Since 2022, Lebanon residents have faced whopping hikes in property taxes. The jumps came because residential property values had appreciated more than commercial ones. In addition, according to the city’s website, Lebanon reduced use of the rainy-day fund to balance the budget, a practice that had concealed Lebanon’s rising expenses from public view.
When the true costs of running the city landed on taxpayers, they revolted. In March 2026, they voted in a tax cap. They said “No.”
A month before, residents also protested the upzoning of North Lebanon. Many thought that the city was underestimating the costs of growth, and that they’d be left on the hook. In response, the City Council suspended action. Five months have now passed and the council remains silent. It hasn’t tackled the costs of Lebanon’s growth, the city’s future character or population limits. Is the council waiting for community resistance to weaken, so it can discreetly backslide to business-as-usual?
Business-as-usual promises enrichment from growth. Conventional wisdom says that new property tax revenues more than offset growing expenses. Conventional leaders calculate that cost increases will be proportional to population growth. Conventionally, developers finance a portion of these increases.
But here’s what convention misses: Every growing population eventually pushes past the existing infrastructure. Then, the city faces big outlays to meet the new demand, such as a larger fire station or a wider road. Property owners pay these bills. That’s why urban taxes typically exceed small town taxes. Time and time again, conventional fiscal policy fails. Growing budgets don’t balance.
Here’s a simple example: storm-water runoff. Nature provides this service for free to small villages. Open land absorbs rainwater and the village’s few paved roads shed water onto ample unsaturated soil. But in time, build-out overwhelms nature’s water-absorption system, and forces the city to install expensive underground drainage pipes.
Here’s a local example: sewage treatment. According to Jay Cairelli, Lebanon’s public works director, the city’s wastewater treatment plant can clean over 3 million gallons a day, and we currently use half its capacity. Demand from future development depends on what actually gets built, but Cairelli estimates that the likely build-out allowed under present zoning fits within the plant’s capacity. The city has not yet estimated future demand from upzoning North Lebanon. Over half of the proposed rezoned area sends wastewater to Lebanon; the northern section sends it to Hanover’s treatment plant.
Lebanon is already maxing out its landfill. According to Cairelli’s City Council reports, city and regional customers will fill the existing space within four years. The city wants to build a $15.3 million addition that’s projected to last another 19 years. What then? Dump our waste on another community? A growing population only hastens that day of reckoning.
Population growth also strains our water supply. Lebanon draws its water from the Mascoma River, fed by Mascoma Lake and the surrounding watershed. Robert Buras, water superintendent, explains that despite population growth, water use has declined since 2020, thanks to water conservation and efficiency improvements. We’ve never come close to exhausting our water supply, even during last year’s unprecedented drought.
Nevertheless, the city believes it prudent to secure a secondary water source. Mascoma Lake is already designated an impaired waterway under the federal Clean Water Act. Since 2022, algae blooms have increased, due to warming waters and increased nutrient-rich runoff.
According to the recent Mascoma Lake Watershed Management Plan, residential and commercial build-out throughout the watershed basin threatens water quality, especially when compounded by the effects of extreme weather events. We can expect a 10-40% increase in runoff just from heavier rainfalls. Combine this with more water-shedding pavement and buildings, along with more nutrient-rich fertilizer and potential sewage leaks, and Mascoma Lake’s water quality will continue to decline.
Lebanon’s leaders recognize that growth in surrounding towns, a force beyond our control, degrades our water quality. This, along with the likelihood of more droughts and growing demand from a growing population, has pushed the city to find a secondary water source. It’s weighing options: connect to other regional water supplies, or drill a well to access groundwater at the confluence of the Mascoma and Connecticut Rivers. Experts estimate this aquifer could be New England’s largest. So, Lebanon lucks out, for now, on potable water.
As a resident who depends on the Mascoma River for drinking water, I’m glad the city is proactively protecting us from a water crisis. I’m even tempted to dream of Lebanon’s prosperity. The city could capitalize on water, a commodity ever more valuable in an ever hotter and drier world. If we drill, baby, drill, we can enjoy the good life.
Then I wake up, distressed. We’re already living way beyond our means. Just consider: most of us rely on supermarkets. Supermarkets rely on agribusiness, and agribusiness is draining the Colorado River basin and sucking water from our southern neighbors. So, by participating in a global food chain, we export our water-footprint and deplete water in other regions.
Globally, we’re now water-bankrupt. This January, a UN report said that over two-thirds of major aquifers world-wide show long-term declines. Humanity is drawing out more ground water (our savings account) than surface water from rivers and lakes (our renewable income). We’re running out. And it’s not fixable.
Water’s not the only bankruptcy we’re facing. On July 30, humanity hits Earth Overshoot Day, the annual day on which we exhaust all the resources that Earth can regenerate that year. For the next five months, we’ll be running a deficit, stealing resources from future generations and spewing waste that Earth can’t absorb.
Back in 1970, when we hit overshoot on Dec. 30, we lived almost within our means. Since then, we’ve slid further and further into overshoot. Even if every one of us abstained from eating, drinking, expelling waste, heating homes, driving, etc., it would take over 20 years for Earth to replenish itself. We’ve irrevocably overshot Earth’s finite resources. That’s simple physics, simple math, simple ecology.
Earth Overshoot Day’s message is clear: We’ve got to adjust our economies for a future of climate disruption, resource scarcity, collapse of global supply chains, and reliance on local resources. The sooner we make this adjustment, the longer we’ll survive.
So, Earth Overshoot Day is the most important day of the year. It’s our road-to-Damascus moment; it’s our ecological reckoning; it’s the day we peel the scales from our eyes and change our ways. Business-as-usual is fatal. It’s time we think about survival.
What makes it so hard to relinquish business-as-usual? Business-as-usual makes us feel good; the alternative, not so much. So we have to disavow. Disavowal is willful cluelessness, self-gaslighting. It’s the worst kind of denial. It believes two incompatible ideas at the same time.
For example, we believe both the evidence of overshoot, and the public narrative that we can do business-as-usual. Disavowal thrives when we distract each other with quibbles; minimize our peril; fantasize salvation through technology; or submit to defeatism. Using a thousand self-deceptions, disavowal negates the disturbing thoughts and feelings that would flow from truly seeing our plight.
How might we counter disavowal? Well, we might take this concrete step: Commit to a study of how many people Lebanon, and the region, can support. What’s the region’s biocapacity — the cropland, grazing land, fisheries, forests and water that’s available for human use? How many people can sustainably live here?
This commitment to understand population limits grounds us in ecology. It counters human exceptionalism, that pernicious illusion that we exist outside the laws of nature. It forces us to tolerate the stress of life-limits that disavowal relentlessly evades.
To be sure, Lebanon has gotten many things right. Setting aside the 12A strip, the city has largely contained sprawl, concentrated build-outs in historic city centers, and protected green spaces. We’re still a desirable place to live. But now we’re at a crossroads. If we disavow ecological limits, we’ll ruin what’s left.
But hasn’t the New Hampshire Legislature prohibited consideration of population limits? Indeed, state mandates to increase housing density now override local zoning. According to Brodie Deshaies, Legislative Advocate at the NH Municipal Association, the Legislature has forgotten the wisdom of letting local officials and residents plan for their own communities.
However, he anticipates an eventual return to local control and encourages municipalities to use tools like master plans to assert their interests. The Lebanon Planning Board has started to revise the city’s master plan, a process open to public input. Let’s use our master plan to determine a right-sized population.
Development for growth is obsolete, and self-destructive. Development for survival is our only rational policy. Development for survival means transitioning to a steady-state economy that keeps money in the community. It means creative housing solutions for an economically-diverse population. It means feeding residents with local food. It means a population that fits, rather than destroys, the natural world.
Earth Overshoot Day, July 30, says to Lebanon, and the Upper Valley: Respect ecological limits. Let that be your loving legacy to posterity.
Miriam Voran practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy in West Lebanon and Montpelier and is on the clinical faculty at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. She lives in West Lebanon.