Vermont has disbursed $928 million since 2016 without the outside evaluation
Vermont lawmakers wrote an independent evaluation of the state’s Lake Champlain cleanup into the 2015 Clean Water Act and set a deadline of January 2021. The state Clean Water Board never delivered it. The board’s request for proposals in 2020 drew no responses, the legislature pushed the deadline to 2023, and no outside firm bid on the work after that. Since 2016 the state has disbursed $928 million on water quality projects and programs without the outside review its own law called for.
The lake’s problems predate the act. Lake Champlain has been overloaded with phosphorus-laden runoff from farms, roads and urban sewers for decades, and that pollution fuels potentially toxic blue-green algae blooms that have raised health concerns and hurt the state’s tourism industry. Under sustained pressure from citizens, environmental advocates and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Vermont’s leaders built the 2015 law around an ambitious cleanup initiative, and the EPA-mandated 20-year effort is now halfway through.
Since 2016, Vermont has disbursed $928 million — $755 million in state funding and $173 million in local and federal dollars — on water quality projects and programs, nearly as much as the state has spent paving and resurfacing state highways over the past decade. The vast majority of that money has gone toward Lake Champlain. This summer the Clean Water Board marked the milestone, and its chair, Douglas Farnham, said, “I think that’s something to be extremely proud of.”
The legislature required the board’s leaders to submit a full program audit from an outside environmental consultant by January 2021. The work was intended to determine whether the projects the state had invested in were improving water quality, and whether the agriculture and natural resources agencies were doing enough to enforce water quality regulations on farms, the biggest source of phosphorus in Lake Champlain. The board received no responses to its initial request for proposals in 2020. Lawmakers extended the deadline to 2023, and again no outside firms bid.
Farnham said the board received informal feedback from some firms that the audit’s scope was too broad and complex. He reported to fellow board members that he and Julie Moore, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, had asked legislators what to do next and received no clear suggestions. The board never issued a new request or revisited the matter, and the legislature never followed up to narrow the scope, until Seven Days and ProPublica asked about it.
Farnham acknowledged an outside audit would be helpful, but said the board already has robust tools for assessing progress: a yearly performance report compiled by the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, which coordinates and tracks most of the state’s clean water spending. “We’ve got enough eyes coming at it from different angles that I think that mutes the need for that comprehensive audit,” he said. The annual reporting process has improved greatly since the audit was mandated, and the department’s website “provides a lot of transparency” about how clean water money is spent and the results, said Emily Bird, director of the department’s Water Investment Division.
Some current and former state officials said that approach is not a substitute for an audit to determine whether Vermont is getting adequate and cost-effective returns on its clean water investments. Former state Rep. David Deen, who sponsored the clean water law and retired in 2018, said he was dismayed to learn the audit never happened. “Personally, I find it amazing that they haven’t done that audit and that somebody in the legislature did not hold them to account to conduct that audit,” he said. Rep. Amy Sheldon, the longtime chair of the House Committee on Environment, recalled hearing about the audit challenges and said it is difficult for the legislature to follow up because Vermont’s lawmakers do not have staff. Former state Sen. Chris Bray, who chaired the natural resources committee until 2025, said he did not recall hearing about the missing audit.
The last independent assessment of clean water spending was a 2019 report from the state auditor, which found that a disproportionate amount of money was going to wastewater treatment plants — which contribute by far the smallest share of phosphorus pollution — instead of bigger sources such as agriculture. That mismatch persists seven years later. Agriculture remains the largest source of phosphorus runoff, yet agricultural water quality programs receive less than a third of the total clean water funding in the current budget.
Doug Hoffer, state auditor since 2013, said “I’d like to think they’re getting something done,” referring to state agencies and legislators. “But the only way to know that is to hire someone who is independent to study that. And it’s really concerning that hasn’t been done. It really raises questions about accountability on both sides.”
Tee Thomas, a former water finance director for the state of Vermont who now runs her own environmental consulting firm, said in an email that an audit would do things the department’s performance reports do not. The reports rely on models for how effective each type of project is at reducing phosphorus. An audit would analyze water quality monitoring data from rivers and lakes to check those estimates, and it would scrutinize how well Vermont has managed projects and whether it has gotten results, she said.
When lawmakers approved the clean water law, they took the major step of establishing a fund to pay for the cleanup and a board to administer it. The Clean Water Fund receives, on average, $25 million to $30 million each year from the state’s rooms and meals tax, a surcharge applied to some property transfers and to deposit money that consumers pay on cans and bottles. That money is paired with between $6 million and $12 million from the state’s annual capital bill, which finances infrastructure projects. The funds have gone to programs and projects to restore wetlands, expand natural buffers around fields, shore up rural roads against erosion, upgrade stormwater drains and improve manure storage on dairy farms.
The state treasurer in 2017 estimated that the cost of Vermont’s 20-year initiative would be $2.3 billion. Finding that money could be difficult, as state government spending outpaces tax revenue and cooling housing and tourism markets squeeze clean water funding sources.
Without the audit, the governor and legislators responsible for coming up with the next billion dollars’ worth of projects may not have a clear understanding of what Vermonters have gotten for the last billion, lawmakers said. Jane Kitchel, who as longtime chair of the state Senate’s Committee on Appropriations was known for her encyclopedic knowledge of the Vermont budget, noted that a billion dollars is a significant sum for the small state, and said that had she not retired two years ago, reviving the audit “would be one of the things I’d put on my to-do list.”
The next legislative session starts in January. State Sen. Anne Watson, who chairs the Committee on Natural Resources and Energy and serves on the Committee on Appropriations, told Seven Days and ProPublica she would likely discuss whether to revive the audit with her colleagues. “If we value having a clean lake,” she said, “then we need to put our resources toward places that are going to make a difference, and it’s unclear to me right now that what we’re doing is effective.”