Revived Hinesburg development raises downstream concerns

In Hinesburg, a major development proposal that failed to win an Act 250 permit last spring due to its anticipated impact on the local floodplain could soon move forward after modifications. Critics of the project say that the handful of Charlotte families who live on the banks of the LaPlatte River may have cause for apprehension.

Last year, municipal officials in Hinesburg threw their support behind developer Brett Grabowski’s plan to build 73 homes, alongside new office and retail space, in the “village growth area” beside Route 116, behind Kinney Drugs. But the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources objected on the basis that adding fill near the Patrick Brook to raise the buildings above flood elevation would reduce the floodplain’s capacity to store floodwater, yielding potential “downstream consequences.”

The Vermont Natural Resources Board’s District 4 Environmental Commission, which administers Act 250 in Chittenden County, consequently shot down Grabowski’s application. He filed an appeal, but he also got to work on making changes. On Oct. 7, he told The Charlotte News that he had completed a revised proposal in compliance with state requirements.

The Agency of Natural Resources “has already reviewed the modification and given it their blessing,” Grabowski said. If so, the proposal may or may not need to return to the Environmental Commission for a second review, depending on the significance of the changes. Grabowski expects to receive Act 250 permission “sometime in November” through a settlement in the Environmental Division of the Vermont Superior Court.

A spokesperson for the Agency of Natural Resources would not confirm or deny that an updated design for Hinesburg Center II had won its approval. “The agency is unable to comment on the proposal because there is a pending appeal,” Kelly Hughes said.

Flood safety has become an especially pressing concern in Vermont since July of 2023, when rivers throughout the state overflowed into adjacent communities. Hinesburg, whose village sits beside the confluence of the LaPlatte and Patrick Brook, received little damage, but one year later, another rainstorm reportedly closed nine roads in the town.

West of downtown Hinesburg, the LaPlatte wanders through farmland before entering Charlotte, crossing Spear Street and heading north through a nature preserve in Shelburne, where it empties into Lake Champlain at Shelburne Bay. Compared to the Winooski or the Lamoille, it has few houses along its banks.

Dave Speidel, a recent retiree who’s lived in Charlotte for 40 years, owns one of them. Built in the 1790s, his Spear Street home — less than a mile north of July’s washout at Mud Hollow Brook — originally served as an office for a sawmill that used the LaPlatte for mechanical power. In recent years, he’s watched its waters rise to new levels during wet weather.

“What happened in Western North Carolina kind of has me freaked out,” Speidel said, referring to the devastation wreaked last month by Hurricane Helene. “And I’m sure anybody that lives on a small stream is a little concerned these days.”

On the opposite side of the LaPlatte, Speidel’s neighbors include five families who live in newer houses constructed by Habitat for Humanity on Albert’s Way.

“Before they even did it,” Speidel recalled, “we went to Habitat and said, ‘Hey, in the spring meltdown when the ice breaks up, we’ve seen big chunks of ice where you’re building those houses. Is that a good idea?’ And they said, ‘Well, we can’t be picky. We get free land — we build on it.’ So, anyway, we have five houses totally in the flood zone.”

So far, the LaPlatte has claimed just a few lawn chairs from Speidel’s property, but he worries that inappropriate upstream development could contribute to bringing the water closer to his house. In September, a project called Haystack Crossing, the largest proposed development in Hinesburg’s history, located just north of the planned site for Hinesburg Center II, received an Act 250 permit, almost two years after winning the town’s approval.

“Charlotte doesn’t have a say in what Hinesburg does,” Speidel said. But he hopes to see Charlotte’s state legislators “add to the chorus of people trying to get better rules up in Montpelier for these things.”

During the last legislative session, the Vermont General Assembly passed bills that aimed to improve flood safety and codify new standards for development. The legislation set in motion years-long planning and rulemaking processes.

2024’s Act 181 overhauls Act 250, the circa-1970 statewide land-use law. Ultimately, it will divide Vermont’s land into “tiers,” indicating its suitability for development. Proposals to alter Tier 3 areas will receive the highest level of scrutiny, with strict guidelines expected to protect “critical natural resources,” including river corridors and riparian areas.

Called the Flood Safety Act, Act 121 intends to conserve and restore Vermont’s wetlands. And, starting in 2028, it will require developments in river corridors to earn permits from the Department of Environmental Conservation, following more than a year of remapping work by the department and two years of public input that will inform “potential restrictions.”

The Vermont Natural Resources Council, a Montpelier-based advocacy nonprofit, helped shape both bills. Restoration ecologist Karina Dailey worked on Act 121.

The legislation particularly targets flood risks associated with fluvial erosion. According to Dailey, only 20 percent of flood-related damages in Vermont have occurred within the FEMA-mapped flood hazard area, while the rest owes to “erosion flooding,” where the river is “shifting and jumping its bank or moving within that river corridor.”

A river corridor consists of the stream’s “meander belt” and a 50-foot buffer on either side. Rivers change course over time, and if Act 121 succeeds, it will prevent development that would interfere with that movement or place Vermonters at risk as a result of it. When human activity artificially straightens or confines a river, its current becomes more powerful and more dangerous.

“The goal of the Flood Safety Act is that it really provides a watershed-scale approach to public safety,” Dailey said. “For those downstream residents in Charlotte who might be impacted by what Hinesburg does, it’s thinking about it at that larger scale of where the water flows and giving the river the room it needs to move.”

But Andrea Morgante, a former member of the Hinesburg Selectboard, thinks the state needs to do more. In 1990, Morgante co-founded the Lewis Creek Association, a conservation organization, where she continues to sit on the board of directors.

“There’s a big gap because the state does not have statewide floodplain regulations,” Morgante said of Act 121. “The floodplain can oftentimes be way outside the river corridor, so it’s not really addressing the flooding issue. It’s addressing development within the river corridor.”

And in Morgante’s analysis, the law’s new protections for wetlands will not necessarily work to preserve critical floodplains, either. “There can be floodplains that aren’t wetlands, and there’s wetlands that aren’t in floodplains,” she said.

Act 181 mentions floodplains explicitly among the “significant natural resources” that “require special consideration” among regional planners. But although lawmakers included provisions to conserve these and other natural areas in their revision of Act 250, Morgante also pointed to the legislation’s other primary objective: ameliorating the state’s housing shortage by streamlining development in downtowns and village centers, which, in Vermont, tend to sit in river valleys.

By exempting many new housing projects from the Act 250 process in such locations, which have municipal zoning regulations of their own, Act 181 seeks to avoid duplicative review that slows and discourages much-needed development. But Morgante contended that local regulations on their own may not always offer enough protection. She cited Hinesburg as an example.

Hinesburg’s zoning bylaws prohibit new development that would have an “undue adverse impact” upon a floodplain. On the basis of that criterion, the local development review board approved the Hinesburg Center II project, which subsequently failed to meet the stricter “no adverse impact” standard of the Agency of Natural Resources, killing its Act 250 application.

The Lewis Creek Association, which submitted testimony against the project to the District 4 Environmental Commission, successfully requested “party status” during its review. Morgante related that she had seen Grabowski’s revised plan, which seeks to reduce its contribution to flood risk by eliminating a planned road crossing over the Patrick Brook that would have connected Hinesburg Center II to Haystack Crossing.

Last year, town manager Todd Odit identified the crossing as a feature “of great importance” in a letter to the Vermont Natural Resource Board in support of the development. Hinesburg Development Review Coordinator Mitchel Cypes told the Charlotte News that, owing to traffic and safety impacts, its removal would pose “a real concern” and “would require an amendment” to the development review board’s prior approval. Grabowski argued that the project “fundamentally has not changed” and noted that a planned pedestrian crossing remains in place.

“I think that the developer is being premature in saying that it’s all finalized,” Morgante said. “I imagine that it will be resolved, but I don’t think it’s completely done.”

In her view, a resolution in the developer’s favor could play a role in threatening the stability of the lower LaPlatte, even if the new plan has satisfied the Agency of Natural Resources. It will still require adding fill to portions of Hinesburg’s floodplain.

“That means that the water is going to go somewhere,” Morgante said. “And houses downstream from this development — or anybody’s land downstream from this development — will be absorbing the additional water that would have been spreading out on this floodplain.”

(Disclosure: Dave Speidel is a member of the board of directors of The Charlotte News.)