New England Policy Chronicle
Updates from Around the Region
Editor’s Note: In each issue, we share policy-related stories from each of the six New England states that intersect with themes of conservation, land use, and efforts to build a thriving future for human and wild communities. Advancing an integrated approach to our relationship with the lands and waters that surround us requires policy change at the local, state, federal, and global levels. The stories highlighted in the Policy Chronicle underscore the complexity and importance of state-level decisions in building a just and sustainable future across our communities. Find other examples of how allies around the region are approaching policy change in our Policy Desk Archive. — Alex Redfield, Co-Director of the Integrated Policy Program for Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities and Food Solutions New England
Jump to page sections:
Connecticut
With this spring’s release of the 2022 Agricultural Census from the USDA, we can now confirm the continuation of two problematic trends in New England agriculture: The average age of farmers keeps getting older (from an average age of 55.3 in 2012 to 58.5 in 2022), and people of color continue to struggle to secure stable land tenure in the Northeast (while people of color represent just under 20% of New England’s population, “non-white operators” manage under 0.7 percent of active farm acreage, essentially flat compared to 2012.) These trends are evident in each New England state, but the racial disparity of agriculture is most stark in Connecticut, with the Census reporting only 372 acres (or less than 0.1% of farmland statewide) as farmed by a person of color.
Well before the release of the most recent data, knowing that a new generation of agricultural producers must be supported as an aging cohort of farmers transitions out of operation, staff at the Connecticut Land Conservation Council (CLCC) and Connecticut Department of Agriculture embarked on an effort to both catalog the barriers that farmers of color face in accessing land and to identify policy tools that might be effective in creating new opportunities for land access and equity. Those efforts and that research was released in early July in a comprehensive report titled Farmland Access & Ownership: An Overview of Barriers, Models, and Actions to Increase Land Access for Connecticut’s BIPOC Farmers.
The reflections and policy analysis contained in the report are relevant to food system and farmland protection advocates around New England, providing a current and thorough analysis of lesser-known pathways to farmland access such as lifetime ground leases, funding for Buy/Protect/Sell programs to facilitate transfer to low-resource farmers, and equity leases in partnership with conservation land trusts. The report’s author, Yaw Owusu Darko, CLCC’s Senior Project Specialist, noted in the report’s release that “Secure land access is not only integral to the livelihoods of BIPOC farmers, but imperative in bolstering the resilience of Connecticut’s agricultural industry. Land trusts have a crucial role to play in creating pathways for BIPOC farmer access and ownership, ensuring these efforts align both conservation goals with producer needs.” The 2022 Census reports that, in Connecticut, farms with a non-white producer grew on just 372 acres, representing just under 0.1% of total agricultural land in the state.
Among the strategies listed in the CLCC report is a model similar to that used by the Cheshire Land Trust (CLT) in Cheshire, Connecticut. In 2006, the 164-acre Ives Farm (pictured) was bequeathed to the land trust. Since then, CLT has leased the farm out to tenant operators as a way to keep the land open and healthy while providing a low-cost land access pathway to producers without acquisition capital. Photo courtesy of Cheshire Land Trust
Maine
In 1975, E.B. White wrote a dispatch to the New Yorker magazine that recounted local discussions about the potential construction of a nuclear power plant on Sears Island, a 941-acre island at the entrance to Penobscot Bay in central Maine. Though the plant was never built, 50 years later, Sears Island is once again at the center of an increasingly complicated debate on energy, conservation, and waterfront access as the State of Maine, local residents, and offshore wind developers struggle to find consensus on where to build out a staging port for future offshore wind developments. The Gulf of Maine is known as one of the most promising sites on the eastern seaboard for offshore wind energy production, with the potential for up to 32 gigawatts of electricity generation within just 20 miles off the coast, but accessing that energy will require the delivery, assembly, and installation of massive floating turbines—all of which require substantial infrastructure on shore. (To get a sense of the infrastructure required to support offshore wind development, see this video tour, from The Day, of the New London State Pier in New London, Connecticut, as referenced in Issue #2 of the New England Policy Chronicle). With its deep water harbor and connectivity to rail and road corridors, the waters of Sears Island are uniquely well positioned to serve as staging ground for future installations. Yet Sears Island is also the largest undeveloped, uninhabited, and causeway-connected island on the Eastern Seaboard and, accordingly, is cherished by natural and human visitors alike for its equally unique role as a relatively undisturbed island habitat.
The undeveloped Sears Island is a haven for migrating and nesting birds. The community organization Friends of Sears Island notes that Maine birders have spotted 222 different species of birds on Sears Island to date, representing 47 percent of all bird species recorded in Maine. Photo courtesy of Friends of Sears Island
With potential development on the horizon for decades, advocates, residents, and policymakers have been discussing their options for balancing the island’s potential for conservation and industrial use almost nonstop since the original nuclear plant proposal in 1975. This ongoing work resulted in both a conservation easement, granted by the Maine Department of Transportation and now held by the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, which protects nearly two thirds of the island from development, and a consensus agreement from residents, local governments, state agency leadership, and conservation officials that the balance of the land be reserved for cargo port or equivalent development over time. Now, Governor Janet Mills’ administration is pushing to use state-owned land on Sears Island as a future home for offshore wind infrastructure, but conservation advocates are pointing across the harbor to Mack Point, where existing industrial port facilities have been made available for lease.
The conflict over Sears Island’s future is emblematic of many others around New England; demonstrating the challenges that arise in simultaneously advancing shared desires to eliminate fossil fuels from America’s energy portfolio, ushering in a new era of green energy jobs and opportunities, and protecting the increasingly rare and threatened wild spaces that remain on our landscape.
For more information, see this comprehensive history and analysis of Sears Island in the spotlight by Lynda Clancy at the Penobscot Bay Pilot, and the Friends of Sears Island website.
Mack Point, on the mainland near Sears Island, has been identified as another possible location for the development of wind infrastructure. Photo courtesy of Friends of Sears Island
Massachusetts
Please see our analysis on the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs proposed strategies for climate smart forestry elsewhere in this issue.
New Hampshire
The Local Food for Local Schools Reimbursement Pilot Program bill (HB 1678) was signed into law on July 12, expanding incentives for New Hampshire school districts to purchase and serve locally grown and produced food for their breakfast and lunch programs. Just under $250,000 is appropriated over the next two fiscal years to create a grant program that would reimburse selected districts $1 for every $3 spent on New Hampshire-grown foods, and $1 for every $6 spent on food grown elsewhere in New England. This program builds on similar programs such as the Maine Local Foods Fund and the Vermont Farm to School Grant, both of which have proven to generate positive results for students, school districts, and farmers. The pilot program is designed to leverage $420,000 in federal funding to maximize positive nutrition outcomes for students. Though the pool of money available is relatively modest compared to the $190 million in total agricultural sales in New Hampshire, this state and federal investment would account for a 50% increase in local food spending across school districts, dramatically expanding access to local products in cafeterias around the state. For more information, contact Stacey Purslow, Program Director at New Hampshire Farm to School.
Local procurement policies like Farm to School programs are an increasingly common way for New England states to make direct investments in addressing hunger and food scarcity while simultaneously creating new marketing opportunities for local farms. Our partners at Farm to Institution New England have compiled policy snapshots and program details on the scale and structure of these programs for each of the six states.
NOFA-New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Farm to School Network, the New Hampshire Department of Education, and a number of local school and conservation districts all supported legislative efforts to create a pilot reimbursement for local food procurement. Graphic courtesy of New Hampshire Farm to School
Rhode Island
Because Rhode Island is the second most densely populated state in the nation and the smallest state in New England, its competing land use challenges might feel even more intense than those faced by its larger neighbors to the north. Within a footprint of roughly 660,000 acres, residents and policymakers must still strike a balance between the development of new, accessible housing options and the protection of the natural and working lands required for a diverse and resilient ecosystem. As mentioned in our last issue, this discourse often takes on an “either/or” tone, typified in Governor Dan McKee’s comments citing the need for housing as justification for cutting conservation funding in the proposed 2024 Green Bond. (Update: The Rhode Island Legislature approved a Green Bond that includes $13 million for land protection, despite the bond initially being nixed from the proposal. Read more from the Rhode Island Land Trust Council.) In the hopes of building momentum around a “both/and” alternative, conservation, housing, and smart growth advocates backed a suite of modest changes (H7699 and S2638) designed to revitalize a defunct “Rhode Island Housing and Conservation Trust” this past legislative session.
Supporters of this effort argue that, with a reformed board structure and future funding, the Housing and Conservation Trust could achieve similar success to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, seen as a uniquely effective mechanism in New England to leverage federal dollars in effective land conservation and affordable housing initiatives. The Rhode Island equivalent was enacted in 1990, but it has been essentially dormant since, struggling to gain momentum without dedicated funding and active governance. A 2006 report outlined the potential for a reformed board, citing the need to coordinate funding and implementation across disparate state agencies and suggesting a real estate transfer tax hike to expand capacity; however, active opposition from the Rhode Island Association of Realtors stalled those reform efforts, and the Trust has existed only on paper for nearly 30 years.
The changes proposed in this year’s session were ultimately referred for future study, but advocates including Melina Lodge, Executive Director of the Housing Network of Rhode Island, are optimistic about growing momentum to integrate (and expand) housing and conservation efforts: “In a state with such a small land mass, we must find and cultivate opportunities to meet multiple land use needs within a single given space. Rather than pitting one need against the other, always to the detriment of one or the other, we are collectively better served by finding the synergies that exist across seemingly competing interests and reframing our thinking as an ‘and’ position, rather than an ‘or’ position.”
With approximately 1 million people living in a small footprint, the tension between the natural and built environments is acute in Rhode Island. That tension is demonstrated in this map, which depicts how Rhode Island’s land base is currently split between competing uses. Figure from Hallisey et al. (2022)
Vermont
Just four weeks before Vermonters faced their third “100-year-flood” in the last 12 months, triggering another round of catastrophic crop loss for Vermont farmers and devastating road/infrastructure damage for many residents, the Vermont Flood Safety Act was passed into law. The bill is a comprehensive attempt to build flood resilience around the state with three primary strategies: First and foremost, the bill restricts development in high-hazard river corridors outside of town centers, allowing rivers to shift and store floodwaters more effectively. Second, the new law attempts to reverse historic trends in wetland loss with a 2:1 net-gain wetland policy, requiring developers to restore, enhance, or create two acres of wetlands or buffers to compensate for every one acre of wetland lost or impacted. Finally, the act consolidates oversight of the state’s 21 electric generating dams within the Agency of Natural Resources to more strategically consider the roles and responsibilities of these dams in high-precipitation emergencies.
Though Governor Phil Scott threatened a veto, arguing that the provisions of the bill would be too challenging to implement in a reasonable timeframe, the bill was enacted into law without his signature.
For readers across New England and other regions grappling with floods and climate change—though the topography of Vermont may be unique to the mountains and valleys of northern New England—the preemptive regulatory framework governing development and management of river corridors contained in this new law may provide a valuable framework across the region.
For more information, see Vermont Public Radio’s coverage of the Flood Safety Act and its passage.
On July 12, the remnants of Hurricane Beryl caused over 1,500 incidents of flood-related damage, ranging from residential flooding to major structural damage to public infrastructure. Photo courtesy of Vermont Natural Resources Council
Alex Redfield is the Co-Director of the Integrated Policy Program for Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities and Food Solutions New England. He lives in South Portland, Maine.