Now The Fun Begins: Vermont Lawmakers Gov Wrangle Over Flood Legislation

The Vermont Legislature is working on a bill that backers hope will limit the kind of flood destruction the Green Mountain State saw last year. 

But the bill's future is iffy. 

As VTDigger tells us, the Vermont Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee voted 5-0 last month on S.213, a bill that require a state permit to build in river corridors.  

Sounds simple, right? If we don't construct new buildings where rivers flood, we won't have new structures to see damage from said flood. 

North Branch of the Winooski River in downtown 
Montpelier, Vermont on July 10, 2023. Photo was
taken less than three hours before the river inundated
the downtown, causing many millions of dollars
in property damage. Now, the Vermont legislature
is working on ways to boost flood resiliency 
in the age of climate change. 

As always, though, it's more complicated than that. 

There's more than just construction at stake in the legislation. As VTDigger explains:

"It would require the state to manage for a net gain of wetland acreage, and it would install measures ti improve dam safety, such as strengthening oversight and setting up funding mechanisms for emergency and nonemergency dam maintenance and removal."

Then there's process. S.213 needs to go through more committees then get a vote in the entire Senate. Plus, reports are, Gov. Phil Scott is not a big fan of this legislation.   

The big sticking point will probably be opposition to how the bill would shift management of development near waterways from municipalities to the state. That's where Gov. Scott's distaste for the legislation comes up

Scott said the bill would shift "responsibilities for certain types of land use regulation from Vermont municipalities to (the Agency of Natural Resources) that will put Vermonters in jeopardy of violating laws they don't even know exist."

Scott likes local control, and I see his point. People naturally chafe under state and federal regulation, and seem to trust the local leaders they run into at the the grocery or hardware store. 

But do flood-prone Vermont cities and towns have the wherewithal to manage development in and near flood plains, on top of trying to recover from the disasters that befell them last summer, and to a lesser extent in December?

VTDigger also reports people in the ANR believe they don't have the bandwidth and personnel to take on all these new responsibilities. 

Plus, ANR officials worry about environmental justice. Roughly a third of manufactured home parts in the state have a least some land in floodplains. People without resources would have trouble affording and sifting through the permit process.

Then again, people without resources would have trouble affording and sifting through the process of experiencing and recovering from a flood. 

The bottom line is the backers of the legislation are right that we need to take bold action to build every defense we can against the inevitable next big flood, made ever more possible with climate change. 

But that bold action is daunting when faced with the scope of the problem. Just that one flood last summer damaged around 4,000 Vermont homes and about 800 businesses. We're still managing the after effects of that, and at the same time we need to carefully plan for the next flood or storm?

Vermonters can walk and chew gum at the same time, but they can't also juggle flaming chainsaws, write the next Great American Novel, cure cancer and send people to Mars while walking and chewing that gum. 

This wrangling is a cautionary tale for states in the rest of the United States that will need to scramble to make new rules to build resilience against the effects of climate change.  Depending on where you are, these risks include but are not limited to more intense hurricanes, sea level rise, worse heat waves, wildfires, pollution and more unpredictable severe weather events. 

Vermont has a reputation for a relative level of political civility.  Sure, we have plenty of spats among elected officials, but things aren't nearly as weird and fraught as in other states. Hi there, Florida and Texas! 

We'll probably work out some compromises with the proposed flood legislation. Or, if Scott vetoes the bill, the heavily Democratic legislature might override it.   

Whether or not this all gets resolved, we'll still have plenty more legislative battles in Vermont and pretty much everywhere else as we reckon what to do with climate change.