Witnesses urge passage of S.124 and S.100 to create state capital pathway for large farms after EPA corrective-action letter

Jonathan Chamberlain, a farm consultant who said he works for Wardle Brothers, told the Senate Natural Resources & Energy Committee on March 19 that recent bills in the Legislature — S.124 and S.100 — should be advanced together to give Vermont a clear pathway to address an EPA corrective-action letter and to create a capital program for larger farms.

Chamberlain said the early sections of S.100 would establish framework language for a capital program and that S.124 includes additional statutory edits that would clarify agency roles and make the state response to EPA’s concerns practicable. He described the current situation, in his view, as leaving large farms “in no man’s land” when the Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) is referred a possible discharge and there is no state capital program to enroll farms for corrective work. “If for some reason a large farm needed to get one, there isn’t a program,” Chamberlain said. He urged the committee to move S.124 so ANR and the Agency of Agriculture (Agency of Ag) would have a statutory avenue to resolve EPA referrals rather than defaulting to federal Region 1 in…