Vermont has a habit of passing grand, high-minded laws before anyone’s sure how they’ll actually work. It’s like breaking ground on a massive construction project before you’ve even drawn up the blueprints. The result isn’t progress — it’s chaos, confusion, and a whole lot of people left standing around waiting for someone to figure out what happens next.

Building the Dream Before Pouring the Footings

Take your pick: the Clean Water Act, the Three-Acre Rule, the Global Warming Solutions Act, or the Clean Heat Standard. Every one of them was rolled out with fanfare — bold promises, urgent rhetoric, and the moral conviction that something big was being done to save Vermont’s future.

And every one of them, in practice, has turned into a golden albatross.

They’re massive in scope, beautiful in aspiration, and crushing in weight. These laws touch every corner of Vermont life — farmers, builders, homeowners, renters, town clerks, you name it. They raise costs across the board, from heating fuel to housing to basic compliance paperwork. And yet, years later, the people who passed them still can’t tell you exactly what they’ll cost, how they’ll be enforced, or when they’ll be finished.

The Clean Water Act and the Three-Acre Rule

Start with the 2015 Clean Water Act, Vermont’s answer to federal pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Conservation Law Foundation to clean up Lake Champlain.

The idea was noble: get a handle on stormwater runoff and stop phosphorus pollution. But the state didn’t have a plan ready — just a mandate. That law eventually spawned the Three-Acre Rule, which requires any property with three or more acres of impervious surface to install expensive new stormwater controls.

The rule took years to finalize and even longer to explain. Some property owners still don’t know whether they’re covered, what they’ll have to build, or what it’ll cost. Towns, small businesses, and churches are left in limbo, trying to plan around rules that keep shifting.

The net effect? Nobody’s sure what to do — but everyone knows they’ll be paying for it.

The Global Warming Solutions Act

Then came the Global Warming Solutions Act in 2020 — another huge, shining monument to good intentions. It sets strict greenhouse-gas reduction targets and gives citizens the right to sue the state if it doesn’t meet them.

But it never spelled out how those reductions would actually happen. No timeline, no cost estimate, no mechanism. Just a legal promise that someone, somehow, would figure it out later.

Four years on, the Climate Council still meets, studies, and writes reports, while Vermonters brace for higher energy prices and new mandates that haven’t yet been defined. It’s a blueprint that never got drawn — yet construction began anyway.

The Clean Heat Standard

The Clean Heat Standard followed the same pattern. It aims to cut fossil-fuel use by requiring heating-fuel dealers to buy credits or fund weatherization projects. On paper, it’s supposed to help low-income households. In practice, it’s so vague and convoluted that even lawmakers don’t seem sure who pays or how much.

Governor Phil Scott vetoed it, warning that it could raise fuel prices and hurt rural Vermonters who rely on oil, propane, and wood. The Legislature came back, tried again, and still couldn’t explain how it would work — or who would enforce it.

Meanwhile, homeowners are staring at their fuel bills, wondering when the next “climate fee” will drop.

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The Common Thread: No Timeline, No Clarity

Each of these laws shares the same flaw: they were enacted before they were engineered.

The plans, costs, and enforcement details were supposed to come later — after the applause. That “later” has stretched into years, leaving property owners, towns, and businesses hanging.

No one disputes the goals — clean water, stable climate, efficient energy. But goals without timelines, rules, or budgets aren’t governance. They’re guesswork dressed up as virtue.

And while Montpelier keeps holding press conferences about “bold action,” the real burden lands on the people who can’t pass the cost on to anyone else: the taxpayers, the small builders, the farmers, the families who heat with oil and keep the lights on one utility bill at a time.

The Cost of Good Intentions

For the average Vermonter, these laws translate to higher costs of living — higher rents, higher energy bills, higher taxes — with no clear sense of when the benefits will appear. It’s one thing to pay for a bridge that gets built; it’s another to keep paying for blueprints that never materialize.

It’s not corruption — it’s unpreparedness. A government run by people who mean well but legislate by emotion instead of logistics. They pass laws the way some folks buy gym memberships in January: full of enthusiasm, short on follow-through.

Time to Bring the Plans to the Site

If lawmakers want to regain credibility, they need to stop breaking ground before they’ve drawn the plans. Every major law should come with an implementation schedule, cost estimate, and agency readiness review before it ever hits the governor’s desk.

Vermont doesn’t lack passion or purpose. It lacks planning.

Until Montpelier learns to measure twice and cut once, Vermonters will keep footing the bill for projects that were never ready to build.

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Dave Soulia | FYIVT

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