10/28 Underway: A Statewide Democratic Engagement Plan for Vermonters to Define Land Use Policy
The Vermont Council on Rural Development and the Vermont Association of Conservation Districts have been legislatively mandated by Act 152, Section 9, as leaders in developing a new statewide engagement plan that’s going to be reported to the legislature on or before January 15, 2027.
The statutory purpose of this engagement is to gather statewide input from Vermonters to inform the General Assembly on:
the risk of losing working lands, both agricultural and forestland, and the causes of those risks, and critical natural resources not already well protected by current land use policy, permitting programs, or other regulatory tools, including (agricultural) soils, rare natural communities, forest blocks, habitat connectors of statewide significance, and headwaters; and
equitable, efficient, and effective regulatory or nonregulatory tools to protect these working lands and critical natural resources and the barriers to land stewardship.
Rural Vermont submitted initial design recommendations for this engagement process that still needs to be funded and implemented - once planned. Our recommendations largely reflect Rural Vermont’s principles and values of our work as also laid out in our vision and mission. The procedural recommendations do not include substantive policy proposals, but are about the engagement process itself - as the policy solutions will be crafted by the grassroots during the engagement. Here is a summary of our recommendations - please click into the .pdf below to review it in all details if there’s time and interest. We welcome your feedback and suggestions and are planning to follow-up on these initial design recommendations with VACD and VCRD based on your input! Please use the form at the bottom to share your input with us.
If you want to share your ideas independently from Rural Vermont with VACD and VCRD directly - use their discussion guide here.
The upcoming engagement plan should:
Apply a food sovereignty based approach; and to be inclusive of and centered on the needs and challenges and dreams of the people and communities who live on that land.
Rebuild trust and right wrongs by acknowledging in communications thoroughly the continued marginalization of people, and their exclusion from policy decision making on land use in recent years.
Enable and facilitate Vermonters, in particular the most impacted stakeholders, in meaningfully cocreating land use as well as programmatic policies affecting them, actualizing their food sovereignty.
Gather and translate stories of relevant impacted community members about needs and barriers to, and opportunities for, working lands’ access, tenure, and community well being.
Compensate any private person engaging and informing this work, the grassroots, for their contribution.
Support this work to be a collaborative, horizontally led effort in collaboration with a broad network by including and expanding the legislatively mandated partners.