In the spring of 2016, a short, technical forestry bill quietly moved through the Vermont Legislature. It was titled H.857 – An Act Relating to Timber Harvesting, and its early drafts proposed little more than a voluntary pilot program for landowners to notify the Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation before cutting timber.

By June 7 of that same year, Governor Peter Shumlin had signed it into law as Act 171 (2016) – still carrying the same benign title. On paper, it looked like a routine housekeeping measure. In practice, the bill that reached the Governor’s desk no longer resembled the one that left the House. Through a Senate procedure known as a strike-all amendment, the entire text was replaced with a 37-page omnibus on forestry, land management, and town planning. Buried within that larger package were a few new sentences in Vermont’s land-use statutes—small insertions that would eventually underpin the state’s Vermont Conservation Design (VCD), a data-driven mapping system that now guides how every municipality plans for forests, wildlife, and development.

A quiet rewrite in committee

House Bill 857 began in February 2016 as a ten-page proposal from the House Committee on Natural Resources and Energy. It passed the House unchanged and went to the Senate with almost no public comment.

In early May, the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy, chaired by former Sen. Chris Bray, merged H.857 with several dormant forestry measures – H.851, 852, 855 and H.789. Legislative counsel Michael O’Grady drafted the new version. Committee agendas from that week list ANR Commissioner Michael Snyder, VNRC Forest Program Director Jamey Fidel, and Vermont Woodlands Association President Putnam Blodgett among the witnesses.

The committee adopted the strike-all amendment, and on May 19, (then) Sen. John Rodgers (D) moved to suspend the rules so the Senate could pass it immediately. The House concurred four days later. The entire process took less than two weeks.

Three small clauses that changed planning law

Tucked inside Sections 14–17 of the new bill were short amendments to 24 V.S.A. §§ 4302, 4303, 4348a, and 4382 – the statutes that define the goals of regional and municipal plans. They added a single directive:

“The plan shall indicate those areas that are important as forest blocks and habitat connectors and plan for land development in those areas so as to minimize forest fragmentation and promote forest health and ecological function.”

Those few words embedded the concept of forest integrity into every future town and regional plan adopted after January 1, 2018. They also created a new vocabulary – forest blocks and habitat connectors – that the state would soon have to map.

From wildlife corridors to statewide design

The timing coincided with years of research by the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department and conservation groups to model wildlife corridors – the travel routes that large mammals use to move between forests. After Act 171 passed, those corridor models became the foundation for a broader VCD initiative. In 2017, the legislature passed, Act 47. An act relating to the Commission on Act 250: the Next 50 Years, codifying wildlife corridors into Act 250 criteria.

Developed by the Agency of Natural Resources (ANR), the Vermont Land Trust, The Nature Conservancy, and University of Vermont scientists, VCD expanded the corridor concept into a full “ecological network.” It now maps core forest blocks, linkages, wetlands, headwaters, and climate-resilience areas statewide. The data feed into BioFinder, ANR’s online mapping tool used by town planners and developers.

For municipalities updating their plans, VCD became the only ready-made dataset capable of meeting Act 171’s new statutory requirement. Though the law never mentioned VCD by name, it effectively made the system the default scientific standard.

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The carrot and the stick

Act 171 does not force towns to adopt zoning bylaws. But towns without an approved plan lose eligibility for many state grants and have less influence under Act 250’s “conformance with local and regional plans” test. That financial and procedural leverage has pushed nearly every community to keep an updated plan – and, by extension, to include the new forest-block and habitat-connector language.

Regional planning commissions, guided by ANR and the Vermont Natural Resources Council, now assist towns in applying VCD layers to their maps. In practice, the requirement has become statewide.

Property-rights ripple effects

For most landowners, Act 171 didn’t change tax bills or ownership titles. The effects appear later, when mapped “forest blocks” or “connectors” intersect private parcels. Local planners may recommend keeping those areas in low-density use or restricting subdivisions that would “fragment” the canopy. Road or driveway permits can draw scrutiny, and some buyers view the designations as development constraints.

Legally, such limits fall under the town’s police power to regulate land use for the “health, safety, and welfare” of the community. As long as Legally, towns can regulate land use under their police power for the ‘health, safety, and welfare’ of the community. In court, those regulations aren’t considered takings — meaning the government hasn’t gone so far as to effectively seize the land — as long as an owner can still make some reasonable use of it, just not necessarily the use the owner wanted. For many residents, the sense of diminished control is real: they continue paying property taxes while new overlays quietly narrow the range of permissible uses.

An enduring transparency gap

What troubles many is less the science than the process. The public was presented timber harvesting, not a statewide ecological-planning framework. Vermont law allowed the strike-all substitution, and the bill’s title never had to change. Still, the absence of plain notice left citizens unaware that a few lines in the planning statutes would evolve into today’s Vermont Conservation Design.

Sen. Bray lost reelection in 2024, but some of the legislators involved have since moved on; Sen. John Rodgers (D) later became Lieutenant Governor John Rodgers (R). Governor Shumlin left office at the start of 2017, replaced by Phil Scott. Scott appointed Julie Moore, a civil-engineer-turned-environmental consultant from Stone Environmental, as his Agency of Natural Resources secretary. Moore had previously led Lake Champlain phosphorus-reduction work at ANR and earned public praise from the Vermont Natural Resources Council when she took the helm. Under her tenure, the agency has continued to expand the use of the Vermont Conservation Design and its mapping tools as the foundation for municipal and regional planning.

Eight years later

What began as a forestry housekeeping bill has grown into a structural component of Vermont’s land-use system. Act 171’s language now anchors the state’s Climate Resilience and Biodiversity Protection Act (Act 59 of 2023) and informs Act 250 reviews. Supporters call it a forward-looking model for ecological planning. Critics see a policy born in obscurity that continues to expand its reach onto private land.

Either way, a single sentence added to Vermont’s planning code in 2016 has redrawn how the state thinks about its forests — and about the rights of Vermonters to use their property.

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Dave Soulia | FYIVT

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