A Vermont business leader is calling out what she sees as a pattern of condescension and coded exclusion embedded in the state’s rural land-use policy, and she is naming names.
Loralee Tester, executive director of the Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce, published a commentary this month detailing how Vermont’s planning and development laws, framed as tools of environmental stewardship, are quietly squeezing out the rural families and communities they claim to protect.
Tester traces the current moment back to a meeting she attended roughly eighteen months ago. At the Vermont Solutions Summit in Burlington, hosted by the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, state Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, referred to Vermont’s “urban dwellers and the cave dwellers.” Tester, one of only a few Northeast Kingdom residents in the room, says the latter phrase was plainly directed at rural Vermonters. The comment drew almost no reaction from the crowd. To Tester, that silence was itself revealing.
“Too often, the people making policy in this state speak about rural communities with a mix of condescension, amusement and disbelief,” she writes. “We are treated as though we are difficult, unreasonable or simply in the way.”
That attitude, she argues, is not new. In 1970, Gov. Deane Davis helped push through Act 250, Vermont’s landmark land-use law, with warnings that the state needed protection from development that would line its roads with “fried-chicken shacks.” The phrase has circulated for decades as a kind of shorthand for anti-sprawl politics. Tester reads it differently. She argues the language revealed anxieties that went beyond aesthetics, pointing toward which kinds of people and places Vermont’s power structure considered undesirable.
That history matters now because Act 181, the 2024 overhaul of Vermont’s land-use framework, is being sold in similar terms. Supporters describe the legislation as a way to direct growth intelligently, protect biodiversity, and reinforce village centers. Tester does not dismiss those goals outright, but she pushes back hard on who absorbs the costs.
When these policies make it harder for a farm family to subdivide land so a son or daughter can build a modest home, she asks, who exactly is being protected? When a young worker cannot afford to stay in the rural town where they grew up, what principle has been served?
Tester’s critique sits within a broader national conversation about land-use regulation and equity. Zoning laws across American history have frequently been presented as neutral administrative tools, while functioning in practice to exclude certain residents from certain places. Vermont’s progressive identity has not insulated it from this pattern, she argues. The language of “protection” and “stewardship” can obscure outcomes that look, functionally, like displacement.
Her concern is pointed and specific. Rural Northeast Kingdom communities are not abstract policy objects. They are places where people have lived, farmed, and built institutions for generations, often with very little economic margin. When land-use rules tighten around those communities, the families with the fewest resources tend to lose access first.
What makes Tester’s piece striking is not just the policy argument but the social observation underneath it. She is describing a room full of decision-makers who did not react to a dismissive characterization of rural Vermonters because, to them, it did not register as dismissive. That kind of institutional blindness, she suggests, is how bad policy gets made with clean consciences.
The Northeast Kingdom has long been one of Vermont’s most economically stressed regions, with aging infrastructure, workforce shortages, and limited access to services. State policy that adds barriers to rural housing development hits those communities differently than it hits Burlington’s Old North End.
Vermont’s legislature and planning agencies have consistently framed Act 181 as reform aligned with both climate goals and housing needs. Tester is not the first critic to raise concerns about rural impacts, but she is pressing the question in unusually direct terms. She is asking whether protection, in this context, is a principle or a preference, and for whom those two things tend to coincide.
