From the Director, June 2025: Harnessing Planning Opportunities Created by Four Recent Statutes
- Details
Integrating actions required by recently-passed statutes related to Act 250 and regional planning, housing, flood safety, and conservation creates the opportunity to make progress towards housing and development goals in climate adapted and resilient communities. Taken together the statutes modernize Vermont’s approach to regional and municipal planning to more uniformly and specifically designate areas suitable for development, encourage the construction of more housing where supported by infrastructure, establish the creation of a statewide land conservation plan, transfer regulation of river corridors to the state, prioritize the conservation of wetlands, improve planning for dam safety, and examine the efficacy of the current approach to flood hazard regulation.
At first glance these may seem like somewhat disparate policy objectives, but viewed together they support the type of comprehensive planning that regional planning commissions and municipalities do already. Brought together at the regional scale, in collaboration with planning at the municipal scale, the opportunity exists to:
- More intentionally plan for future land use that integrates conservation, flood safety, compact settlement and housing, while also identifying gaps and needs for infrastructure investment to make adaptive and resilient community development possible;
- Establish a more robust correlation between conservation, development, and infrastructure needs that transcends municipal boundaries; and
- Create a statewide land use map by stitching together the new regional future land use maps, which can both guide development and tell the story of opportunities and barriers to making a more adaptive and resilient Vermont possible.
What are these statutes?
- Act 181 overhauls Vermont’s planning framework for coordinating state, regional, and municipal land use. It will better enable the mapping of future growth areas that can take into account the evolution of historic compact settlements up and away from flood hazard risks, plan for new neighborhoods and growth centers, and protect large forest blocks to better protect headwaters and buffer runoff.
- Flood Safety Act will move regulation of development in high-hazard river corridors to the state, establish a net-gain wetlands policy, improve dam safety through consolidated oversight, dam owner maintenance requirements, and investment in strategic removal of dams, and study how flood hazard policy might be more effectively administered.
- Community Resilience and Biodiversity Protection Act is intended to protect the ecological functions of our landscapes with the ambitious goals of conserving 30% of Vermont's landscape by 2030 and 50% by 2050. A draft conservation inventory is complete, and the development of a Comprehensive Conservation Plan will soon be underway to be presented to the legislature in December, 2025.
- Vermont HOME Act amends the Planning and Development statute, Act 250, and other laws to enable new opportunities for housing development within state, regional, and local planning and development regulations.
The WRC is in the process of adopting a regional plan update under the pre-Act 181 rules, with the goal of a Commission vote at its meeting on July 29th. However, beginning this autumn, we’ll begin the process of creating an Act 181 compliant future land use map and regional plan by the end of December 2026, and this will involve working with all of the region’s towns. We’ll work with them to explore development strategies that support growth and conservation in places and ways that promote climate adaptation and resilience for this and future generations of Vermonters.
