by Liz Royer
This article was published in the fall 2025 issue of our newsletter.
Over the past five years, Vermont Rural Water has been involved in working with legislators in the Vermont State House on issues including flood response, PFAS, and workforce development.
During the 2025 session, we reached out to many representatives and senators regarding various bills on housing and development and how water and wastewater systems could be impacted by the creation of additional housing in their communities. The response we received was not encouraging. Most legislators were feeling overwhelmed and didn’t have time to thoroughly research all of the issues coming before them.
It became clear that we can no longer wait and be reactive to all of the challenges facing our industry. We need to be proactive in educating our representatives and senators and directly providing the perspective of drinking water and wastewater operators.
Talking Points
Vermont Rural Water is currently working on several handouts for legislators to provide background information on drinking water and wastewater systems before the next session begins in January 2026. These documents will include talking points for water and wastewater personnel to discuss current and relevant issues with local and state officials. Here are some highlights from our document on housing and development. These facts may be commonsense to those in our industry, but are not as familiar to the general public:
1) Invite us to the table. Water and wastewater operators and managers are typically left out of conversations regarding housing, economic development, emergency response, and hazard mitigation, even though drinking water and wastewater are critical to development and planning.
2) Existing systems may not be able to accommodate new development. Just because water or sewer infrastructure exists or a pipe runs down a certain road, doesn’t mean that the water/wastewater system has the capacity to support additional connections or new development.
3) Capacity is difficult to calculate, so water and wastewater systems may not know exactly how much drinking water they can supply or wastewater they can treat. Factors that affect capacity include treatment processes and equipment, permitted wastewater discharge limits, seasonal fluctuations of groundwater sources, regulations on water pressure within distribution pipes, size and condition of water/sewer pipes, and age and condition of equipment and infrastructure.
4) Increasing capacity can be expensive. It’s not as simple as withdrawing more water from a source or treating more wastewater. New permits, new treatment equipment, and new distribution/sewer infrastructure will likely be needed.
5) Allocations are not reliable measures. State agencies do not track individual allocations for water and wastewater systems. Municipalities are responsible for their own allocations, but smaller systems and fire districts may not have an official allocation process. In addition, allocations may be based on hydraulic design flow for facilities, which are based on average flows and will likely be different than actual use. They do not consider the treatment capacity required for contaminants, or hydraulic capacity of piping such as systems with combined sewer overflows. Municipalities may have projects on the books for several decades that have never been constructed—so it can be very difficult to know the current situation in terms of allocations and overall capacity.
Tours
Before the next legislative season begins, the Green Mountain Water Environment Association (GMWEA) and Vermont Rural Water are planning to invite legislators out to tour wastewater treatment facilities. It is important for legislators to understand the operations of what is arguably the most expensive asset their community owns and maintains.
Of particular concern is the management of PFAS in biosolids. Vermont has some of the toughest screening standards in the country when it comes to PFAS in residual materials intended for land application, and a bill discussed in the Vermont Legislature’s House Environment Committee this spring proposed to ban the land application of “septage, sludge, and biosolids” and prohibit the sale of “compost or other agricultural products containing or produced from septage, sludge, or biosolids.” This would pose significant challenges and expense for Vermont’s wastewater facilities that currently dispose of biosolids through land application.
In developing talking points for the tour guides, GMWEA hopes to inform smart policies that will reduce PFAS concentrations in residuals while maintaining and increasing in-state end-use options.
We are encouraging every water and wastewater system in the state to work together to educate our local and state officials.