofy, charming and satirical movie.” O’Brien, the reviewer wrote, “has a keen sense of the lunacy of politics, but also a sensitive ear for sprightly musical accompaniment and an artist’s eye for the natural beauties of Vermont.”

Typically, films open in New York and Los Angeles so they can be reviewed and any critical praise can become part of a national marketing campaign, O’Brien said. But “Man With a Plan” got to New York having already played in the provinces and with no marketing budget.

He and the film’s backers scrambled to get the movie into home video formats before Christmas, and they distributed it through video shops, book shops, general stores and other places willing to sell it.

In the long run, the movie grossed around $1 million, enough to cover costs, pay back investors and for O’Brien, Tuttle and a few other people to get paid $10,000 to $20,000. If you figured the hours spent making the film, that didn’t work out to minimum wage.

But there was a second chapter that was even bigger than the first.

O’Brien had been considering having Tuttle run for Congress for real in 1998 as a way to generate publicity. But Peter Freyne, political columnist for Seven Days, encouraged O’Brien to look at the Senate race instead.

Jack McMullen, a Massachusetts businessman who’d become a Vermont resident in 1997, filed to run as a Republican for the Senate seat held by Democrat Patrick Leahy. A wealthy Harvard Law School grad, McMullen came across as a diffident, inexperienced candidate who lacked the common touch. O’Brien and Tuttle decided he should run in the Republican primary against McMullen.

Their September 1998 GOP debate on Vermont Public Radio was a classic native-vs.-flatlander encounter in which the candidates asked each other questions. Tuttle’s queries for McMullen proved he didn’t know his way around a barnyard. “How many teats does a Holstein have and how many does a Jersey have?” “What’s a tedder?” And “what is rowen?” (All cows have four teats. A tedder is a tractor attachment that turns hay for drying, and rowen is second-cut hay.)

He also handed McMullen a list of town names and asked him to pronounce them: Charlotte, Calais, Leicester and so on, and McMullen mangled them as if on cue.

“That was a quintessential moment in Vermont history,” Deborah Kimbell, a Tunbridge resident who had been Leahy’s campaign press secretary in 1986, said in a phone interview.

Tuttle defeated McMullen by 10 percentage points and swiftly endorsed Leahy and campaigned with him. Kimbell caught them at a campaign event at a one-room school in Granville.

“If it had been McMullen and Leahy, it would have been more of the same,” she said. “This was so refreshing and fun.”

Tuttle collected 23% of the vote in November, despite his endorsement of Leahy. He also made the rounds of talk shows, including a flight to Los Angeles for “The Tonight Show.” Rowell sold photographs of Tuttle to newspapers around the world.

After “Man With a Plan,” O’Brien made one more film, “Nosey Parker,” completing his “Tunbridge trilogy.”

He told a reporter once that he’d like to make bigger movies with bigger budgets, but didn’t really want to leave the farm, either. The farm won. He got married to Emily Howe, a fellow Tunbridge resident, in 2015, and they run a wedding business at the farm. He’s also served two terms in the Vermont House, representing Royalton and Tunbridge, as a Democrat, and is on the Tunbridge Selectboard as well.

He shot about 500 hours of film for another mockumentary, this one about environmentalism, but hasn’t found time to finish it.

American politics has grown stranger and more fraught since 1996. “Man With a Plan” stands apart from it, as Vermont does.

“I think the movie and its satire are holding up pretty well,” O’Brien said. “As with all satire, the real deal of American politics is even more absurd.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: 25 years later, ‘Man With a Plan’ saga shows real-life politics is stranger than fiction.

Editor’s Note: This story by Claire Potter first appeared in the Valley News on Sept. 17.

Susan Cain stood outside the Log Cabin Museum at the Tunbridge World’s Fair on Thursday in a homestead-style yellow floral dress and no shoes.

“It’s been a really hard year,” she said. With her family dispersed across the country, the 81-year-old spent much of the year isolated because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Cain oversees the museum, complete with spinning wheels and an old-school general store. The fair had to be canceled last year, and she is glad to be back. Her first love is weaving — pulling up the weedy flax grass at the end of July and transforming its stringy interior into linen. On the fair’s first day on Thursday, she displayed samples of her work and handled the wooden antique tools she uses for her craft.

All of the fair’s Antique Hill hummed with 1920s farm equipment brought back to life, the regular beat of axes hitting logs and the thumping of a blacksmith’s hammer. It was education day at the fair, and busloads of children investigated the one-room schoolhouse, the printing press and the historical reenactments. Homestead traditions brought to life proved as popular as ever, and Antique Hill is growing.

Dennis Cilley, a lifelong Tunbridge resident, has big plans for Antique Hill. He is in charge of everything on the hill except the museum — including the printing press, the barn full of carriages and wagons, and the blacksmith shop, where he apprenticed as a boy. He was helping at the apple press and distributing cider with his two sons.

“It’s old Vermont,” he said. “This stuff isn’t done anywhere anymore.”

Each year, there is a new addition to the hill — like the antique wood splitter that joined the menagerie of old machines. Cilley pointed out a row of young maple trees planted in an even row. Soon there will be shops between them and perhaps a church at the end of the lane, “like a little Main Street,” he said. The beams that Mario and Isaac Sacca, of Tunbridge, were hewing from logs just a few feet away would be part of a 20-by-20-foot store.

Elliott Morse’s family has been sugaring at their farm in Montpelier for 200 years. He reenacted his ancestors’ work as he manned a wood-powered sugaring evaporator attached to a red sap bucket mounted on a one-horse sleigh.

“I’ve been sugaring since I was this tall,” he said, lifting his hand to just under 4 feet. “It’s in my veins to make syrup. I can’t think of not sugaring.”

For well over a year, though, Morse has had to stay away from the Morse Farm. He is over 80, and his doctor told him to avoid the steady flow of tourists because of the pandemic. So he has been driving a delivery truck for an auto parts store — “I’m not one to sit around,” he said.

The volunteers behind the buzz of activity on Antique Hill are confident that the next generation would keep their traditions alive. Cain, of the Log Cabin Museum, taught Laura Craft, 56, to spin yarn from wool, and Craft has brought her 13-year-old daughter, Alice, to the fair every year since she was born.

Sarah Corrigan and Brad Salon, who run a school for “ancestral skills” in Corinth, toured the booths with their baby, Ash. At the ROOTS School, they use many of the same tools and natural materials as the historical reenactors. More than anything, they said that they and their students want to reconnect with the natural world by working with natural materials and practicing the skills in “everyone’s ancestry.”

“Making these things with hands and tools, there’s a direct understanding to it — it’s technical and involved, and there’s a beauty to working with natural materials,” Corrigan said. “But there’s a competency that’s hard to feel with modern technology. If my cellphone breaks, competency is a moot point.”

Although Antique Hill was busy, the absence of two people was also noteworthy. Former longtime Town Moderator Euclid Farnham, an eighth-generation Vermonter, died this year at 87. The former dairy farmer helped transform the fair into a family affair and with his wife, Priscilla, was a constant, steady presence on Antique Hill. Priscilla Farnham was not there Thursday morning.

The Farnhams had recruited Cain to the fair decades earlier.

“Right where I am in my life, I’ll always be thankful for people who led me down the path I followed,” Cain said.

“I miss them both,” she added.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tunbridge fair brings past to present with ancestral skills and crafting.

Lauren Gitlin knew something was wrong when she found Potato, among the more energetic goats on her Tunbridge dairy farm, laying in the field where she had been grazing that day. 

On the afternoon of July 31, Gitlin, the owner and sole operator of Villa Villekulla Farm in Tunbridge, had come to gather the goats and take them back to the barn for the night. Several of the goats were acting strangely — lethargic and unbalanced, she said. Then she spotted green coloring on one of the goats’ noses. 

“It almost looked like paint,” she said. “It smelled really strongly of, like, chemical. And then she was kind of wobbling — she seemed almost drunk. I was like, oh, something is very wrong.”

Now, she knows that three goats found a discarded, almost-empty bag of copper naphthenate, a green, greasy substance used to preserve the base of wooden utility poles and prevent them from rotting. 

Gitlin marks the second Tunbridge dairy farmer in the past year to make a startling discovery: Their livestock — first, cows at Hoyt Hill Farmstead; now, goats at Villa Villekulla about 10 minutes away — had ingested material left behind by a subcontractor who was working on utility projects, causing the animals to fall ill. 

For several days, Gitlin worried the goats would die, but as of the beginning of September, all three of the affected animals appear to have made a full recovery. 

Still, she’s dumping milk because of concerns it may be impacted and said the situation has been a huge hit to her business.

“I want there to be more awareness and more care from these companies that are working within historically agricultural territories,” Gitlin said. “I mean, this is an agricultural state. So the fact that people can be so careless is really disturbing and disappointing.”

Grazing in the hills

Gitlin operates her farm on a large swath of rented property located below power lines that stretch up a rolling hill. She’s been using the fields for grazing without any problems since she moved to the rural White River Valley town three years ago, she said.

Washington Electric Cooperative, Inc, a customer-owned operation based in East Montpelier, hired a contractor in 2005 to apply the material to the base of a utility pole located in Gitlin’s field, according to Patty Richards, general manager for Washington Electric.

That part of the practice is fairly standard, she said. Leaving a half-buried bag of the preservative behind is not. 

“There was residual naphthenate on the bag — kind of like if you’re trying to squeeze out pudding from a plastic bag, you’re going to have some residual residue on the side,” Richards said. “They dug a hole in the ground, and they left the bag in the ground, which is not proper procedure.”

The contractor has since been purchased by an Ohio-based company called Osmose Utilities Services, Inc. Officials with the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets say they’re working to locate the individual who performed the work to gain a clearer idea of what happened, but they have not found that person.

Gitlin, a former journalist and food scholar, has a total of 28 goats in her herd, but she only uses milk from six to make small-batch artisan products like skyr, a thick Icelandic-style yogurt. Gitlin moved to Vermont in 2014 and spent four years working for various goat dairy producers to learn the craft. She finally began selling her first products last fall. 

Two of Gitlin’s six milking goats consumed the copper naphthenate, and though the animals appear to have recovered, she’s continued to dump their milk — 60 gallons so far, a third of her product — unsure whether it would be safe for consumption. 

She said those 60 gallons amount to approximately $1,200 to $1,500 in lost product. 

“It just kind of breaks my heart a little bit every day when I have to dump that milk down the drain,” she said. “I know how much work went into making it. My animals are working hard to create that milk every day — it puts a strain on their bodies, and for it to all be for not, it’s just sad for me.”

No protocol 

Utility poles come pre-treated with pentachlorophenol, a substance that prevents them from rotting. Around 20 to 25 years later, workers re-treat the base of the poles with various types of wood preservatives, including copper naphthenate. 

The toxic substance is painted onto the base of utility poles, about 2 feet underground. Then, workers wrap the pole with a cardboard membrane to prevent any of the substance from leaching into the surrounding dirt. 

While the effects of copper are fairly well known, the effects of the second part of the substance are lesser known. Copper naphthenate is created from a reaction between copper salts and naphthenic acids, which are “usually obtained as by-products in petroleum refining,” according to a 2010 handbook on pollution prevention. Gitlin learned, in trying to find a lab, that there are not easy ways to test for naphthenate. 

Cary Giguere, who directs the Agency of Agriculture’s Public Health and Agrichemical Resource Management division, said that’s because “it’s not a typical active ingredient.”

He said he was hoping a state lab could perform tests, which would clear the milk for public consumption and allow Gitlin to continue selling all of her products. But the state lab is not equipped to test for safe levels of copper naphthenate.

“For better or worse, there’s no precedent for this type of thing. There’s no answer. There’s no protocol,” Gitlin said. She eventually found a lab that might be able to develop a test, “but it’s a $7,000 bill.”

In the meantime, she’s going to continue dumping her milk. Gitlin’s veterinarian, Royalton-based Taylor Hull, said the substance’s impact on the animals is also relatively unknown. 

Unfortunate situation

Richards, with Washington Electric, said the company is taking the situation seriously.

“We’re super concerned about the goats’ welfare, and we want to do right by our members.”

Richards said she thinks the incident is a “one-off,” but Washington Electric plans to send crews to check each utility pole up and down the line from the pole that was affected. 

Washington Electric is prepared to reimburse Gitlin for her losses through an insurance claim, Richards said, but Gitlin is hesitant to send along an invoice because her costs are ongoing, including continuously dumping milk.

Gitlin also said she’s received infrequent communications from the company. They didn’t immediately confirm that they would reimburse her for all of her losses, and they stopped responding in early August, except for some third-party communications through the Agency of Agriculture, until a reporter contacted them for comment this week, she said.

Gitlin, who only recently began collecting praise and recognition for the product she’s been selling for less than a year, said the incident has complicated the prospects of her emerging business.

“Certainly, I want to recover all of my lost income, but the things that are harder to calculate are the damage to my business at this stage,” she said. “There are these more abstract damages that I’m having a hard time really assessing or assigning a value to.”

Strike 2 in Tunbridge

Last fall, dairy farmers Amber and Scott Hoyt discovered that a subcontractor for Eustis Cable, which was working on a project for the communication union district ECFiber, left wire on their hay fields. After unknowingly chopping the wire and incorporating it into their hay, which as many as 70 cows consumed, the Hoyts lost three animals and incurred considerable expenses. Recently, the subcontractor’s insurance denied their claim, which has prompted the farmers to consider legal action.

Richards said Gitlin’s case has a few distinct differences from the Hoyts’ case, of which she said the company is “keenly aware.”

First, Gitlin has not lost any animals. Second, she does not consider the incident to be ongoing — the goats have recovered and likely will not be exposed to the same chemical again in the future. 

“It’s dissimilar than the Hoyts’ situation, where they’ve got continual problems in their hay feed and stock,” she said. “This is not that situation.”

Still, Gitlin is calling for accountability and renewed awareness surrounding utilities’ hiring practices — much like the Hoyts. In that case, a group of 12 Tunbridge officials this summer delivered a letter to ECFiber asking the communications district to compensate the Hoyts, and the new leader of the Vermont Community Broadband Board called for better training for contractors.

Richards said due to the Hoyts’ story and Gitlin’s, they’re having internal conversations related to the practices of their contractors. 

“We want to make sure all of our contractors are behaving in responsible ways and not leaving anything behind, whether it’s a spool of wire or tool or whatever,” she said. 

For the love of goats

When Gitlin first determined that her goats had consumed the toxic substance, she called her vet, who recommended that Gitlin feed the affected goats charcoal. 

“My littlest goat, Potato, was very clearly in a lot of pain and a lot of distress,” Gitlin said. “She was really, really sick.”

First thing in the morning, she would hurry to the barn, hoping Potato was still alive.

“She was in so much pain,” she said. “She was kind of whimpering — it was really heartbreaking because I could tell she was just suffering.”

Gitlin has a tattoo of one of her goats, named Mouse, on a portion of her upper body. Mouse was affected by the preservative, she said. 

“During that week, when I thought that I was likely going to lose one or two of my goats, I was pretty raw, pretty broken,” she said, her voice breaking. “And I’m really grateful that they were able to come back around because, you know, they’re my family.”

Gitlin said she doesn’t think anyone had ill will or ill intent toward her, and she said she appreciates the help she’s gotten from those looking to ameliorate the situation. She’s also angry. 

“I’m wondering why there hasn’t been clearer guidance for me, so that I can go back to doing my job and trying to build my small business,” she said. “On a day-to-day basis, every time I have to dump that milk down the drain,” she said, “it just makes me angry and sad.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Goats in Tunbridge sickened after consuming toxic chemical below utility pole.

TUNBRIDGE — The owners of a Tunbridge dairy farm whose cows died after ingesting leftover wire from a telecom project say their insurance claim has been denied, spurring them to consider legal action against the entities that oversaw work at their property.

Meanwhile, a dozen Tunbridge officials have signed a letter raising concerns about Hoyt Hill Farmstead’s “ability to survive” and calling on the ECFiber communications district to “make the Hoyts ‘whole’ in a timely manner.”

And the new leader of the Vermont Community Broadband Board is calling for better training for subcontractors as the state pushes broadband expansion efforts.

In a response to the Tunbridge officials last week, ECFiber said it is “pursuing every responsible avenue available to us to resolve this matter quickly.”

“As you can imagine, this matter involves many parties, insurance carriers and lawyers, and the facts and issues we are grappling with are complex, and working through this process takes significant focus,” ECFiber board chair F. X. Flinn wrote in the letter dated Aug. 13.

Last fall, Amber and Scott Hoyt, owners of the Hoyt Hill Farmstead in Tunbridge, found in their feed small pieces of wire, which seems to have been left in spools around their hay fields where a contractor was stringing fiber. 

When the farmers’ chopper mowed the field to harvest the hay, it apparently cut the wire into pieces and mixed it into the feed, which was consumed by as many as 70 cows. Three cows have died.

Although the Hoyts use devices equipped with magnets to detect bits of metal when cutting hay, the lashing wire used in telecom projects is a non-magnetic type of stainless steel, allowing it to pass through undetected.

The farmers had hoped an insurance claim would reimburse them for damages, including the three deceased cows and 500 tons of replaced feed. But they told VTDigger they recently learned their claim was denied because an insurance policy for a subcontractor who worked on a telecom project in the area had expired.

The Hoyts believe the wire was related to a broadband expansion project overseen by ECFiber, also known as the East Central Vermont Telecommunications District. The communications union district is working to expand broadband in the Upper Valley.

The district contracted with Brookfield-based Eustis Cable, which hired Crammer O’Connor’s Fiber Genesis LLC to install the new lines on the Hoyts’ property in fall 2019. The line is operated by ValleyNet.

Crammer O’Connor’s has since gone out of business. VTDigger has been unable to locate a representative for the former company.

According to a paralegal working on behalf of the Hoyts, Crammer O’Connor’s insurance carrier denied the Hoyts’ claim because its insurance lapsed amid the company’s work on their fields.

“The policy lapsed on Nov. 7 [2019] for non-payment and never continued after that,” said Donna McCann, of the law firm Cullenberg & Tensen.

The subcontractor visited the Hoyt property that year on Oct. 20 and 31, and on Nov. 6, 7 and 12, McCann said.

Scott Hoyt said the family expects to file suit against all involved parties sometime this fall.

In an interview on Wednesday, Flinn said the district “certainly had policies and standards in place that, on paper, meant this should never have happened,” he said.

“Our intent is to do a study of how this all happened so that we can learn from it and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.

Broadband expansion

In addition to calling for compensation for the Hoyts, the July 29 letter signed by the 12 Tunbridge officials — including members of the selectboard and planning commission, as well as the town clerk and town treasurer — asked ECFiber to recognize that the issue is “ongoing,” and stated concern about additional farms that may be unknowingly affected. 

“We also request this come as an opportunity to redesign best practices of the broadband expansion throughout the state and beyond,” the letter reads. 

Officials said they understand the need for broadband expansion, but were concerned about the future of dairy in the town. 

“We do not want to lose another dairy farm with a wonderful, young, hardworking family for a disastrous reason like wire (now ‘needles’) in their cows and feed,” the letter said. “And we certainly do not want to see young dairy farmers like the Hoyts suffer from somebody else’s mistake.”

Vermont recently received $250 million in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act that will be directed toward broadband expansion in the state, and additional funding is likely to come in from the federal infrastructure law. 

Christine Hallquist, who leads the new Vermont Community Broadband Board, said she learned of the Hoyts’ story on July 12, the same day that Gov. Phil Scott appointed her to the position. She called it a “terrible situation, just horrible.” 

Hallquist said there is a significant labor shortage in Vermont’s broadband industry, along with a materials shortage, which may be prompting companies to search for subcontractors.

“In the short time I’ve been here, I’ve already had meetings with the Department of Labor to talk about how we’re going to train folks and grow our own labor pool within the state of Vermont,” she said. “And part of that training has to address safety and housekeeping.”

“I believe 95% of people get up every day and want to do a good job,” she said. “But, you know, without leadership, things can fall into chaos.”

Contractors, she said, can come and go, and businesses aren’t as familiar with their practices as they are with their own employees. 

“It’s hard to tell the level of training they’ve had, the level of experience,” she said. “So yes, I’d call that a basic failure of contract management.”

Eustis Cable and ECFiber, she said, may be held responsible for the fact that Crammer O’Connor Fiber Genesis LLC did not have insurance for part of the time the company was working on the Hoyts’ land. She referred to her time working in the electric utility business, during which a person died. 

“When those things happen, I expect the families to go right up the chain,” Hallquist said. “It’s every person in the chain’s responsibility once something like that happens.”

Andrew Bauer, director of operations for Eustis Cable, said most industries in the state are currently experiencing labor shortages, including Eustis. 

“We’re always evaluating how we vet labor, be it contract or in-house,” he said. “We’re always learning. Certainly, I’ve never heard of any incidents like this in my 30-some-odd years of doing this work.”

In his response letter, Flinn, the chair of ECFiber, said the district learned of the Hoyts’ situation in May, and officials “immediately took action.” Flinn acknowledged that the organizations involved have given “limited comments to date.”

“You may have even interpreted that silence as inaction, defensiveness, or indifference, on ECFiber’s part — nothing could be further from the truth,” the letter reads. “ECFiber is investigating this matter, and we, along with ValleyNet, have done just as you suggest and engaged in discussions directly with the Hoyts’ attorney, and are pursuing every responsible avenue available to us to resolve this matter quickly.”

Continued ‘nightmare’

Meanwhile, the Hoyts say their anxiety persists. One cow, named Jeopardy, is pregnant, and Scott often struggles not to assume the worst when she arrives late from the pasture, trailing behind the other cows. 

The farm’s former vet, Tom Stuwe, who recently retired, said cows are often most susceptible to “hardware disease” — the ailments caused by ingesting wire — while calving, when wire that has settled within the animal’s body can move and cause harm.

“Does she have hardware and is it causing her discomfort? We don’t know,” Scott said. “She looks well-conditioned and happy as a dry cow should, but unfortunately so did [another cow named] I-Lax before she calved and died.”

The Hoyts have harvested hay from their fields again, though they aren’t completely sure the wire is gone. 

“Are we going to further add to this nightmare when we begin to feed this year’s haylage in the next month or so?” Scott said. 

The Hoyts have an outstanding balance with a Canadian company that provided them feed after they dumped their contaminated silage. Eustis Cable paid for the first two loads of feed, and ECFiber has offered to pay the remainder, but only if the Hoyts agreed to release them from all other liability, according to the Hoyts.

“That caused a little bit of pause on our end, and from our attorneys,” Scott said. “We’re not in a situation where we can release anybody right now of any responsibility.”

The Hoyts are concerned about possible future damages, as they’ve observed a decline in milk production. But Scott said he’s looking for accountability, and to ensure that the situation doesn’t repeat itself on other farms.

“We try to remain hopeful, along with others, that just maybe, some real change will occur so this kind of avoidable situation, and devastation, will not happen to anyone else,” Scott said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Tunbridge farmers’ insurance claim denied after cows ingested leftover telecom wire.

This article by Claire Potter was first published July 10 in the Valley News.

TUNBRIDGE — In December, Shona Sanford-Long visited Holstein Stock Farm just off of a scenic stretch of Route 110 that follows the First Branch of the White River as it winds through the valley’s pastures.

The farm was for sale, and she knew it could be exactly the location she needed to grow her new livestock business, Flying Dog Farm.

She was less certain she could pull together the money to actually buy the land. A few weeks later, she approached the Vermont Land Trust, which owns a conservation easement on a 60-acre tract of agricultural land on the property and was helping the former owners navigate the sale.

“It was just such a huge investment that I wasn’t able to do it on my own,” Sanford-Long said.

Sanford-Long was no farming neophyte. She grew up minutes away in South Royalton, where her parents have been growing crops and raising chickens at Luna Bleu Farm for about 30 years.

She and her parents started talking to others in the area about how they could transform the Tunbridge farm into a multifaceted community resource.

“We started thinking about a bigger community project there because it’s such an iconic farm and such a part of the agricultural history of the area,” Sanford-Long said.

Now, Sanford-Long is one of the women leading a new initiative on the Holstein Stock Farm that brings farming, solar energy, recreation and housing together on the property. The White River Land Collaborative, as the effort has been dubbed, envisions its community-based land ownership structure as a model that will help young farmers continue the region’s agricultural legacy.

“Thinking of this particular farm, it’s in such a central location: in the heart of Tunbridge and right on 110,” Sanford-Long said.

She and her mother, Suzanne Long, have been involved with Vermont Council on Rural Development’s regional initiative, Our 4-Town Future, which brought together hundreds of residents from South Royalton, Tunbridge, Sharon and Strafford to envision their community’s future. In 2019, the group identified conserving “the working landscape” and creating a “regional agricultural network” as one of three guiding goals.

In February this year, Shona Sanford-Long and Suzanne Long started talking with Fran Miller, a senior attorney at the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School, and Sarah Danly, a South Royalton resident who was also involved with the Our 4-Town Future initiative. They wanted to see if they could work together to buy the 200-acre property and start a multi-use, community project that would support local farmers.

“We knew that this is where we needed to go,” Sanford-Long said. “There were other things we were talking about and in the works, and this just really felt like a very solid project.”

The four women now make up the collaborative’s Community Project Team, with Miller and Danly as co-directors. In April, the group became an LLC but plans to soon file as a nonprofit. Danly said the collaborative is renting the farm from the land trust for $1,900 a month — enough to cover the interest and insurance on the property.

“Because of that (4-Town Future) community process, we already knew this was a priority of the community. Land access is a big thing to do, and Shona saw that it was a unique opportunity to help multiple farmers and provide land access,” Danly said.

At first, they thought that they would have to raise the money themselves, which would mean pulling together about $700,000 on short notice. Instead, they approached the land trust with a novel proposal.

Their pitch: If the land trust bought the property, then it could lease it to the collaborative and the farm could become a “community hub” for farmers and residents, where uses from grazing to hiking could exist side by side.

“We were talking with prospective buyers, with Shona, who is a young farmer. It’s hard to get into farm ownership when a farm is being sold. This farm is 200 acres,” said Donna Foster, Vermont Land Trust regional stewardship manager.

In May, the land trust agreed to the women’s proposal and paid the previous owners $650,000.

“We think it’s exciting for the region. It’s potentially a great model for other communities to follow and something we’re eager to support and be a part of,” Vermont Land Trust spokeswoman Abby White said.

Since late May, Sanford-Long has been grazing her cattle on the farm. Her sheep have dotted the hill that rises behind a cluster of barns that the Howe family built over a century ago. Two weeks ago, one of her sows gave birth to now-rapidly growing piglets.

“There are so many different functions that (the land) could fill, and we already had the momentum as a community,” Sanford-Long said. “Everything really aligned.”

Farming meets solar

Under the land collaborative setup, property will not solely be devoted to agriculture; Sanford-Long’s animals will share land with a planned solar array.

Norwich Solar Technologies CEO Jim Merriam said his company contributed an additional $70,000 to the purchase price for the farm that went directly to the previous owners. Although it is still navigating Vermont’s regulatory approval process, the company plans to install a solar array on a cleared slope on the property.

Sanford-Long said the solar array was “integral” to the collaborative’s vision for the land. In addition to the $70,000, the company will lease the land. Sanford-Long said those regular payments would contribute to keeping the collaborative financially viable and help the community further combat climate change.

Merriam said his company is still at least two years away from being able to build the net-metering array.

In June, Merriam met with the Tunbridge Selectboard to seek the “preferred siting” designation that he needs to move to the next phase of the project.

He said that the company would like to build a 2.2-megawatt array, which would require about 20 acres.

However, Merriam said the capacity of Green Mountain Power’s lines may preclude such a high-energy project. Even if it overcomes that physical hurdle, Norwich Solar would have to win a state auction to be one of about four 2.2 MW solar projects. Since 2009, Vermont has hosted standard-offer auctions to increase renewable energy generation. This year, the state is soliciting over 12 MW of renewable energy and is accepting bids.

“You compete on the value of the solar; the lowest per-kilowatt-hour wins,” said Merriam.

He said a 500kW project was a “fallback option.” The smaller option would occupy only about 5 acres.

Merriam said that either solar project would go through an extensive certificate of public good process and would have to be approved for environmental impact, aesthetics, feasibility, and effects on historical artifacts. All abutting landowners will be given the results of all studies conducted during the approval process 45 days before Norwich Solar makes its application.

“It’s a very open, public process with ample time in between each of those steps to allow anybody that has a concern to voice it,” Merriam told the selectboard.

The board approved the array for preferred siting, and next Norwich Solar will move to get state approval.

Merriam said it has been “delightful” working with the town. “There was no ‘not in my backyard.’ It was civic responsibility. … They saw how energy and this farm and all of these things would come together to preserve what they like about the town.”

From idea to reality

Sanford-Long hopes to be the first of many farmers and community members who will share use of the land. She said that farm viability and food affordability are often conflicting goals. When a farmer’s costs are lower, they are not under as much pressure to keep their prices high.

“Having a secure, long-term lease, leaving the farmer without a mortgage, helps a lot,” she said. 

Sanford-Long’s rent to the collaborative is on a sliding scale that takes into account her caretaking work. Sanford-Long is renting several pastures, barn space and part of the farmhouse where she and her husband live. Three employees of Luna Bleu live in other rented rooms in the house.

With time, other farmers may join them in the white farmhouse just across a covered bridge that spans the First Branch.

“Housing is such a huge shortage and need in this area,” Danly said. “It will be available to the farmers who are farming that area as well as to farmworkers who are working in the area.”

With time, Sanford-Long said, the collaborative may add processing equipment and cold storage that farmers could share, and open the upper story of the milking barn as a community space where farmers could host workshops.

Additionally, the public will be able to use a trail network with expansive views over the valley from the ridge above the farm.

Jenn Hayslett, a Tunbridge resident, is a board member of the Alliance for Vermont Communities, a local group committed to protecting forests and working farms. She is offering pro-bono consulting to the project and helped the collaborative launch its nascent fundraising campaign.

“So many organizations are really rooting for this. Many farms are changing hands, and we want to be able to use this as a model going forward for how young people can stay in farming,” Hayslett said. “My husband and I bought our place in 1988 as young folks, and it was very much of an agricultural town at that point. We really support this project as community members because we’re excited to see young folks who want to keep land in production in our community.”

Although the collaborative is only months old, it has gained several regional and statewide supporters. Its board of advisers includes representatives from the Vermont Council on Rural Development, Vital Communities, the Vermont Land Trust and the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont.

Miller said the collaborative hopes ultimately to buy the farm from the land trust by March 2023. Supporters will need to raise at least $650,000 in less than two years; otherwise, the land will be reappraised and the price could climb higher. If successful, they hope to expand the collaborative model to more farms.

Miller added that a central part of the collaborative’s mission is “changing the way that land is viewed — not just as a commodity that should be sold to the highest bidder, but as a precious resource and part of the ecological system that people are part of.”

Seeking collaborators

The collaborative will be talking to residents throughout the community to ensure that the farm is meeting real needs. That includes reaching out to Abenaki groups this summer through the Winter Center for Indigenous Traditions, an Upper Valley organization committed to preserving Indigenous culture.

“We want to take our time and do this really thoughtfully,” Danly said.

Once the chaos of the growing season is over, she said, the representatives of the collaborative will start one-on-one conversations with area farmers and residents in the fall and winter about possibilities for activities on the property.

Sanford-Long quickly rattled off some of the possibilities.

“Is there space for crops of some sort? Maple sugaring? Agroforestry?” she proposed. “What fits well together, and what are the best fits for all the different ecosystems on the land?”

She said fruit or nut trees could share pastures with her livestock. Working together, farmers could stock a farm store with a medley of products that would draw in more customers and share labor across enterprises.

“Livestock farming, and many types of farming, can be fairly isolating. There are few people, and much of my work is just me,” she said. “Having many people working on the property can help with collaboratively thinking through problems and finding creative ways of doing things.”

On Wednesday, Sanford-Long drove water to her cattle in one of the farm’s elevated fields with views of evergreen-cloaked mountains on four sides. With the season at its busiest, she hasn’t had the time to lay down water lines. Her two dogs, Yap and Ruger, came along in her Ford. 

Some of her auburn cows sauntered toward the trough with their calves.

“It’s been really nice — the amount of support there has been,” she said. “We weren’t sure how people would see it. People are excited.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Farming collaborative plan looks to keep land accessible, open.

TUNBRIDGE — On the first Friday of July, Amber Hoyt stood in the dairy barn she owns with her husband, Scott. She held a plastic ziplock bag with small, mangled pieces of stainless steel wire in her hand. 

Since December, the Hoyts have pulled the wire from the bodies of three cows that recently died after showing symptoms the farmers hadn’t seen before: sudden bloody noses, a high number of aborted calves, obvious signs of discomfort, a decline in milk production. 

Last fall, the Hoyts found the wire scattered throughout the cows’ feed, which they grew on their land and other fields they rent in the rolling hills of Tunbridge. As the weather cooled and the Hoyts transitioned the cows out of pasture, they began feeding the animals silage, which they make by layering chopped hay from several different fields in a bunker.

“We started finding a piece [of wire] here and there,” Amber said. “Then it turned into multiple pieces a day. That’s when we started reaching out to people.”

The wire, they say, is what’s known as lashing wire: a thin, stainless steel strand used in telecommunications projects. As efforts ramp up to expand broadband internet across the state, the wire is wrapped around groups of cables, functioning like a collection of zip ties to stabilize lines from one telephone pole to the next. 

The Hoyts began finding coils of lashing wire in locations around the farm. ECFiber, a communication district that serves the Upper Valley, had recently hired Brookfield-based Eustis Cable Enterprises for a project to expand broadband in Tunbridge, and Eustis had employed a subcontractor to install the lines that run through the Hoyts’ fields. 

The Hoyts believe the subcontractor left behind the spools in the field, and when the farmers mowed to harvest the feed, the self-propelled chopper plowed through the wire, cutting it into pieces and mixing it in.

In effect, according to the Hoyts’ telling, that created a collection of needles — hundreds, possibly thousands — in 500 tons of hay. 

Seeking relief

Hoyt Hill Farmstead, a small, certified organic dairy, includes about 60 milking cows and another 70 heifers. And they eat a lot of hay: in the winter, each cow can consume up to 100 pounds a day.

According to the Hoyts, replacing the 500 tons has presented both a logistical and financial challenge. The feed has to meet requirements for organic certification, and weather conditions have caused prices to surge. And it’s been difficult to dispose of the contaminated hay, which isn’t considered compost and was rejected by waste companies. It still sits fenced off on the Hoyts’ land.

Andrew Bauer, director of operations for Eustis, said the company has paid for three loads of feed for the Hoyts totaling 146 bales, which the Hoyts said they brought in from a feed company in Canada. The Hoyts have had to purchase another eight loads, and now owe more than $40,000 to the Canadian company. 

Although a Eustis investigation confirmed that the Hoyts found lashing wire in their feed, Bauer said the company hasn’t confirmed that the cows have been affected specifically by Eustis’ project.

Bauer said it’s possible Eustis and the subcontractor, Crammer O’Connor’s Fiber Genesis LLC, may not be responsible for harm to the Hoyt’s cows. 

“Whether they find additional materials, additional companies involved with this, I don’t know,” he said.

Lashing wire is housed in a machine, Bauer said, and the operator will occasionally change out the wire. It could have fallen out while being transported or fallen into some snow, he said.

But Donna McCann, a paralegal with the law firm Cullenberg & Tensen who is working on the Hoyts’ case, said she’s confident the wire is from the broadband installation carried out by ECFiber, Eustis and Fiber Genesis. 

“There was nothing else going on there,” she said. 

The Hoyts, seeking additional relief, filed a claim with Fiber Genesis in October, which is being processed by insurers for both Fiber Genesis and Eustis. 

Fiber Genesis, formerly based in Albany, New York, is no longer in business. VTDigger could not reach representatives from the former business for comment. 

ECFiber’s board chair, F. X. Flinn, said the district has a limited role to play while insurance companies review the claim. The district learned of the situation in late May, alerted its lawyer and insurance company, and met with Eustis, he said.

Beyond that, ECFiber is “not privy to any of the details,” Flinn said.

Bauer said Eustis may provide more support in the future.

“The feed that was provided was not something that was done because of an insurance company or anything else,” he said. “That was because we recognize that they’re dairy farmers, and they needed some immediate action. So I would just go as far to say that I’m sure if there was a need, that we would give consideration and see what we could do to assist.”

McCann said she’s now working with the third adjuster from Fiber Genesis’ insurance company. The Hoyts may consider legal action in the future. 

When the Hoyts filed the claim, they hadn’t lost any animals. Now three cows have died, and they’ve found wire in each necropsy. They’ve located wire in both their first and second cuts of hay, and believe as many as 70 cows have been exposed. 

The “kicker,” Scott said, is that the wire was recently found in a deceased cow named Wally, who had only been exposed to third-cut hay. 

“So it must have been in third cut, too,” he said. They’ve considered tilling and replanting all 105.5 contaminated acres, but that’s a costly endeavor they currently can’t afford. 

Hardware disease

Like most dairy farmers, the Hoyts have taken preventative measures to protect their cows from ingesting metal hardware, an ailment known as “hardware disease.”

Their chopper, operated by a custom feed producer from Washington, Vermont, is equipped with a magnet that shuts the vehicle off entirely when it detects metal. But stainless steel isn’t magnetic, and it passed through the chopper undetected. 

Hardware drops into the cow’s reticulum, at the front of a cow’s four-chambered stomach, near the esophagus, Stuwe said. 

The cows also are made to swallow magnets, which sit harmlessly at the bottom of their stomachs and keep accidentally ingested metal — such as chopped fencing wire — from causing internal problems. 

“But the bummer here is, it’s stainless steel wire,” said Tom Stuwe, the Hoyts’ veterinarian. In this case, the magnets are useless.

On that Friday in July, Amber and Scott stood in their dairy barn in front of a stall where a cow had died a week earlier. That cow had birthed a stillborn calf on a Tuesday and died the following Saturday. 

“She started coming to milk, and all of a sudden she just stopped eating and went downhill,” Scott said. “She died in her stall there.”

Another cow, Iva, stopped eating on Thanksgiving Day. 

“She was this huge cow,” Scott said. “Everybody knew her when they came to the barn. She was the one that we took to the fair and all that kind of stuff. She would eat anything you put in front of her, and then she wouldn’t eat grain, wheat, hay — and then she just went downhill from there.”

They lost another, Wally, in April. They bought Wally from Scott’s grandmother, Agnes Spaulding, who was still milking cows in her 80s. 

“Top Jersey in the barn,” Amber said, her voice strained through tears. 

Another cow, named K-Zip, stood in a nearby stall. Recently, she stopped eating, prompting the Hoyts to call Stuwe again. Amber hoped the cow’s stomach was twisted — an ailment with a solution — but Stuwe delivered bad news. She, too, showed symptoms of hardware disease.   

Stuwe performed a necropsy on the cow that died in June. A wire, he said, punched a hole through the reticulum.

“It didn’t go into the heart, like sometimes happens,” he said. “It had caused an overwhelming infection in the abdominal cavity, and that’s what killed the cow.”

“Even worse than the dead cows are, you know — it hurts to have this wire churning around in there,” he said. Cows that would normally produce 60 pounds of milk might be making 40. 

Milk production decreased last fall, they said. At their lowest point, they shipped 3,500 pounds of milk, produced in 48 hours; in the same period they usually ship 4,500. They typically expect that the cows will produce more milk in the fall, when they start eating more nutritious stored food. 

“That doesn’t pay the bills,” Amber said. 

Stuwe said it’s impossible to be sure that the decline in milk production is coming from hardware disease, though he said it’s likely. 

All of the cows that have been exposed to the wire are now only worth beef price, Scott said, which is around $500 per cow, down from the market value of a dairy cow at about $3,000.

When a cow dies, the Hoyts are not only losing milk production and the market value of the cow. They’re also losing valuable genetics. Amber has taken control of the genetics program since the couple bought the farm from Scott’s parents in 2018.

About five cows have also lost unborn calves — and lost more than one, Amber said. The animals have been aborting calves at various stages of pregnancy, a problem she said is “just not explicable other than hardware.” 

Wire can be particularly problematic when cows are giving birth, Stuwe said. They push with their diaphragm, causing wire to poke through the stomach wall. Meanwhile, their immune system is stressed while they’re calving, and they’re exposed to more bacteria, so infections can spread more easily. 

“There’s milk loss, there’s pregnancy loss, there’s obviously animal loss of the actual cows, there’s the loss of resale value,” Amber said. 

Not to mention, Scott added, the emotional toll of watching cows experience pain and death. Scott said he’s started taking medication for anxiety. He comes into the barn worried that he’ll find a dead animal, and when a cow comes back late from the pasture, it’s hard not to assume the worst. 

“Farming is stressful; we get it,” he said. “This has been beyond anything we could ever imagine.”

It’s hard to put a value on the Hoyts’ losses, Stuwe said. In 46 years of practice, most of the medical-legal questions he’s found himself in the middle of “land in a gray area,” with both the farmers and the third party sharing some responsibility.

This issue, he said, feels more clearcut.

Broadband expansion 

New legislation and federal funding has opened the door for broadband expansion in Vermont, prompting celebration on both sides of the political aisle. The pandemic illuminated the state’s dearth of internet accessibility as many Vermonters struggled to access school, work and health care online. 

As telecommunications companies attempt to meet the demand, many have been working with contractors. Some farther flung contractors may be less familiar with the needs of property owners with rural farmland. 

The Hoyts hope their situation might be a warning call to those companies, and the broadband districts that hire them. 

“All utility companies need to be more thoughtful and aware, because the reality is, we know that, with the federal stimulus, there’s a push for broadband — there’s a high demand for it,” Scott said. “Is the demand for quality labor there, too? And are they hiring crews that are knowledgeable and know about the side effects of what they can do?”

Bauer, with Eustis, said the company tries to hire locally as much as possible. The company employs about 250 people and has not experienced a labor shortage, he said, especially when working on EC Fiber projects. 

Their vetting process for subcontractors is standard, he said — “insurance requirements, making sure that they follow general protocols and things along that nature.”

Eustis has considered the situation a “heartbreaking matter,” Bauer said, noting many employees have ties to dairy farms. 

When the Hoyts began finding wire, they reached out to Clark Parmelee, with Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, who works in the farm division and specializes in public health and resource management. 

Parmelee said the agency is acting as an objective third party in the matter and has asked other nearby farmers if they had identified wire in their fields. 

One other farmer in Royalton told Parmelee that stainless steel wire had been caught in his mower but it didn’t cause major damage. He hasn’t heard from anyone else. 

Crews installing internet have left discarded materials at the base of telephone poles at his own home, Parmelee said. He’d like to think it was an isolated incident, but says more training may be warranted.

“I don’t think that’s that uncommon for those guys,” Parmelee said. “This crew that did it, I don’t think they understood the consequences of what they were doing.”

Breaking point

Standing in front of K-Zip, the latest cow to show symptoms of hardware disease, Amber held back tears.

“There’s no end in sight,” Scott said, to which Amber added, “Until all the cows that were exposed are gone, it’s always going to be in the back of our mind. Who’s going to get sick next?”

Asked whether the wire could pose an existential threat to the farm, Amber and Scott nodded.

“We’re gonna do our best not to let it be, but what is the breaking point?” Scott said, looking at Amber. “This is the third time I’ve seen her cry in my life.”

A collection of wire, ranging from neat, untouched coils to long, tangled pieces, to the shorter chunks they’ve found in their feed, to the pieces found during necropsies, now sits on a table in the barn.

As they wait for the claim to process, the Hoyts are nervously watching their animals. While they hope no others will show symptoms of serious internal injuries, they expect more will show signs of “hardware disease.” 

“I dread when I see an email from Amber,” McCann said. “I’m so afraid another cow has died.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Dairy farmers devastated after cows ingested wire leftover from telecom project.

Petitions seeking to break up unified school districts have produced mixed results at the ballot box.

Five towns have held special elections in recent weeks on whether to secede from their school districts. Three — Tunbridge, Newbury and Weybridge — decided to stay put. The other two, Ripton and Westminster, voted by wide margins to withdraw from their respective districts.

The result was expected in Westminster, where local school officials have adamantly opposed consolidation. On Jan. 5, townspeople voted 200 to 58 in favor of independence. 

The results will now trigger a vote in Athens and Grafton, which, along with Westminster, form the Windham Northeast Union Elementary School District. 

“The town had previously voted not to merge, then it was forcibly merged with two other towns that had voted not to merge. And so it’s no surprise it still doesn’t want to merge,” said David Major, a former Westminster school board chair and an organizer of the ballot initiative. 

In September, a split between two southern Vermont districts demonstrated that a little-known law could give communities a path to independence, if they could persuade all towns within a merged district to vote to approve secession. 

The State Board of Education, worried that this could undo the work of Act 46, has suggested to the Legislature that they revisit the matter.

“Two small towns which had formed a joint school district three years ago under the incentives of Act 46, came to the State Board in 2020 for permission to dissolve their joint district. Under provisions of statute that pre-date Act 46, the Board was obliged to approve the dissolution. Yet this dis-aggregation of school governance appears to be inconsistent with the Legislature’s purposes in Act 46,” State Board members wrote in their annual report to lawmakers.

It’s unknown what appetite lawmakers will have, in the midst of the pandemic, to return to deeply bitter debates around consolidation. But Rep. Kate Webb, D-Shelburne, the House Education Committee chair, said it is precisely the crisis — and the strain and chaos it has imposed on schools — that could spur legislators to act on the matter.

“There’s definitely conversation about it,” Webb said, though no legislative proposals have been floated yet. There is talk of a one-year moratorium on secession from merged school districts, she said. Lawmakers may also consider a requirement that a district seeking a divorce to demonstrate it can meet the goals of Act 46 on its own.

“What we will do, whether we do something or not, I don’t know,” she said.

In Tunbridge, the proposal to break up the two-town First Branch Unified School District failed by just nine votes – 135 voted to leave, 144 to stay. Kathy Galluzzo, the school board chair, said the newly minted union district had a rocky start, including failed budgets and a proposal to close the Tunbridge Central School outright. 

The petition to secede, she said, ironically landed at the same time as a merger committee finally put forward a more palatable path forward for the two communities — one in which Tunbridge would educate students in grades K to 4, and Chelsea would serve students in grades 5 to 8.

“I think timing was everything in this situation,” she said.

In Ripton, where a well-organized campaign has been underway for months, the vote Tuesday in favor of secession was resounding: 163 voters cast ballots to secede; 107 chose to stay. 

The effort to withdraw from the merged district is part of an attempt to save the town’s school. The Addison Central School District, to which Ripton belongs, is considering closing several elementary schools to cut costs in the face of declining enrollment.

“It’s actually about 100 more people than normally vote in recent years on town meeting,” said Ripton selectboard chair Laurie Cox. “You’d have to say it was a good turnout.”

The nearby Weybridge elementary school, which is also facing closure, will stay in the merged district. Residents there voted 190-109 to remain in Addison Central School District, according to unofficial results reported by the superintendent’s office Tuesday night. 

The remaining towns in Addison Central — Shoreham, Cornwall, Middlebury, Bridport, Salisbury and Weybridge — will now each vote on whether to allow Ripton to stand on its own.

It’s likely that geography played a role in the split vote in Addison Central, said Margaret MacLean, a former State Board of Education member who has been a leading organizer of anti-merger campaigns. The Weybridge elementary school is less than 4 miles from downtown Middlebury, where children from the school would likely be educated in the event of a closure. Ripton is more remote.

Other towns, including the Windham Southeast School District, will take up similar votes in the coming months. How many, and whether they can convince their neighbors to let them go, are all open questions. But MacLean expects to see petitions pop up as districts debate how and whether to close schools.

“You’re going to see people use this route to kind of assert their position. Because that’s the only thing open to them,” she said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Towns deliver mixed verdicts on seceding from unified school districts.

This story was written by Rose Terami of Tunbridge, a freshman studying virtually at Loyola University Maryland this fall, for VTDigger’s new platform for student journalism, the Underground Workshop.

On Sept. 20, several historical reenactors from the Tunbridge Fair’s “Antique Hill” exhibit gathered on the fairgrounds to commemorate the canceled event. In jeans and jackets instead of their usual period attire, they sat at picnic tables on the empty Antique Hill lawn, trading favorite stories from the fair in years past.

In a normal year, Antique Hill — which slopes upward from the rest of the fairgrounds — would be filled with fairgoers, the rhythmic hum of old machinery at work, and the crack of gunfire every hour from the Civil War soldiers on the lawn.

Emily Howe works in the colonial kitchen located in the “Log Cabin” building on the hill. “It’s woodsmoke and spice; it’s pickle juice; it’s coffee grounds,” she said of the odor that pervades the cabin during fairtime. “There’s a little cow smell that wanders up from the barns.” 

Each year, Howe is able to catch up with individuals who she may see only during the four-day fair each year. “99% of the hugs that I give and receive in the entire year happen at the fair,” she said.

Dawn Hancy, who demonstrates the drop spindle — a historical tool used to “twirl” sheep’s wool into yarn — makes a tradition of strolling the midway in costume every Sunday morning before clocking in on the hill, mixing with fairgoers from the 21st century. With a coffee and an “obscenely huge chocolate muffin” in hand, she sat on the metal bleachers overlooking the oxen-pulling arena.

“There’s an energy that’s still alive, even without the fair in town this year,” she said. “It feels like the land has held the community of the fair.”  

Antique Hill is best known for its period reenactments, which, in Hancy’s words, represent a “hodgepodge of historical time periods” that span from the early Colonial period to the turn of the century. 

Covid-19 isn’t the only thing that’s gotten in the fair’s way in the past. The event has been canceled twice before, once due to the Spanish Influenza in 1918 and again for a brief period during the Second World War. 

“This is supposed to be full of people and noise and smells,” said Sue Cain, who demonstrates textile crafts during the fair each year, spinning flax into linen thread and weaving on the circa 19th-century authentic Tunbridge loom.

In the colonial kitchen, head cook Eve Ermer usually enjoys narrating to an audience of visitors while she tends to a chicken slowly turning above hot coals in the hearth. In lieu of reenacting this year, Ermer took matters into her own hands and crafted a makeshift fire pit outdoors at her Tunbridge home, where she recreated several dishes that would have been made during a typical year at the fair.

 “It was weird to be cooking at a fire without a skirt [on],” she said, remembering the heavy period clothing that she would usually be donning during the fair. She also missed the “sound of the midway through the chimney” in the kitchen. 

Beyond the kitchen is a turn-of-the-century model general store exhibit where shopkeepers sell visitors penny candy, pickles, apples, homemade doughnuts, and wedges of sharp cheddar cheese. 

Out the door, the lawn of Antique Hill would normally bustle with activity: Civil War soldiers sitting around a campfire drinking out of tin mugs; spinners and fiber-artists working at their wheels; basket weavers turning pliable strips of bark into functional carriers; and men dressed in plaid shirts and overalls pressing cider and shaping logs into benches with draw-shave knives. 

In other years, the blacksmith shop demonstrates the centuries-old practice of creating practical items from solid iron ore. In the circa 1840 one-room schoolhouse, a schoolmarm gives lessons on “reading, writing, and rithmetic.” The barns offer even more antique treasures: old agricultural equipment, vehicles, and tools that represent a way of life long since forgotten by most people.

“There’s so much tradition here,” said Laura Craft, who demonstrates the carding and spinning of raw fleece into wool on Antique Hill. 

Across from the kitchen, Karla Klotz usually dips long wicks in hot wax to demonstrate the art of candle making. “[Reenacting] really connects us with the past,” she said, noting that young visitors to Antique Hill in particular seem receptive and curious to learn about history.

 Sue Cain usually works alongside Klotz. “We get people that come through who really have no clue what all of this is all about,” she said. She and other reenactors on Antique Hill have the opportunity to “teach others about how people used to live.” 

Whether it’s cider pressing, spinning wool, cooking, rug hooking, quilting, or making bobbin lace, Cain said visitors to the Log Cabin get to meet some “people who make a living with their hands.”

For many, Antique Hill provides some insight into the hardships as well as the blessings of a way of life void of many of the conveniences and luxuries we have access to today. Perhaps it’s the satisfaction of tending to a task from start to finish, or the simplicity of self-sufficiency that makes these periods of history so intriguing. 

Sue Cain’s words ring true for many of the reenactors on Antique Hill: “I was probably born in the wrong century.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: “There’s so much tradition here” : Giving thanks for the Tunbridge Fair.

This article by Alex Hanson was published by the Valley News on Sept. 19.

At the outset of Wednesday evening’s meeting of the Oxbow Unified Union School District board, Bradford resident Bud Haas made a few recommendations to board members that seemed to sum up the challenges the district has faced in getting a budget passed for the current school year.

Maybe, he suggested, the board should find a way to hold a Town Meeting-style floor vote. Perhaps the budget would pass if the board wrote up articles of agreement that would make rearranging grades or closing schools in the Bradford-Newbury district more difficult. The district needs to change its name, as voters don’t understand that the district budget, rather than just the Oxbow High School budget, is what they’re voting on. The board should make a statement that moving the Orange East Supervisory Union offices to the Copeland building in Bradford was a mistake, Haas said.

If these suggestions have anything in common, it’s that they are only tenuously related to the district’s proposed budget, which voters have now twice rejected. In conclusion, Haas noted ominously that the Vermont Board of Education had approved earlier that day the dissolution of the district formed by the southern Vermont towns of Readsboro and Halifax.

The only other district in Vermont that doesn’t have a budget, First Branch Unified School District, comprising Chelsea and Tunbridge, is also in Orange County and is facing some of the same issues. Costs and tax rates are up, district officials are working on plans to improve education and find efficiencies, and every step of the way the district must overcome skepticism about its existence, which was brought about under Act 46, Vermont’s 2015 school consolidation law.

But without budgets, both school districts are now facing a cash crunch and will struggle to provide needed programs and services, officials said. Both districts are in uncharted waters. Very seldom does a school district start a new fiscal year, which for both began July 1, without a budget, much less welcome students back after Labor Day without knowing whether it will have funding from the public.

“We’re beyond a rock and a hard place at this point,” said Danielle Corti, chair of the Oxbow district’s board, which oversees the elementary schools in Bradford and Newbury, Oxbow High School and River Bend Technical Center. Board members have begun to get out and talk to the public more, including an event in Newbury last Monday, which Corti said “is definitely where we need to be.”

At meetings Wednesday night, both districts approved new budget proposals which they hope will find favor with voters.

Oxbow’s proposed budget of just under $16.9 million cuts another $190,000 from the spending plan voters rejected Sept. 1 in a 273-184 vote. That’s an increase of less than $600,000 over last year’s budget. Much of the cut from the previous plan comes from continued federal funding for universal meals and a final accounting of food service debt for the prior year that showed a substantial reduction last spring.

If voters approve the budget, the homestead education tax rate in Bradford would increase by just under 9 cents, to $1.66 per $100 of assessed value. The Newbury homestead education tax rate would rise by a little over 4½ cents, to $1.61 per $100.

The Oxbow board has not yet set a voting date, but it will likely be in the week of Oct. 19 to 27.

First Branch board members voted to forward a budget of just under $6.9 million to voters next month. The new proposal is about $104,000 lower than the budget defeated in March. Residents voted at the end of June, 266-143, against a proposed $6.98 million spending plan.

The latest attempt is about $188,000 higher than last year’s spending, an increase of about 2.9%. The most recent cuts were attributable to staffing decisions made over the summer, said Jamie Kinnarney, superintendent of the White River Valley Supervisory Union.

Approving the budget would yield homestead tax rates of $1.64 per $100 in Chelsea and $1.58 in Tunbridge. That’s about 5.5 cents and 10 cents higher than last year, respectively.

Most Vermont residents pay their education property taxes as a percentage of income. In both the First Branch and Oxbow districts, that comes to around 2.7%.

Oxbow board members said the public was telling them that the proposed budget and tax rates were too high. But board members also said they felt residents need to hear from the board about not only the budget, which is typically a school district’s fundamental policy document, but also about the structure of the districts themselves. The pandemic has hampered officials’ ability to meet with voters and address their concerns.

Both districts ordinarily vote on their budgets at floor meetings, where attendees can ask questions and make amendments to the budget. And in both districts, officials have studied ways to hold an in-person meeting, even during the pandemic. First Branch officials took a look at the empty Tunbridge Fairgrounds, but ended up warning an Australian ballot vote.

“Not being able to have a discussion that night where we’re able to amend and change the budget, I think that’s … I don’t feel confident with an Australian ballot,” First Branch board Chair Kathy Galluzzo said in Wednesday’s meeting.

“I think as a board your hands are tied,” Kinnarney replied, “and I think you’ve got to trust that we’re going to inform voters and that Tunbridge and Chelsea residents want what’s best for their kids. And I think what’s best for their kids is ensuring we have a budget that makes certain we can provide them with a high-quality education.”

Both districts also have decisions to make about how their schools are structured.

First Branch has been considering since last winter a plan to group K-4 students at Tunbridge Central School and fifth- through eighth-grade students at Chelsea Public School. A restructuring committee convened by Kinnarney in July has recommended the district go ahead with those plans, which wouldn’t go into full effect until fall 2022, in the interest of improving educational options and managing costs, and board member Nick Zigelbaum said he felt the district should put that plan in front of residents before another budget vote.

“That’s the thing we need to have in place in order to get people to support this budget,” he said, suggesting the board put off a budget vote until November.

The restructuring committee intends to present its plans in virtual meetings in the coming weeks, but Kinnarney said the budget vote needed to happen sooner, because in the event of a third defeat, he would have to prepare a menu of cuts to put before the board.

Oxbow officials also have had to put off measures that would provide their consolidated district with some structure. A set of proposed articles of agreement were to be voted on in April, Corti said. Those articles would address some of the suggestions Haas made in Wednesday’s meeting, she noted, including setting up voting thresholds for rearranging grades or closing schools.

“All of that work has actually been done,” Corti said in an interview, but it had to take a back seat, first to the onset of the pandemic, then to the ongoing work of winning approval for the budget.

There are still residents who would rather dissolve the district, but that process doesn’t have anything to do with the budget, officials said. The towns would have to vote individually, as Readsboro and Halifax did. In the meantime, students are attending schools and receiving instruction, but without public support.

Kinnarney’s promise of budget cuts is an acknowledgement of the funding reality these districts will face if they can’t get a budget passed. The schools will limp along, and there will be financial consequences.

Under state law, if a school district doesn’t have a budget, it can set a tax rate of $1 per $100, and the state provides only about 25% of funding. A district can then borrow up to 87% of its previous year’s spending, which would allow it to keep the doors open, but would necessitate cuts in programs. And the borrowing would result in interest costs that voters would be on the hook for.

In the next month, officials in both districts will be reaching out to voters who are, Corti said, “inundated with information.” It isn’t clear how or whether they will break through.

“There is no right answer,” Corti said. “It’s just, I feel like, an impossible situation, and in the middle of this impossible situation are our students and staff” who are trying to just to keep school open in the middle of a pandemic.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.

Read the story on VTDigger here: School districts without budgets in place hope voters approve spending plans.

This article by Jordan Cuddemi was published by the Valley News on Sept. 10.

MONTPELIER — The Vermont Attorney General’s Office says it won’t prosecute the Vermont State Police troopers who fatally shot Jeremy Potwin following an armed standoff outside a mobile home on Gage Road in Tunbridge in May.

Trooper Neil Carey and Sgt. Matthew Tarricone acted reasonably when they fired shots at Potwin after he emerged from 920 Gage Road with his pregnant girlfriend, Calen Vaine, in front of him and with a semi-automatic handgun pointed at her head as he advanced toward police, Attorney General T.J. Donovan said in a news release on Tuesday morning.

Potwin also “held a large-caliber revolver which was pointed directly at members of the Tactical Services Unit” and ignored “repeated demands” to drop his weapons, the Attorney General’s Office said.

Potwin had fired several shots out of the house toward police in the hours preceding the fatal shooting.

Carey fired a single shot at Potwin but didn’t hit him, prosecutors said. Tarricone fired a single round and hit Potwin in the right shoulder-blade area, authorities said. 

“Based on the totality of the circumstances, it was reasonable for Troopers Carey and Tarricone to think that they, Ms. Vaine, and other members of law enforcement were in imminent danger of being killed or seriously harmed by Mr. Potwin,” Donovan wrote. “Accordingly, Troopers Carey and Tarricone’s decision to use deadly force to stop the threat was reasonable and justified.”

Troopers had arrived on the property that day to serve Potwin an arrest warrant for an alleged violation of probation. He also was wanted for questioning in other criminal cases, including three nearby fires in Tunbridge.

The Orange County State’s Attorney’s Office also reviewed the case and have declined to prosecute the troopers, the release states.

On Sunday, a fire destroyed the mobile home on the property where the shooting took place. Potwin lived nearby at 896 Gage Road.

Read the story on VTDigger here: AG: No charges against troopers in fatal Tunbridge shooting.