This Commentary is by Denise Smith, Executive Director of the Vermont Council on Rural Vermont (VCRD). VCRD has been serving the needs of Vermont’s rural communities for over 30 years, facilitating community-led, place based conversations to help communities envision their collective future.
Ask anyone how many towns there are in Vermont and you’ll hear a range: 251, 252, maybe 256 depending on whether you count unincorporated towns and gores. What doesn’t change is this crucial fact: nearly all of them rely on the labor of love of volunteers. Neighbors serve on selectboards, planning commissions, development review boards, nonprofit boards, and fire departments and emergency services.
At the same time, municipal revenues have remained constrained with competing priorities from increasing healthcare and infrastructure costs, natural disasters, and the impacts of declining grand lists. There is little room in municipal budgets, if any, to hire additional staff to manage the increasingly complex world of grants, compliance requirements, infrastructure financing, housing development, and economic revitalization. The result is that the towns with the least capacity are often the ones least able to compete for the very resources meant to help them thrive. Some towns have part-time staff. Some have a town administrator. Many have very little administrative capacity at all.
Vermont has long relied on regional planning commissions, regional development corporations, and statewide partners to provide technical assistance and economic development support. In recent years, a statewide pilot program demonstrated what is possible when multiple technical assistance providers are coordinated: stronger collaboration, better planning, and more flexible funding reaching communities. The challenges facing small towns are only growing. Federal resources are shrinking, while our regional partners remain chronically underfunded, and their capacity varies across the state.
And yet, in true Vermont fashion, there is a remarkable ecosystem of grassroots and statewide organizations that provide specialized support in community facilitation, historic building assessment, housing development expertise, infrastructure planning, leadership training, and more. Together, they form an intricate network, but without coordination and navigation support, communities often struggle to access it.
Last year, the Vermont Department of Housing and Community Development commissioned a report on rural technical assistance. The findings were clear: communities need navigation support to help them understand where to turn, a searchable clearinghouse of funding and providers, stronger coordination among technical assistance partners, leadership development opportunities, and flexible funding to test emerging ideas that do not fit neatly into existing programs.
This is not the moment to scale back investment. It is the moment to lean in.
At the Vermont Council on Rural Development, we are seeing urgent and emerging needs around wastewater and water infrastructure, the repurposing of closed schools for new community uses, rural housing development, multi-modal transportation and recreation, and downtown revitalization and small business growth.
People want to invest in Vermont. Vermont needs that investment. But communities must have the capacity to meet opportunity when it arrives.
Years ago, when I moved to St. Albans, storefronts were boarded up, our infrastructure was failing, and the downtown was in crisis. This past summer, a new restaurant was nominated for a James Beard Award, we have welcomed 3 new housing projects, and many young families are moving to our region. That transformation did not happen by accident. It happened because the community came together and had the support, staffing, and the technical resources to do the work. St. Albans is fortunate and will likely be seen as a winner in this story, but our smaller communities do not have what is needed to navigate the complexity of the systems, funding, or administrative burdens.
The question before us is simple: do we want rural Vermont to operate from scarcity or from abundance and possibility?
If we believe in the promise of Vermont then we must invest in navigation, coordination, and flexible funding. Our towns are resilient. They are innovative. They are ready. They simply need the tools to move forward.