Hi all. Welcome again to the Bennington County Conservation District column. Board member Lissa Stark kicked it off two weeks ago and we hope to provide a biweekly installment for the foreseeable future, or until we run out of things to say. I'd like to introduce myself, Don Wilson, an Arlington resident, and one of several members of the Board of the BCCD scattered about Bennington County. The loose concept of this column is to introduce the county to the BCCD board and staff and to give you, the people we are working for, an idea what we are doing and care about.
One of the things I care about is the bad rap our environmental regulations continue to receive as people and parties try to negotiate the permit process. Some years ago, when we became party to an Act 250 appeal regarding the protection of prime farmland, I felt frustrated. That old method, wait until something is too problematic to stop or remediate without a public brawl, was not working. Protagonists became antagonists, involved parties became tribal and entrenched and some relationships soured. Such processes become entangled in permit quicksand, in death by delay. This is an unnecessary outcome if there are honest intentions at the table. The permit process can be clean.
As BCCD evaluated our available time and resources, it became clear we could best move our conservation mission forward if we were pro-active, not reactive. (The ongoing debate over business-unfriendly and sometimes clumsy environmental regulations was, and is, poisoning the water. We didn't want BCCD to go down with the ship, a victim of guilt by association, even though in fact we have legitimate party status to state hearings involving environmental evaluation and testimony.)
So we looked for opportunities to work cooperatively with vested parties, providing specific site-based information and solutions before the red flags went up. Though we understand the environmental regulations (we work with them every day), and we are in regular contact and work closely with many of the state agencies that have regulatory jurisdiction over legal and permit process, we want our presence to be a resource. We want to be solution-based and perhaps to provide guidance to our partners as they work their ways through the rules and regulations.
We have helped to facilitate several successful permit applications and remediations before the projects were stopped and before the inevitable negative public scrutiny of another permit process gone bad. The Mount Anthony Middle School agricultural lands project is an example of which I'm particularly proud. We helped the site planners design a project that met Act 250 requirements, and that laid the foundation for teaching our young people about our working landscapes. (Not that I'd recommend to any student a summer with my old hay baler.)
The downside to all this pro-activity is we are running a little under the radar. If the process is working, no one notices. And to close the loop here, this is one of the purposes of this column. We would like to keep the public, abreast of the who, what, and why of our activities. We are a public agency, we are accessible and friendly and we try (pretty well) to have the correct answers. (Our district manager, Shelly Stiles, won't let me freelance.) BCCD is located on the second floor of the Citizens Bank, across from Greenberg's parking lot in Bennington. Reach us at 442-2275 or at bccd@sover.net. We are trying to get the word out. Look us up.
This column appeared in the Bennington Banner in August 2006, as one of the BCCD's Conservation Currents pieces, a bi-weekly feature written by BCCD board and staff members since August 2006.