We live in villages, some of us in cities. In Vermont, even out in the sticks, we still live in so-called “towns.” Then there are counties and states.
More intrinsically, however, and more naturally, we live within watersheds. The contours and characteristics of the land around us create a shared experience, and much of it has to do with the water we can see (streams, ponds, rivers, lakes) and the water we can’t because it’s underground, but no less a part of the aquatic environment that sustains us. We’re joined at the hip to our watershed neighbors, which is never more obvious than when pollution or floods create a common catastrophe and remind us we’d better clean up our act.
In central Vermont, the Winooski Natural Resources Conservation District helps us do that. It works on the broad scale and the narrow. The former includes overseeing “Lake Wise Assessment” surveys (two were recently concluded, at Sabin Pond in Woodbury and Nelson Pond in Calais) to evaluate the water’s condition and identify sources of present or possible contamination. The latter (smaller scale) might simply be helping a farmer apply for a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to drill a well for his livestock, or to calculate the nutrient loads permissible under state law for the amount of acreage she has.
Last year the conservation district completed a project it had started in 2019, Board Chair Richmond Hopkins recalls, to remove the Hands Mill Dam, a deteriorating structure nearly 100 years old on a section of the Jail Branch, a tributary to the Winooski River. Vermont waterways are full of obsolete, virtually irrelevant dams, but this one held back some 500,000 cubic feet of water. Were it to breach, officials with the Vermont Dam Safety Program warned, property could be ruined. People might die.
The town of Washington owned the dam and wanted it removed. “But,” Hopkins says, “they didn’t have the time, the energy, or the resources to take on that kind of work.”
So the Winooski Natural Resources Conservation District stepped in to help.
Landowner Kyle Birrer (left) and Dan Koenemann, district director of the Winooski Natural Resources Conservation District, assess the severity of erosion and the resilience of existing vegetation along a stream bank on Birrer’s Chittenden County property. Their analysis will help the District design a project for stabilizing the soil and protecting the stream water from contamination. Photo by Lucas Goldfluss.
” data-medium-file=”https://montpelierbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WNRCD-field-photo-300×225.jpeg” data-large-file=”https://montpelierbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WNRCD-field-photo-1024×768.jpeg” src=”https://montpelierbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WNRCD-field-photo-1024×768.jpeg” alt class=”wp-image-70670″ srcset=”https://montpelierbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WNRCD-field-photo-1024×768.jpeg 1024w, https://montpelierbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WNRCD-field-photo-300×225.jpeg 300w, https://montpelierbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WNRCD-field-photo-768×576.jpeg 768w, https://montpelierbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WNRCD-field-photo-1536×1152.jpeg 1536w, https://montpelierbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WNRCD-field-photo-2048×1536.jpeg 2048w, https://montpelierbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WNRCD-field-photo-60×45.jpeg 60w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>
“We agreed to apply for the money on the town’s behalf, to take on the responsibility for managing the money, getting the permits, hiring a contractor, overseeing the project,” he says. “It’s an example of a very complicated technical project. Historic Preservation got involved, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), Fish and Wildlife, Vermont Emergency Management. It just went on and on with the number of organizations and agencies we had to coordinate with.”
Then came July 10, 2023. Floods swept Vermont, and, as predicted, the Hands Mill Dam failed. Not catastrophically. No one died. But it underlined the urgency of completing the project and restoring nearby floodplain to provide safe recourse for the next incident along the Jail Branch, knowing, as Vermont contends with climate change, that more will follow. The conservation district wrapped up the work in 2024.
“We got through it,” Hoskins says. Then, enthusiastically, he points out projects like this allow for more watershed-conservation work once the dam is out of the way.
“You go upstream and there’s an opportunity to deal with culvert replacement, improving connectivity for aquatic organisms; there’s riparian work opportunities” — rehabilitating and stabilizing shorelines — “there’s storm water mitigation, there’s working with agricultural landowners on a variety of agricultural runoff topics.”
Spread Thin
Expand this vision to include not just Washington County and three nearby towns in Orange County (Washington, Williamstown, and Orange), but also Chittenden County, where development threatens the natural environment, and you have the operational domain of the Winooski Natural Resources Conservation District. There are fourteen NRCDs in Vermont, but the Winooski District is the largest by area and easily the most populous.
Yet it’s a district with just four employees, led by a supervisory board of five and a panel of volunteer associate supervisors. And truthfully, district manager Dan Koenemann would call that tally an exaggeration.
“We have three and a half employees,” he notes. ”We have one full-time ag person (Phoebe Judge) and one half-time ag person (Kara Winslow). And we have a full-time, general conservation specialist who does mostly water-related issues.” Then there’s Koenemann: three-and-a-half.
Koenemann is a Montpelier native with a Ph.D. in biology. He returned home last July from a professorship in South Carolina and took the leadership position at the Winooski NRCD.
“Like most people,” he confesses, “I knew nothing about conservation districts.”
States — particularly states like Vermont with a keen environmental ethic — are teeming with governmental agencies and nonprofit organizations whose acronyms can blur into a haze. We might assume they were all born of the environmental consciousness that blossomed in the 1960s and ‘70s, when the cumulative impact of our thoughtless tread upon the earth began revealing itself.
Nope. Soil and Water Conservation Districts, as they were originally called, were created during the New Deal era of the 1930s, when it was determined the Dust Bowl was not just a result of drought but of negligent, uninformed farming practices. The new districts would offer science, advice, and assistance relevant to land usage of every variety, in every state.
What’s more, these natural resource conservation districts, as they are known in Vermont today, are designated as “special units of state government.”
“We don’t have the authority to levy taxes or anything like that,” Koenemann says, “but we’re technically classified as municipalities. We’re even members of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns.”
Thus, the members of their boards of supervisors are, theoretically, elected. The opportunity is there each fall for interested parties to secure a petition and seek election. But in real life, since virtually nobody knows about this, the board refills its own ranks by appointing supervisors to five-year terms. They bring a wealth of expertise, experience, and dedication to their roles. Hopkins retired after almost 30 years in the Water Quality Division of Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation, and his resume is typical not only of the board members but of the associate supervisors, volunteers who cannot vote on the District’s decisions but provide their input and sometimes assist in projects. (Dan Hemenway, a frequent contributor to The Bridge, had a memorable experience with a Conservation District in Florida some years ago; upon learning that a similar organization existed in central Vermont, he joined up as an associate supervisor in December.)
The Winooski NRCD may be a unit of government but it’s a vastly underfunded one. The state allocates around $600,000, he estimates, to the fourteen conservation districts, “which shakes out to about $30,000-ish each, which is not enough to support even a single staff position,” Koenemann says.
“We write a lot of grants,” Koenemann says, “and that’s basically how we fund ourselves.”
Which is reminiscent of how Hopkins explained the district’s role in the Hands Mill Dam project: “We agreed to apply for the money on the town’s behalf, to take on the responsibility for managing the money …”
Seeking, and obtaining, money is the heartbeat of the district. Tellingly, of the three types of conservation activities it pursues — agriculture, forestry, and resilient watersheds — the least active, by far, is forestry. Koenemann and Hopkins agree that it’s because there’s just not a comparable network of forestry-related agencies and nonprofits to tap into.
Money Matters
Lucas Goldfluss, the conservation district’s “conservation specialist,” came on board last November. “I got thrown right into a bunch of projects,” he says. “Which is great!”
A 2023 UVM graduate in environmental studies, with a resume stressing shoreline-restoration efforts in Vermont and California, he works out of the district’s Williston office (Koenemann’s office is in Berlin) and is particularly engaged in similar programs here: Rethink Runoff, Storm Smart, and Trees for Streams.
“Trees for Streams is a kind of historic conservation-district program that helps landowners identify eroded buffers on stream banks,” Goldfluss says. “We go out and facilitate these projects and get the trees planted, which is super awesome and meaningful.”
Referrals, he says, pop up out of nowhere — as they should, for in his view we’re all residents of a watershed and “everyone is integral to the mission” of protecting it.
“Any Jack or Sally can come to us and say, ‘I was driving on [Interstate] 89 and there’s this severely eroded stream bank that maybe you haven’t seen yet.’ Or a lot of the time it’s the Vermont Land Trust that comes to us and we’ll partner with them. Or smaller conservation or environmental groups will say, ‘We don’t have the means to do this project; can you help us?’ We serve as a liaison to help put them in touch with the resources that are out there.”
Really? There are resources out there? In this economy?
“Most definitely,” says Goldfluss. ”Whether it be with the state or private foundations. … It’s constant research to find that funding. But in the clean water realm there’s definitely money out there for projects. Especially in Vermont.”
A dollop of good news! Wait, what country are we in?