TUNBRIDGE — Over the hubbub of music and corn dog vendors, Amanda Janoo addressed a standing crowd at the World’s Fair. She had no microphone, and her voice was fading after weeks on the campaign trail. But this conversation was too important to miss.

“OK, everybody, come on in,” bellowed event moderator and TikTok-famous farmer Morgan Gold, of Peacham, Vt. “We’re gonna get friendly!”

The dozens of listeners included farmers and landowners from across the state concerned with their communities’ economic sustainability — and political candidates hoping to earn those citizens’ votes in November. They shuffled inward, closer to each other and to where Gold and Janoo sat beneath a large banner with the words adopted by a movement: Rural Vermont Rising.

It’s been just three months since Gov. Phil Scott signed into law a partial rollback of Act 181, tossing large sections of the 2024 statute that overhauled Vermont’s approach to land use permitting. The bill repealed a provision requiring complex reviews for nearly all new development in areas labeled the state’s most sensitive ecosystems (called “Tier 3”) and another requiring them for some new roads and driveways. It also exempted some on-farm business ventures from such reviews.

In an unusual move, driven largely by advocacy from rural Vermonters who resented what they saw as restrictive, top-down reforms, the state’s Democrat-controlled Legislature ultimately reversed course on parts of its own initiative. Republican lawmakers and Scott — whose veto of Act 181 was overridden in 2024 — had long been opposed to the law.

That public backlash, which included a protest and critical testimony during the legislative session, increasingly flowed through the growing Rural Vermont Rising Facebook page. And the online forum — now touting roughly 18,000 members — has been far from dormant after its policy wins earlier this year.

That movement has become a broad forum for organizing around issues affecting rural communities. In particular, the state’s efforts to balance conservation with rural housing and economic development — and indeed the role working lands should play in the state’s conception of conservation — remain at the center of the group’s debate. So too does the state’s ability, or lack thereof, to attract young people and families through robust land-based industry and financially feasible development.

“We’ve spent a decade setting policy as if we’re under this immense growth pressure, when it’s actually the opposite,” said Neil Ryan, a Corinth beef farmer and consultant who has become one of Rural Vermont Rising’s most visible members. “We’re facing a demographic cliff.”

The movement has continued to grow, and its wide variety of participants have a correspondingly broad set of priorities under the umbrella of rural prosperity. This summer, its members have rallied against a regional land use plan and helped ready a sweeping manifesto of policy recommendations for lawmakers to take up in January.

Rep. Greg Burtt, R-Cabot, who was a primary advocate for repealing parts of Act 181 in the last legislative session and has become a celebrated figure for many in Rural Vermont Rising, said in an interview before Friday’s event that candidates across the political spectrum are urgently trying to connect with these newly engaged voters.

“What should our (land use) policies be in Vermont to create the culture and the lifestyle that we ultimately want?” he said. “I feel like everyone is having to answer that to some degree right now.”

Burtt faces a challenge in November from Democrat Eric Bach, whose platform includes reducing overregulation and “preserving rural Vermont for those who live there.”

Molly Gray, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, also spoke at Friday’s event, calling the movement “probably one of the most impactful modern-day grassroots movements in Vermont.” Republicans Scott and Lt. Gov. John Rodgers conducted similar conversations at the booth over the weekend.

The governor is “excited about the grassroots organization and putting party politics aside,” said Emma Shouldice, a spokesperson for Scott’s reelection campaign. “This could help shape policy, and help farmers, and help parts of Vermont truly be heard at the Statehouse.”

Ryan said he thought Friday’s event signaled promising seriousness from Democratic statewide candidates in their engagement with rural landowners. The GOP, including Scott and Rodgers, he said, has been “more consistently welcoming” of the movement since its inception.

The mix of crowds and lawmakers who had stopped by throughout the fair demonstrated the movement’s desire to push issue-based discussion rather than partisan politics, he added.

Janoo agreed.

“I think it’s important that we are not writing off this movement as, you know, some fringe, extremist group or something,” she said in an interview, “but as really the reflection of — I think — some pretty legitimate demands for a voice in policymaking.”

Rural Vermont Rising

In recent months, the movement has begun assembling a more formal leadership structure as it seeks to strengthen internal communication and build its advocacy capacity.

At least 14 local chapters have formed to facilitate in-person political conversations. The movement’s new steering committee, which was formed by a charter approved by members earlier this month, will have duties that include policy strategy and public communications.

The document says the movement will not endorse particular political parties or organizations, and candidates are largely prohibited from campaigning directly on the Facebook group, according to Colleen Geddis of Newark, Vt., the page’s founder.

“Our political diversity does make election season tricky,” Megan Durling, a fellow Newark resident who sits on the movement’s new steering committee, said in an email. “Many, no doubt, are counting on us to fail that test and to splinter along party lines.”

Some critics of Act 181 drew a bipartisan rebuke from Vermont’s legislative leadership over “reprehensible” and allegedly threatening online language this spring. Geddis, who questioned elements of the lawmakers’ statement, said she has always sought to root out such attacks on the Rural Vermont Rising page. She posts near-daily reminders to keep discussion civil in the forum, where friction over particular candidates, events or positions is not uncommon.

“We remain entirely committed to fostering a productive, passionate, and respectful community page where rural Vermonters can voice their very real concerns,” Geddis said in a text message.

Though some members feel their advocacy will have a clear impact on this fall’s election season, many agree that electoral politics are only a small part of long-term efforts to educate and activate the state’s rural public.

“We’re too young a movement to hold (electoral politics) as our primary goal,” said Durling. “Elections are not a goal in themselves, but a means to an end. There are other means.”

One central path to reform, she said, will be ensuring rural voices can fully take part in the legislative process.

Rural Vermont Rising is positioned to fill a gap in advocating for a better-balanced approach to land use policy and support for working lands, according to Mary White, who leads the Vermont Farm Bureau. White’s organization has advocated for agricultural interests since 1915 but has recently struggled to make farmers’ voices heard, she said. Some legislative leaders have been unreceptive to requests for individual testimony, she said, and it’s often been tough to convince the Farm Bureau’s member business owners that speaking to lawmakers is worthwhile.

“It’s been harder and harder year after year, because people felt like they weren’t being heard,” White said.

For her, Rural Vermont Rising has not only injected renewed energy into some of her organization’s central issues but also created a direct connection between lawmakers and a broad base of informed, active landowners. This kind of large-scale, “raw” advocacy that reaches Montpelier without a pass-through lobbying entity, she said, is difficult for policymakers to ignore.

For Ryan, the Corinth beef farmer, the movement has also reframed Vermont’s political conversation in recent months.

“Almost everyone in the state involved in politics is watching that Facebook page,” he said.

“By and large, when people are talking about these issues of rural Vermont and land use,” he added, “They’re evoking what emerged out of this movement.”

Land use is a difficult subject for Democrats in particular, according to Ryan, who believes they are experiencing something like “growing pains” as a party after the consensus over Act 181 shifted suddenly this spring. Candidates are being asked to prove their understanding of the topic — and their openness to listen to rural voices — to a new depth, he added.

“They’re unaccustomed to people asking substantive questions,” Ryan said, calling the new engagement “exciting and hopeful.”

Rep. Troy Headrick, a Burlington Progressive/Democrat-turned-Independent, shares Ryan’s concerns. In a widely discussed online essay aimed at Democrats, Headrick wrote last month about “the political cost of talking when we should be listening” on rural issues.

While it’s difficult to predict how such a movement might affect the November elections, he added in an interview that it’s clear to him Democrats need to lend more credence to rural voices than they have in the past.

Todd Heyman, a Hartland sheep farmer and lodging business owner who participates often in the Rural Vermont Rising forum, said he believes there was evidence of the movement’s impact in the August primaries, where two Upper Valley House Democrats lost their seats.

Such impacts are difficult to track. However, while this year’s primary turnout increased roughly 50% statewide from August 2024, the rural districts of the defeated Reps. Jim Masland, D-Thetford, and John Bartholomew, D-Hartland, shot up far more, by nearly 70% and about 135%, respectively.

Dylan Morse and John Tansey, who beat Bartholomew to win Democratic nominations to represent Hartland, Windsor and West Windsor in the House, each said in interviews that finding a better balance between land conservation and rural economic prosperity was a central legislative priority. Morse added that the issue factored into his decision to launch his campaign and that his engagement with local landowners on such reforms likely helped him win the primary. The Democrats will face Independent Rich Thomas in the general election for the two-seat district.

Two Rivers ‘tsunami’

Rather than coalescing around electoral politics as the general election approaches, many Rural Vermont Rising members have instead been galvanized in recent months by a bureaucratic land use planning process that’s underway on the state’s eastern side.

For some local landowners, the issue is tied to concerns over Act 181.

A regional development plan in the works at the Two Rivers-Ottauqueechee Regional Commission — which Rural Vermont Rising members say is both overly prescriptive and insulated from public input — has become central in the movement’s discourse. Heyman, one of the loudest voices on the issue, said Rural Vermont Rising’s platform has helped shine a light into a little-examined part of land use bureaucracy, creating an unprecedented level of interest.

Like all Vermont regional planning commissions, Two Rivers is tasked with creating a plan to guide future development and land use for the 30-town block it represents, which runs from Plymouth, Vt., north to Topsham, Vt., and from Hancock, Vt., east to Thetford.

Tony O’Meara, who chairs the Newbury Planning Commission and is the town’s appointed representative on the Two Rivers board, said this year has stood in stark contrast with previous iterations of the regional planning process. Previously, he said, board discussion and public comments had essentially rubber-stamped the staff’s suggested plans, but this year has brought a “tsunami” of public criticism.

“As an organization, they’re just not used to dealing with this level of informed pushback,” he said of Two Rivers’ staff in an interview.

O’Meara believes the organization has been “dismissive” of legitimate questions raised in public hearings and has inappropriately cut local voices out of meetings they had a right to attend. Two Rivers acknowledged earlier this year that the organization violated Vermont’s open meeting law in March by failing to allow appropriate public comment before a land use rules vote, but O’Meara said problematic efforts to shut down discussion of the regional plan have continued in the months since.

O’Meara also said the regional plan “crossed a line” by introducing a large number of its own policies to regulate future development, an argument Two Rivers Executive Director Peter Gregory firmly rejected in an interview. The board’s chair, Bill Emmons, did not respond to requests for comment.

The comprehensive regional plan, now in a more than 200-page draft form, includes maps categorizing swathes of land as more or less appropriate for different types of growth and places requirements on new development proposals that trigger the state’s land use review process.

That Two Rivers proposal remains squarely within accepted practices under state law, and is not out of step with other regional commissions, Gregory said. The planning process has also gone “well beyond any statutory minimums as far as public engagement,” he added, including meeting with each town during the planning process.

But the Vermont Land Use Review Board, which oversees land use policy statewide, has expressed real concern about both the plan’s content and how it was developed.

The state board said late last month that it questions whether “mandatory land use restrictions expressed throughout the plan infringe on constitutional property rights without adequate input from affected landowners.” It also said a number of the plan’s mandatory policies appeared overly restrictive, including a rule outlawing fossil fuel heating in some future buildings and another banning certain retail operations from ever opening in specific areas. Such rules, the body said, could be “at odds with removing barriers to housing development and rural enterprises.”

Two Rivers staff have said they are willing to consider some changes to the plan. But Gregory has argued that the Land Use Review Board’s response showed deep inconsistencies with the body’s approach to other regions’ plans.

At the very least, Two Rivers is an outlier when it comes to public interest in its hearings and planning steps — and the discourse has often been heated.

In one of several blog entries and social media posts on the subject, Ryan — who lives in the affected region — called the plan a “naked power grab” by the organization’s staff. Heyman said in an interview that the commission was “designed to be unaccountable.”

Heyman further argued that local residents have been rendered effectively powerless in the planning process, with statutory protections around community participation giving the public no concrete leverage. It’s not that the regional plan is illegal, he said — it’s adhering to an inherently undemocratic regulatory process.

“The irony is, we are entirely dependent on the unelected Land Use Review Board to save us from the unelected regional planning commission,” he said.

The Two Rivers plan remains subject to change or rejection by the state land use panel. But for the first time, a host of local landowners will watch the outcome closely and make their feelings known.

‘I just felt compelled’

Barbara Baumann, a Randolph resident who stopped by the Rural Vermont Rising booth — wearing the movement’s logo T-shirt — for much of Friday afternoon, said she never expected to become politically involved. Then, she found discussions of Act 181 online, and soon she was protesting the law in Montpelier.

“It’s never been my thing. It’s never been my style,” she said in an interview. “I just felt compelled from someplace deep inside to go.”

Baumann isn’t a farmer. But she nonetheless began listening “obsessively” to House Environment Committee hearings, becoming more and more convinced that the state’s conservation laws constituted overreach.

“I would like more people to understand what’s happening, and I would like more people that voted for this to look deep within themselves and understand the impact on Vermonters,” she said. “They really need to stop partisan politics, stop listening to their higher-ups, check their morals.”

Rural leaders are looking to convert the grassroots momentum they’ve built this year into lasting, substantive policy change.

Last week, a website called “Grow What’s Good Here” went live, and with it a working slate of policy recommendations “crowdsourced from rural Vermonters of all politics and the community of Rural Vermont Rising.”

The sweeping suggestions, which range from expanding the state’s local food purchasing incentives to changing the role of regional planning commissions, largely aim to support rural communities. One section of the site calls on lawmakers to publicly commit to nine rural policy priorities, including land-use deregulation measures for farms and working forests and major shifts in requirements and funding mechanisms for schools.

“Our work will continue regardless of who takes office in January,” wrote Durling, who helped develop some of the new proposals. That legislative involvement, she said, “is going to make for real change that recenters our state’s policies on sustaining the rural way of life that continues to serve as the substance — and not merely the appearance — of Vermont.”

Whether further organizational structures or funding are needed to bolster that effort, Ryan added, remains in question.

For Burtt, the Cabot Republican, Rural Vermont Rising’s strength — and indeed, its ability to survive — is inseparable from its bipartisan appeal. “It had nothing to do with politics, ultimately,” he said of the grassroots mobilization around land use this spring.

“I think so long as they focus on being nonpartisan, not advocating for individuals, and focusing on policy, on education and engagement,” he said of the movement, “I don’t see this ever going away.”

Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VtDigger. This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.