“In pursuit of cheaper stuff, Vermonters need to be especially careful not to overload their winding roads and covered bridges, not to ruin their green rolling landscapes and not to empty out their small historic downtowns. More than a quarter of the state’s income comes from tourism, and nobody’s going to mail home a postcard of Wal-Mart.”

Six years and holding!  We’re still here and Walmart still is not.

Dear Friends of Responsible Land-use and Local Economies,

Many of us have had the pleasure of being quietly congratulated by some of our neighbors for the great job we are doing on behalf of the entire community. It’s time to put that goodwill to the test and ask for some participation in the form of monetary contributions. Even better would be pro bono representation by one of the sympathetic legal professionals in Franklin County. We love all those words of support, but right now, we need HELP!

What’s really at stake, you ask?

Disappearance of prime agricultural soils. The areas in St. Albans Town and Swanton that have been designated for large-scale retail development have some of the highest concentrations of prime agricultural soils in Vermont. The only other remaining area where concentrations are similar is around Bennington. Developers love to locate their projects on prime agricultural soils because they yield most readily to excavation. Of course, this means the permanent loss of the area to agriculture. It is shameful and outright folly to continue to allow the degradation of Vermont’s principal economic resource to satisfy the short-term interests of a few developers and unimaginative administrators. Our economic future lies in our ability to exploit the cache that Vermont has in quality food marketing. Which brings me to our second point:

Food Security. Recent events should serve as cautionary tales for anyone doubting the necessity of protecting local lands for their eventual use to feed local populations. Not only is the cost of transporting our food over hundreds or thousands of miles in danger of becoming cost-prohibitive due to fuel cost pressures; but we can no longer ignore the fact that, by freely outsourcing our food production and passing it through so many hands before it reaches our tables, we are courting disaster in terms of food safety and availability.

Traffic. If we allow these mushrooms of sprawl at the Interstate exits in Franklin County, we will see worse traffic problems than they have in Williston. Rte. 104 doesn’t have the capacity for this kind of load. It will turn a pretty nice rural drive into a polluted crawl through disappearing countryside. Bear in mind that, when the developer applied to the DRB to permit his large scale project at Exit 19, he maintained that his prime ag soils were “no longer farmable” due to the traffic! The DRB apparently agreed with this reasoning, as they issued the permit, despite our objections; but when the same argument had been raised by Hudak Farms in objecting to the Wal-mart proposal three-tenths of a mile from their organic farm, the DRB chose to ignore their plight and permit the project! V-Trans has raised serious concerns about the state of Rte. 104. even without considering the proposed development at Exit 19.

Aesthetics. Is this really what we want to be the gateway to Franklin County…a sea of concrete and big box retailers? How many tourists are going to find that attractive? Next Vermont grown and raised foods, tourism is our biggest business. Is the best future we can conceive of for Franklin County to be a retail quick-stop?

Degradation of the air, the watershed and natural environment in general.

Local Economy. The pressures that big box retailers can place on small local businesses will cause many to close with no opportunity for new local retailers to start-up in the community. The end result will be an overall decline in the tax base as increasing services are required to accommodate the “drive-through” traffic generated by national chains who are not invested in the community.

Please take this opportunity to contribute to the ongoing work we are doing to preserve a valuable way of life and the precious resources that we have here in Franklin County.

Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth
P.O. Box 750
St. Albans, Vermont 05478
(802) 324-4139