Flood Mitigation
Background
Since Tropical Storm Irene, the Town has sought strategic opportunities to mitigate the impact of future floods on our residents and businesses. The floods of July 2023, December 2023, and July 2024 spurred the Town into action to make greater progress in mitigation, to improve our planning to ensure we are able to notify our residents if a flood is impending, and to marshall the efforts of Town staff and community volunteers if a flood recovery effort becomes necessary.
Randall Meadow Project
During the 2025 legislative session the State of Vermont heard testimony from the Town about the Randall Meadow, which is the agricultural field between Randall Street, the State Office Complex, and the Winooski River. The Town has contracted with SLR Consulting, a firm with a specific practice in hydrology modeling, to analyze the possibility of lowering the land to reduce the impact of a future flood. The resulting analysis suggests there would be between 4 inches and up to 1 foot of flood relief (during a 50-year flood) for not just the Randall and Elm Street neighborhoods, but the entire area of South Main Street that sits in the floodplain. Read a summary of this preliminary work…..
The land, a parcel of about 45 acres, is currently being surveyed, and the future plan is for the State to transfer ownership to the Town at no cost to taxpayers as part of the project implementation.
Funding
In the fall of 2025, the Town submitted a grant application to the State’s Community Development Block Grant Disaster Relief (CDBG-DR) program. The estimated budget for the entire project is $4.3 million, and we were awarded a total of $2.0 million. As a condition of the grant award, the Town needs to prove it can complete the full project as envisioned, or to revise the scope of the project to limit the expenditures to the amount of the grant award. Read the award letter….
A version of this project was previously submitted for a hazard mitigation grant, but the application was not selected for funding.
Bond Vote - For how much, and why now?
The only way to meet the conditions of the grant and complete the project as proposed is to hold a public bond vote, which ensures the Town has the legal authority to borrow the funds needed. Without that legal authority, the State will not provide us with a grant agreement, which means any funds we spend on the project will not be paid by the grant. In short, the project does not move forward without this vote. This funding condition must be fully met by March 16, 2026.
Our attorney advises it is prudent, and traditional, to request authority to borrow the full project amount of $4.3 million, in the odd event the grant funds are later withdrawn. This would be a very unlikely possibility, and the selectboard would most certainly pause the project if that were to happen. Based on the current grant application, even if no additional funding is received, the Town would only need to bond for $2.3 million to meet the budget. We are also well-positioned to receive another significant grant. However, that grant application will be far stronger when the project is fully designed and engineered. Other grant opportunities may also emerge to defray the cost of the project to the town. Grant money would be the first payer on costs incurred by the project.
How will a bond affect taxpayers?
As noted above, the Town would borrow the net cost of $2.3 million. Using our current tax rate for purposes of comparison, this would increase your taxes by an estimated 3.7% if the Town issued a 20-year bond. Fortunately, because we don’t anticipate issuing the bond for 18-24 months, the debt payments would not impact the budget for several years—likely 2028 at the earliest.
Further, the debt payments can be phased in over several years, and the town may be able to service the debt, or a portion of the debt, using the local option tax, which would avoid any increase in your property taxes.
The following documents show the debt service scenarios for amortization over different time periods:
10-yr LP 15-yr LP 20-yr LP 25-yr LP
More Details About the Bond Vote
Please read this message from the Selectboard about the Town Meeting Day bond vote. It contains greater detail on the information provided here and is intended to provide voters with answers to the most frequently asked questions and concerns.