Ashley LaRoche drove from her home in rural Concord to the Vermont Statehouse steps this week with something to say. The registered nurse, her combat veteran husband Alex, and their three children live on what she calls “29 acres of rocks” in the Northeast Kingdom, near the New Hampshire border. It is a hard life, she says, but a good one. Her son builds treehouses with his dad. Her 14-year-old daughter rides a quarter horse in the pasture. Her youngest grows basil for pesto.
Proposed changes to Vermont’s Act 250, the state’s foundational land use and development law, are putting that life in jeopardy, LaRoche says. She and dozens of other rural residents gathered at the Statehouse to demand lawmakers either postpone new Act 250 rules governing sensitive wildlife habitat, or repeal Act 181, the 2024 law that set those rules in motion.
“Because we are not rich and we work, this designation means that our property is effectively barred from further development, preventing us from building, growing or creating based on our dreams,” LaRoche told the crowd gathered on the Statehouse steps.
Act 181 passed two years ago over the objection of Gov. Phil Scott. Its intent was dual-directional: make it easier to build housing in already developed areas like cities and village centers, while making it harder to build in environmentally sensitive zones. Those zones include headwaters, steep slopes, wildlife habitat, and forests that are increasingly fragmented by development. Under draft rules currently being considered by state land use officials, even a single home built in such areas could trigger Act 250 review.
That prospect has rural residents furious. Protesters carried signs reading “Repeal Act 181: Let Vermonters Pass Down Their Land,” “Property Rights Are Not Up for Negotiation,” and “Leave Our Land Alone.” The anger in the crowd was barely restrained. When lawmakers mentioned a bill to delay implementation of the rules, people shouted back a single word: “REPEAL.” When Sen. Anne Watson, a Democrat from Montpelier who chairs the Natural Resources and Energy Committee, addressed the crowd, she was met with boos.
Not every moment was grim. The crowd broke into laughter when Lucy, a goat from Wheelock, urinated on the Statehouse steps.
But the stakes are real for families like the LaRoches. They feel, as Ashley put it, “frozen in place,” uncertain whether they can ever build another structure on their own land. That sentiment cuts to the heart of a deeper tension in Vermont between environmental preservation and rural landowners who have lived on and worked the land for generations. These are not developers or corporate interests. Many are working-class families who bought or inherited land as a form of long-term security.
Lawmakers have been absorbing that frustration for weeks. Watson’s committee responded with S.325, a bill designed to delay many of the new rules rather than repeal them. Under S.325, the designation of sensitive ecological areas known as Tier 3, originally scheduled for adoption this year, would be pushed back until June 2028. The controversial “road rule,” which would require Act 250 review for any new road longer than 800 feet, would not take effect until 2030. The bill would also extend Act 250 exemptions for most new housing construction.
For rural advocates, though, delay is not enough. They argue that any version of the rules, implemented sooner or later, will tie their hands and diminish the value of land they have scraped and saved to hold onto.
The divide here maps onto something larger happening across the rural Northeast, where environmental policy written in and for urban and suburban contexts often lands differently on the ground. The goals of protecting wildlife corridors and forest connectivity are legitimate. The question is whether those goals can be pursued in ways that do not foreclose the futures of people who are already living close to the land, on the margins of economic security, with very little room for error.
LaRoche did not come to Montpelier to fight environmentalism. She came to fight for her daughter’s horse pasture, her son’s treehouse, and whatever building her family might one day need to put up on those 29 rocky acres. For her, that is not a political abstraction. It is her life.
