Growing awareness about a progressive Vermont land-use measure has sparked widespread populist backlash.
Act 181 was passed in 2024 by the Green Mountain State’s progressive supermajority, overcoming Governor Phil Scott’s veto. Falsely framed as a pro-housing bill, the stealth measure seeks to preserve natural resources at the expense of traditional development rights, draining wealth from property owners without compensating them a dime. Vermonters, incessantly pounded by regressive progressive taxation, are furious.
The U.S. Constitution and common law system favor the free ownership of land. What we understand as “owning a piece of land” is referred to in the law as “fee simple absolute,” and dates back many centuries in England and Europe. That right allows land interests to be split: The owner of the “fee” can sell partial rights to the land while retaining the underlying asset.
This includes life estates, which allow recipients to use the property until they die, and then the land reverts to the owner, and remainder interests, in which the owner of the fee uses the land until he dies, and then it is passed to others (rights of land inheritance). Other subservient land interests more commonly known include leases, subleases, and easements for things such as water lines, utility poles, underground gas lines, driveways, etc.
Conservationists often pay for land-use easements to prevent land development, such as through private land trusts, universities, or philanthropists who donate their land or development rights (using a “conservation easement”) to public ownership. When the government “takes” land for public use — for instance, when individuals refuse to sell for a roadway, railroad, or other large-scale public-benefit project — it invokes the power of “eminent domain.” However, eminent domain proceedings require the government to pay landowners the fair market value of the property seized, or of the subsidiary rights taken (i.e., a public right-of-way or other easement).
Act 181 is, in effect, what is often called a “regulatory taking.” Progressive legislators who seek to protect land for wildlife are unilaterally imposing a costly, burdensome process on many Vermont landowners that dramatically undermines land values. The new legislation imposes costs on landowners for attorneys, surveyors, environmental engineers, stormwater and traffic studies, and other services to obtain the requisite approvals for subdivision or driveway installation. This “takes” money from citizens’ pockets with zero compensation. It is a theft by a political eco-faction of Vermonters’ hard-earned assets.
For many Vermont property owners, selling a residential lot is essentially their retirement or emergency or savings account. Under Act 181, that reasonable property expectancy is wiped out so deer can leap to and fro (proponents’ justification for the law is to maintain “open corridors” for wildlife). If a landowner must pay $40,000 or more in costs to gain approval for a lot that sells for $30,000, that lot is effectively undevelopable: He has lost $30,000 with no compensation. It is government theft! It is also inequitable that the classification of properties subject to Act 181’s costly requirements imposes these burdens on one demographic of the state (those in the most rural areas) and not others.
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The landowner cannot escape by selling his entire property, either. After paying some of the highest property taxes in the country for decades (more theft?), a Vermont landowner or farmer might understandably sell up and move to a state where progressive legislators are not allowed to steal his intergenerational wealth. However, once Act 181 is implemented, his property values will decline, because buyers who would have paid a premium for a developable property would face the same Act 181 problem. The market value of all otherwise developable properties will decline accordingly — another wealth theft with no compensation. This loss applies to every Vermonter with development rights extinguished by Act 181, whether he wanted to develop a lot or not.
Vermonters are being taxed into poverty. Double-digit property tax increases are almost an annual guarantee. The state’s largest employer is its government bureaucracy. Vermont has the seventh highest income tax, health care costs, and property tax rates in the nation, and the second highest per-pupil school costs. That doesn’t stack up well when the Green Mountain State ranks 26th nationally for median income.
Many Vermonters have joined in opposition across party lines as they’ve learned what is in progressive store for their families through the latest Act 181 gimmick. This is not a tax on income but on capital, eroding the asset values of many low-income Vermonters.
Citizens must hold legislators accountable who inflict such dodgy schemes. In the name of the Marxist codeword “equity,” progressives impose oppressive policies designed to drive out native, low-income Vermonters and retirees and transform the lovely Green Mountain State into the next Martha’s Vineyard.
