Picture the morning of January 15, 2027. A newly seated legislature votes to strike Act 250 from Vermont law, and the governor signs. The district commissions pack up, the Land Use Review Board closes its files, and for the first time in more than half a century, development decisions return to the towns. No headlines of celebration follow—only a stunned silence broken by the sound of paper leaving filing cabinets.
Supporters call it catastrophe; builders call it long overdue. Either way, the effect would be immediate.
The myth and the record
For decades, advocates such as the Vermont Natural Resources Council have credited Act 250 with “helping shape the Vermont we love today — safeguarding our farms and forests from sprawl, protecting our natural resources, and helping our towns balance growth with community health and safety.” It’s a comforting line, but the numbers tell a harder truth.
In 1970 Vermont had roughly 8,000 to 9,000 farms covering about 1.7 million acres. By 2022 the count had fallen to 5,697 farms on 1.13 million acres — a loss of one-third of its farms and more than half a million acres of farmland. Forest cover rose from about 65 percent in the early 1970s to roughly 75 percent today, but that rebound came mostly from abandoned pastures returning to woods, not from planned conservation.
If Act 250’s purpose was to protect working farms, it failed. If it was meant to freeze the view, it worked perfectly.
The economic shape: beautiful stagnation
Vermont’s economy has spent a generation idling in neutral. Its GDP growth trails every other New England state. Private-sector employment is almost unchanged since the late 1990s, while government, education and health care now make up more than half of all payrolls. Median wages, when adjusted for the state’s cost of living, sit near the bottom of the region.
The law didn’t create global headwinds, but it amplified them. Every new housing or industrial project passed through the same gauntlet of overlapping reviews, adding years of delay and thousands in fees. Over time, that friction hardened into policy and policy into culture.
The human shape: a hollow center
The state is now the second-oldest in the nation. People in their twenties and thirties continue to leave; construction and manufacturing workers retire with no one behind them. Housing shortages, born partly of those same permitting bottlenecks, keep prices climbing. Vermont’s rental vacancy rate hovers near one percent — the lowest in the country.
When a builder must spend eighteen months and tens of thousands of dollars to gain permission for a four-unit project, the math stops working. So do many of the people who might have lived or worked there.
The social shape: the quiet unraveling
Economic paralysis seeps into daily life. Overdose deaths have reached record highs. Petty theft, car break-ins and “quality-of-life” crimes are up in towns that once left doors unlocked. Small businesses close not from competition but from emptiness — too few customers, too few workers.
Vermont still photographs beautifully, but the faces behind the scenery look tired. If this is the “Vermont we love,” it’s a love built on memory.
The environmental shape: forests, no farmers
“Prime agricultural soils” are treated as sacred ground in hearings, yet those soils are human creations. Two hundred years ago nearly the entire state was forest; farmers cleared it, manured it, and made it productive. What we now sanctify as “prime” was built by labor, not geology.
Ridgelines are equally misunderstood. Most towns already prohibit construction above 1,200 to +1,500 feet to prevent runoff and protect slopes. Act 250 rarely changed those outcomes — it only replicated them at a higher cost.
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Loss of oversight—or return of it
Repeal would not erase oversight; it would localize it. Vermont’s 251 municipalities already have zoning, flood-hazard and site-plan rules. They hold hearings, issue denials, and appeal decisions to Environmental Court. The only real change is who sits in the chair: neighbors who pay the same taxes and drive the same roads.
For decades, the law let advocacy groups challenge any project through one centralized process in Montpelier. Without Act 250, they would have to make their case town by town. That’s harder work—but that’s democracy. A right exercised locally instead of administratively.
The psychological shape: virtue as veto
Act 250 didn’t just regulate land; it rewired civic behavior. It taught generations of Vermonters that saying no was an act of virtue, and that property rights were a collective entitlement. People learned they could control a neighbor’s land without paying a dollar toward its taxes or upkeep.
Repeal would challenge that reflex. It would replace moral permission with responsibility—forcing communities to decide, in public, how much control they actually want.
The fiscal math
Running Act 250 isn’t cheap. State reports list annual application-fee revenue between $1.7 and $2.7 million, covering roughly 80 percent of costs. The remainder—about a million more—comes from the General Fund. Add salaries for roughly 60 employees, legal appeals, and digital archiving, and the total hovers around $3 to $5 million a year.
That’s only the public expense. Developers, towns and landowners collectively spend millions more navigating the process. The opportunity cost—projects never filed, housing never built—can’t be easily tallied.
If the repeal came
If 2027 brought repeal, applications for new housing and small commercial projects would surge. Tax bases would widen as new construction filled long-stagnant parcels. Towns would face real tests: more traffic, more water-sewer demand, more need for planning staff. Some would stumble; others would thrive. The difference would depend on local competence, not state dictates.
Environmental litigation wouldn’t vanish, but it would fragment—fifty small arguments instead of one endless statewide fight. And the conversation would finally shift from ideology to results: which towns manage growth well, and which simply say no out of habit.
The line that sums it up
If Act 250 truly “shaped the Vermont we love today,” then it shaped a state where the scenery thrives and the citizens struggle.
Repeal wouldn’t erase Vermont’s character; it would test whether that character still includes the freedom to build, work and live without asking permission from people who bear none of the cost.
For better or worse, that question will define the next fifty years just as surely as Act 250 defined the last.
(Oh, and if you’re picturing Route 7 lined with billboards, relax — the statewide ban’s been on the books since 1968 – Outdoor Advertising Act – and isn’t going anywhere.)
Dave Soulia | FYIVT
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