Cry, Vermont

You'll be amazed when you see Whitingham Farms for yourself with its lovely common greenery offering complete off-road privacy and rusticity to each homesite. The community parks, beaches, recreational and shopping areas, and covered bridges are all designed for the epitome in private use and landscape protection.

--Promotional brochure

Right now, Whitingham Farms is merely a 2,096-acre tract of hilly countryside in Windham County in the extreme southeastern corner of Vermont. There is little to be amazed about--except the beauty of the area. The air is clean and fresh; the lakes and streams are full of trout and bass. A sharp-eyed visitor might glimpse deer flashing through the woods, or a fox, raccoon, bobcat or woodchuck. Man's hand has not yet transformed the landscape. Just three of a projected 1,735 houses have been built, and most of the promised amenities are visible only on the pages of the glossy brochure.

Unfortunately, the brochure epitomizes the unfolding fate of unguarded land in Vermont--and much of the U.S. as well. If Whitingham Developer Clifford Jarvis sells 300 lots, he will recoup his initial investment of $1.5 million. He has a lot to do--building those covered bridges, for example, and draining a pond now full of beaver ("We'll have to kill them"). When his work is finished, says Jarvis, "I personally have no intention of staying in Vermont."

Costly Dump. Many Vermonters would not mind seeing him--and about 100 other developers in Windham County--leave tomorrow. True, the real estate men have helped to create a broadened tax base and a lot of construction activity that will doubtless benefit the state's economy. But they have also trapped the county's towns of Stratton, Wilmington, Dover, Winhall and Guilford in a vicious cycle that might make a hardened Yankee farmer weep.

The cycle began with the increase in leisure time. Many of the vacationers, hunters and skiers who motored up new highways to Windham County decided to buy second homes. They, in turn, attracted developers, who quickly snapped up big parcels of land. So far, subdividers have built 4,216 vacation houses; by 1974 they plan to construct another 5,000. Naturally, land prices and property taxes have soared. In 1967, the owner of a 55-acre wood lot in Guilford paid $24 in annual taxes; today he pays $585. As a result, some residents can no longer afford to live in Windham County, and have put their farms up for sale. As more developers buy them, the lovely open countryside becomes, in Vermont's Governor Deane C. Davis' words, "a man-made jungle."

Neighbor's Well. Who is to blame for the mess? First and most obvious targets are the developers. Most of them have never heard of even rudimentary site planning, except insofar as it means jamming as many houses as possible onto their tracts. Half-acre plots are not unusual. Another basic problem is sewage. Close beneath the new grass lawns is solid, impermeable bedrock. Instead of building expensive central sewage systems for their developments, the subdividers depend on much cheaper septic tanks for each house. Because the soil covering the bedrock is so shallow, the tanks overflow and wastes seep downhill, ending up in a neighbor's well, a stream or a lake. Vermont, alas, has few laws governing what developers can and cannot do.

Windham County's towns have also contributed to their own despoliation. Fiercely proud of their long Yankee tradition of personal freedom, none of them enacted stiff zoning, planning, or ecological restrictions to impose even a semblance of order on development. Without such laws, the towns have been pushovers for the developers, who blithely burden local residents with the expense of increased road maintenance, garbage disposal, schools, police and fire protection. So taxes rise, and the vicious cycle is repeated.

Big Money. Local residents now burn with fervor against developers. Even though Windham County has an alert regional-planning commission, the people have been curiously feckless in protecting their environment. One reason is that the developers seem to have hired most of the lawyers in the county, so that towns are hard-pressed to find legal help. Too, big money seems invulnerable. After the Dover planning and zoning boards spent a year carefully drawing up 28 amendments to the town's minimal zoning ordinances, only ten passed. Why? Says one citizen: "At least 75% of the people at the town meeting were representatives of the biggest developer in Dover. The selectmen felt they didn't have a chance."

Help is on the way. Spurred by two of Windham County's planning commissioners, Jack Veller and William H. Schmidt, Governor Davis last June became concerned about uncontrolled development. He has already established an environmental commission and an advisory team to tell him what can be done. In July, the Governor personally appealed to the president of International Paper Co. to stop an ill-planned development on some of its 23,000 acres in Stratton. I.P. embarrassedly complied. Most important, the Governor will ask the state legislature in January to enact a series of laws designed to halt disorderly development. Only if Vermont acts fast, he said in a recent speech, can it retain "the choice of controlling its own environmental fate."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.