Vermont now has two big, overlapping policy pushes on the books.
On one side, the state has completed a new Housing Needs Assessment and set regional housing targets, expecting towns to accommodate substantial new residential development over the next decades.
On the other, Act 181 (aka. Act 250 2.0) has launched a complete overhaul of regional land use planning, including a new, standardized Future Land Use (FLU) map for every region, reviewed and approved by the state’s Land Use Review Board (LURB).
The maps will matter. They define categories like “Planned Growth,” “Enterprise,” “Rural General,” “Rural Agriculture & Forestry,” and “Rural Conservation.” Those categories will feed into a new, tiered Act 250 system and the state designation program that controls where development is streamlined and where it is not.
The result, in practice, looks like this: the state wants more housing, but it is also shrinking the map of where that housing is easiest to build.
Coming Soon To A Town Near You…
Pittsford is just one example, but it is a useful case study.
Under the Rutland Regional Planning Commission’s draft Act 181 map, more than 56% of Pittsford’s land area is now designated “Rural Conservation,” up from 19% in an earlier draft. Meanwhile, the share mapped as “Rural Agriculture & Forestry” falls from about 42% to just over 10%, after that category was redefined to follow “clusters of agricultural land cover” rather than farms enrolled in Vermont’s Current Use program.
The same map shows the town’s Route 7 commercial corridor being broken into smaller and more restrictive pieces, with the “Enterprise” category reduced where flood mapping, habitat layers, or adjacent residences are present.
Behind the scenes, the methodology is straightforward:
- State and regional planners overlay flood hazard zones, river corridors, forest blocks, wildlife corridors, steep slopes, and wetlands.
- If any of those statewide layers intersect a parcel, that land is a candidate for Rural Conservation.
- Map boundaries are then “snapped” to parcel lines to remove slivers and simplify shapes.
In new state training materials, “Rural Conservation” is defined as land “intended to be conserved,” often through regulations or by state or non-profit purchase of property rights.
On the ground, that can mean a familiar pattern: working farms and upland fields that have never flooded, and have been taxed for generations as full-value land, are now colored as conservation-priority on a state-aligned regional map—while still being taxed as if every development option remains open.
Public information sessions
The Rutland Regional Planning Commission will hold two public information sessions on the revised 2026 Rutland Regional Future Land Use Map before the first formal public hearing.
– Session 1: Wednesday, January 14, 2026, 12:00 p.m. – Microsoft Teams (Meeting ID: 249 058 715 733 23 Passcode: 2b43Xa2g)and in person at RRPC, Large Conference Room, 16 Evelyn Street, Rutland.
– Session 2: Thursday, January 15, 2026, 6:00 p.m. – Microsoft Teams (Meeting ID: 225 697 207 860 81 Passcode: Gg35vf3w)
The current draft regional Future Land Use Map can be viewed at: https://tinyurl.com/RutlandRegionalFLUMap.Land Use Review Board meeting:
The state Land Use Review Board, which oversees regional plans and future land use maps, is also holding its next regular meeting today at 1:30 p.m. at 10 Baldwin Street in Montpelier, with virtual and call-in options, on YouTube. Agendas and connection details are posted on the Board’s website; members of the public can attend and offer comment.
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The Housing Paradox
All of this lands at the same time as the state’s housing push.
The Housing Needs Assessment projects significant additional housing demand by 2030 and 2050 and provides regional targets to match. Regional planning commissions are required to “disaggregate” those regional targets into municipal-level numbers and write housing elements that describe how that housing might be accommodated. Municipal plans, in turn, are expected to “address housing needs and targets as identified by the regional planning commission.”
In other words, every town gets a share of the housing burden on paper.
But under the new FLU maps, not every town keeps the same share of the land base available to meet it. In places like Pittsford, more of the landscape is being mapped as land the state and its partners “intend to conserve” over time, even as housing targets grow. Other towns may see more of their area left in categories that are friendlier to growth.
If the map says a parcel is “intended to be conserved,” that changes expectations. It does not automatically block all development, but it changes how easily housing and other projects will move through Act 250, state agency review, and regional planning conversations.
An Honest Tax System
Right now, Vermont’s property tax and land use incentive systems are built around older assumptions. The big statewide tool, Current Use, reduces taxes on working farms and forests but does not reflect these new conservation designations or the state’s own declarations about which parcels it expects to see conserved in the long run.
If the state is going to draw a map that:
- pushes more land into “Rural Conservation,”
- narrows the areas where multi-unit and higher-density housing is encouraged, and
- makes it harder for some towns to expand their tax base while giving others more room,
then the tax system should stop pretending every acre is in the same position.
One logical policy response would be:
- Retire Current Use in its present form, which was not designed for this new mapped framework.
- Replace it with a statewide property tax classification system keyed directly to the Act 181 categories.
- Parcels mapped as Rural Conservation—land the state itself labels as “intended to be conserved”—would pay the lowest effective property tax rate.
- Parcels in Rural Agriculture & Forestry and Rural General would sit in the middle, reflecting both working uses and some development potential.
- Parcels in Planned Growth and Enterprise—where the state wants to see housing and commercial activity—would pay higher rates but also get streamlined permitting and infrastructure priority.
The principle is simple: if public policy is going to restrict future use and growth on a parcel in the name of a statewide goal, the cost of that decision should be shared more broadly, not carried quietly by the individual landowner and the town that loses out on future tax base.
A Starting Point, Not the Last Word
Act 181, the new regional maps, and the state’s long-term conservation and housing targets will shape Vermont’s landscape for decades. Pittsford’s draft map is one early example of how the pieces fit together. The question is no longer just “what does the map say,” but “who pays the price when the map changes.”
A tax system that acknowledges the state’s own land-use categories would not fix all of the underlying tensions. But it would at least make one thing honest: if Vermont is going to decide, from the top down, which parcels are for growth and which parcels are for conservation, the people bearing that burden should not be asked to pay as if nothing has changed.
Dave Soulia | FYIVT
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