Conservation districts warn $4.75 million in federal funding and local projects are at risk

Montpelier — Michelle Monroe, executive director of the Vermont Association of Conservation Districts, told the Committee on Agriculture on April 9 that about $4,750,000 in federal funding for conservation districts and district-led projects is at risk after recent federal freezes and cancellations.

Monroe said the bulk of the funding supports technical assistance — conservation planners and program-assistance staff who help farmers develop projects and apply to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. “We’ve got $4,750,000 that is … at risk,” Monroe said, adding that the figure includes a frozen $3,600,000 technical-assistance pool and several canceled projects.

Those canceled and at-risk projects include a $1.2 million slate of culvert replacements in Lunenburg, Brighton and Ferdinand and a roughly $40,000 culvert project on the Upper Missisquoi River in Orleans County; an AmeriCorps conservation-planner training program that Monroe said was canceled outright; and a joint New York–Vermont chestnut manufacturing project meant to produce chestnut oil. Monroe said the White River Conservation District is owed about $200,000 for work it advanced during the canceled training project — roughly half of that district’s $400,000 annual budget.

Why it matters: the conservation districts serve as local technical partners to NRCS and to farmers. Monroe told the committee that districts’ technical assistance speeds NRCS work, in some cases reducing tasks that would take NRCS staff weeks to do down to minutes, and helps draw federal dollars to the state. “We’ve got about $8 million to $10 million coming to Vermont for NRCS funding this year,” Monroe said, and districts’ capacity to deliver that work depends on reliable technical-assistance funding.

State funding context: Monroe described the districts’ request for increased state base funding and reviewed where the FY25 appropriations stood in the legislative process. She said the House appropriations bill included $612,000 in base funding for the districts; the agency-level recommendation trimmed that to $500,000, and separate House committee actions included proposals ranging up to $3,000,000. “House agriculture supported $3,000,000,” Monroe said. She told the committee that $3,000,000 in state support would allow each district to hire at least one full-time employee to secure and administer additional federal funds, and that every dollar in state base funding can leverage multiple federal dollars — Monroe estimated about $9 of non-NRCS federal funding pulled down for every dollar of state base funding in some districts.

Local examples and program delivery: Sarah Gonzales, district manager for the Orleans Community Conservation District, described how locally led planning and grant management works on the ground. Orleans County used a locally focused NRCS funding pool to obligate about $700,000 over three years to address invasive species, Gonzales said, and the district has used grant funds to pay for water-quality sampling, tree plantings and livestock-exclusion projects. Gonzales said locally elected district boards and sustained community outreach are central to setting priorities such as PFAS response, food security and farm viability.

Monroe and Gonzales emphasized the cascading risk if technical-assistance funds remain frozen: districts may be unable to pay staff or complete projects that allow farmers to receive federal implementation grants. Monroe said some IRA-funded programs were targeted because of their name (she said the conservation-planner training was called “Climate Corps”), and that the result has been canceled trainings and frozen grant payments to districts.

Committee discussion and next steps: committee members asked about options to preserve staffing, whether districts can reassign workers to lower-cost tasks while capital projects are delayed, and how engineering and design costs are handled in phased grant processes. Monroe and Gonzales described project-development, design and implementation as separate grant steps that often require letters of commitment from landowners before district staff start work. Committee members said they would consider the minimum base funding request when completing appropriations and that members planned to follow up with site visits and further conversations after the session ends.

No formal committee votes were taken on funding during the session; Monroe asked legislators to consider increased base funding to avoid staff layoffs and to preserve districts’ ability to draw down federal dollars for farm and water-quality work.