Debate over S.4 pits Vermont landowners’ property-rights concerns against town authority to maintain legal trails

Landowners and municipal officials presented sharply different views Thursday to the Vermont Senate Transportation Committee about S.4, a bill that would explicitly authorize towns to maintain “legal trails” mapped on town highway surveys and otherwise recognized as public rights of way.

John Echeverria, a professor at Vermont Law School and a Tunbridge landowner, told the committee that S.4 would “dramatically change Vermont law” by giving towns authority to enter private land to repair or maintain legal trails. Echeverria said that under his reading of current law — Title 19 of the Vermont statutes and related precedent — towns do not have authority to maintain legal trails and that landowners therefore retain the right to decide whether and how to maintain trail segments that cross their property. He warned that authorizing maintenance would allow towns “to come onto your property” with heavy equipment and called S.4 “a straightforward unconstitutional take.”

Echeverria described his family’s conservation work at the Dodd Farm on the Tunbridge–Strafford line — including a donated conservation easement covering nearly the entire property — and said the town’s proposed repairs on trails that cross his pasture would “literally destroy the grass grazing operation” and interfere with the farm’s use. He also urged the committee to postpone legislative action while a related state-court case proceeds. He said the landowners’ case, filed in June 2022, has already produced a unanimous Vermont Supreme Court decision that remanded the matter to the superior court for further proceedings and that waiting for the judge’s ruling would provide useful guidance to the legislature.

Representatives of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns (VLCT) countered that S.4 would only clarify municipalities’ existing authority and was necessary to preserve public access and the connectivity of trail networks. Josh Hanford and Samantha Sheehan of VLCT told the committee that legal trails are public rights of way that were created or confirmed during statewide mapping efforts following Act 178 of 2006. They cited Agency of Transportation data that shows several hundred miles of mapped legal trails statewide (VTrans reports roughly 550 miles) and said towns and local recreation groups already coordinate maintenance in many places.

Sheehan said VLCT’s voluntary municipal survey — which received responses from 45 communities — showed that most towns that regulate legal trails also participate in some maintenance and coordinate that work with clubs, volunteers and landowners. “S.4 cleans it up and makes it crystal clear that in addition to the authority to establish and regulate the use of legal trails, municipalities have the authority to maintain or cause to be maintained…these essential, public trail networks,” Sheehan said.

Committee members questioned both witnesses about the scope of a “legal trail,” the practical effects of changing the law on communities that already maintain trail networks, and the risk that confirming or denying municipal maintenance authority would shift costs onto towns or prompt litigation. Echeverria disputed VLCT’s characterization of survey results and said the VLCT materials he had seen reflected much lower municipal response rates; VLCT acknowledged its survey was voluntary and described the 45 responses as part of broader municipal feedback collected through its member processes.

Both sides described a large recreational-trail network in Vermont that relies heavily on private land: Echeverria cited a commonly cited figure of roughly 8,000 miles of recreational trails with about 75 percent on private land; VLCT and VTrans representatives stressed that mapped legal trails are a smaller subset of that broader network but serve as critical connectors to state and federal public lands.

No committee vote was recorded during the hearing segment covered by the transcript. The committee indicated it would continue to take testimony and background from both proponents and opponents before advancing the bill, and witnesses repeatedly urged lawmakers to consider legislative drafting and the state-court proceedings together so that statutory language addresses both practical maintenance needs and property-rights limits.

The testimony illustrated the central tension the committee must weigh: whether to codify explicit municipal maintenance authority to preserve public access and coordinated trail upkeep, or to preserve landowner control over maintenance decisions to avoid what opponents say would be a government physical invasion of private property.