Land Trust seeks to mend river

Author: Kelly Janis

On Sept. 20, local residents gathered at the Sarah Partridge Library Community House in East Middlebury for a forum presented by the Middlebury Area Land Trust (MALT). The meeting was convened in order to seek community input about the organization's recent purchase of a 11.7 acre parcel of land north of the Middlebury River with the intention of averting continued erosion and protecting the river corridor.

"You live around here," said Hannah Panci '08, a MALT employee since her first year at the College, as she addressed homeowners with property abutting the river. "This is your community. And we want to know what's important to you, what we should do with this land."

Middlebury Town Planner Fred Dunnington acknowledged that while the land trust and the town have specific interests in the property, so too do the residents whose homes surround it.

"Perhaps some interests are yet to be expressed," he said. "We don't have to decide anything yet."

MALT, which preserves over 2,600 acres of land in Middlebury and the surrounding region, has been at work on this project since Faith Sessions Neil approached the land trust three years ago and urged it to assume ownership of the property, which has been in her family since 1830.

"I know MALT can do a much better job [of preserving the land] than my sister and I could," Sessions Neil said. "We just couldn't come up with the funds to do the necessary landscaping."

Sessions Neil emphasized the vital nature of the body of water upon which the property is situated.

"This river has been a concern in this community to a lot of people for a long time," she said.

Shannon Pytlik, a river resource scientist with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, addressed the impetus of these concerns. Rivers ideally exist, she said, in a state of equilibrium between water and sediment.

"If you increase the sediment or the water, it's going to tip the balance and throw the stream into some kind of disequilibrium and the stream could start to adjust," Pytlik said. "This is exactly what we're seeing in East Middlebury."

Deforestation, population growth, development of roads, channelizing, berming and flood plain encroachment have forced this adjustment upon the river, which has considerably less room to meander and contains its energy in a far smaller vicinity than it did prior to the settlement of the towns surrounding it.

"We're constantly fighting with the river," Pytlik said. "We're trying to tame it, manage it and keep it where we think it's supposed to be."

Occasionally, the resistance of the river to these taming efforts manifests itself with a vengeance. As evidence, Pytlik displayed illustrations of the infamous Flood of 1927, during which the river jumped its channel and flowed down Main Street. She stressed that such events were not merely relics of days of old.

"We had five floods in four years during the 1990s, and the state of Vermont spent over $15 million in recovery," Pytlik said.

The fact that much of that money came out of taxpayers' pockets, Pytlik said, should be motivation enough for change.

"We're stuck in the cycle where we encroach on our rivers and have floods and property damage, and are forced to dredge further and further into our rivers because we have all of these investments in the river corridor," Pytlik said. "And then we don't have a flood for a while and people begin to feel safe, and they encroach further. It's a very expensive, unsustainable cycle. So we're trying to break that cycle and find new strategies. And one of them is to accommodate the river as best as we can. It is crucial for communities to plan for these floods, and not allow new development in areas prone to erosion hazards."

Strategic utilization of the property surrounding the river, Pytlik said, stands as a chief means of executing this planning.

"This property has a lot of opportunity to allow the river to meander, and to flood, and to do all the things a river needs to do," Pytlik said. "And hopefully that will take some of the stress off of other areas in East Middlebury over time."

Robin Scheu, interim executive director of the Middlebury Land Trust, noted the flexibility necessary in charting a course for contending with the raging stream.

"In some places [the river] may be narrow, and in some places it may be wide," Scheu said. "We can't get a straight measurement. The river doesn't work that way. We're trying to take direction from the river, and do the best we can."

MALT also sought direction from the river's neighbors. To this end, Scheu opened the floor to the meeting's attendees, encouraging them to voice their concerns.

"We want to get a sense of your connection to the land, and what your thoughts are now that you have all of this information," Scheu said.

Above all, residents were vehement in asserting their desire for easy access to the river, a site rife with poignant associations for many who spoke fondly of hot dog roasts, swimming, fishing, kayaking, tubing and hiking.

"How can you not be connected to the river?" East Middlebury resident Peggy Peabody said.

MALT leaders assured meeting-goers these diversions would remain uncompromised, and expressed their hope that the forum would spark continued dialogue between the town, land trust and local residents.

As attendees shuffled toward the door at the meeting's conclusion, Scheu praised them for the thoughtfulness with which they had approached the matter at hand.

"It's clear that you love your town," she said.