The Prophet of Act 250: How One Yes-Vote Became VT’s Loudest Critic

When Vermont passed Act 250 in 1970, it was celebrated as a landmark in environmental law — a framework to protect the Green Mountains from haphazard sprawl and preserve small-town character. Among the legislators who voted for it was a young lawmaker from Caledonia County named John McClaughry.

But over the following 55 years, McClaughry watched the law he helped create harden into bureaucracy. He became one of its most persistent critics—warning again and again that excessive land-use control would choke housing supply, drive up costs, and concentrate decision-making in Montpelier. Half a century later, Vermont faces exactly those outcomes: affordability at historic lows, housing starts stalled, and legislators acting surprised at a crisis one of Act 250’s own authors predicted from the start.

1975: The Warning — “The New Feudalism”

Five years after the vote, McClaughry published “The New Feudalism” in Environmental Law Journal. He argued that Vermont’s new land-use system, along with similar efforts nationwide, was quietly transforming the nature of property itself.

He called it “social property” — ownership conditioned on bureaucratic approval. “All property in land,” he wrote, “is not held in fee simple, but of a superior — that superior being the State.” To him, Act 250’s permit system had introduced a modern version of feudal tenure: landholders reduced to vassals, their rights dependent on the favor of regulatory lords.

The essay came during a fierce public backlash against Governor Thomas Salmon’s statewide land-use plan. By 1975, legislators had rejected it three times, and the idea of a “state zoning map” had become political poison. McClaughry viewed that revolt not as anti-environmentalism but as a reaffirmation of Vermont’s Jeffersonian streak — local control over distant authority.

“The freedom of the freeholder,” he warned, “is being replaced by the permission of the planner.” It was a striking reversal for a lawmaker who had voted yes only five years earlier.

1987: Lessons for Growth Managers

A decade later, as the state revisited growth management policy, McClaughry distilled his experience into a ten-point lecture to the Governor’s Commission on Growth Management at Lyndon State College. The tone was less polemic and more pragmatic — an effort to teach policymakers how to avoid the mistakes of the 1970s.

His first lesson was blunt: learn from history. Vermonters, he said, “saw the Salmon Land Use Plan as an assault on the right of freehold property ownership, dishonestly disguised in other clothing.”

Subsequent lessons built a coherent philosophy:

Private property is essential to both a free economy and a republican form of government.
Government may restrict property only to prevent harm to others — not to advance abstract goals.
When regulation removes value, the public should pay for what it takes.
Infrastructure investment — roads, sewers, schools — guides growth more effectively than decrees.
And most presciently, that housing shortages are the inevitable product of overregulation. When builders are blocked, he warned, “housing will be priced beyond the reach of many income groups,” forcing young families out and creating the very “affordable housing crisis” that future governments will then try to fix through subsidies and rent control.

Perhaps his most practical advice came near the end: “If there are to be land-use controls beyond the local level, the persons enforcing such controls ought to be accountable directly to the voters through election.”

He urged legislators to explore non-coercive methods — covenants, incentives, market tools — that align public purpose with private stewardship. “Any new scheme which threatens freehold property,” he predicted, “will meet the same buzz-saw of opposition as the Salmon Land Use Plan.”

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2017: The Climate Clause

By 2017, the state’s attention turned to Act 250’s 50th anniversary. The Vermont Natural Resources Council (VNRC) — the same group that had championed the original law — proposed a “Commission on Act 250: The Next 50 Years.” McClaughry, writing as vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute, saw history repeating itself.

In a commentary titled “Putting ‘Climate Change’ Into Act 250,” he accused VNRC of drafting legislation that would further expand state control, this time through carbon accounting. The proposed commission, he noted, guaranteed a seat for a VNRC representative — “an extraordinarily arrogant requirement,” he wrote, “simply writing itself onto the commission.”

The bill directed the panel to ensure that Act 250’s criteria “address the issue of climate change, including greenhouse gas emissions.” To McClaughry, that mandate echoed California’s Global Warming Solutions Act (sound familiar?), which regulators had used to shut down a rural bottling plant for lack of carbon offsets. “Tough luck, rural people,” he quipped.

His argument had evolved in tone but not in premise: noble rhetoric, he believed, still masked the same dynamic — centralization under moral pretext. Where 1970s reformers spoke of “sprawl,” their successors spoke of “climate,” but both, in his eyes, sought to convert ownership into permission.

A Half-Century of Consequence

Across five decades of essays, speeches, and testimony, McClaughry’s record forms a continuous warning: when government makes it harder to build and invest, the ripple effects reach every corner of the economy. He cautioned that layers of regulation would not only “price housing beyond the reach of many income groups,” but would also dampen job growth, hollow out rural enterprise, and turn Vermont’s economy into one sustained by rules instead of production.

That prediction reads less like philosophy and more like today’s headlines. Vermont now struggles with housing shortages, affordability crises, and a stagnant job market—all under the same legal structure he helped create and later warned against. He may never say “I told you so,” but his 50-year paper trail does. One of Act 250’s own framers has been describing the outcome in detail for half a century, and Montpelier, despite every commission and reform bill, still hasn’t wanted to listen.

As Montpelier continues to modernize this legislation — this time with climate criteria, housing exemptions, and regional jurisdiction on the table — McClaughry’s warning sounds familiar. “A society cannot be both free and centrally managed,” he wrote years ago, “even in the name of virtue.”

For a man who voted to create Act 250, then spent a lifetime chronicling its unintended consequences, that paradox has defined his public life — and, in many ways, the state’s.

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Dave Soulia | FYIVT

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