Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: We're not sure why we're so. We're live. Alright. Welcome back to the Environment Committee. We are welcoming Karina Daily to us to talk about her work in dam removal restoration projects and an idea for a new type of restoration permit.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Thank you. It's good to be back. Yes, my name is Corina Daley. I am the Science and Restoration Director at Vermont Natural Resources Council. In that role, I managed the derelict dam removal program for VNRC.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: A lot of these. Those derelict dams out here.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Derelict dams. Worked to reconnect rivers for flood resilience, water quality, and habitat. I also work on clean water policy at the state level. So I'm excited to be here. And yes, the goal for today is to just share more about the work I do. I hope you've heard or learned a little bit about it in the past. But the idea of restoring waters for resilience and river restoration through dam removal. So, high level, there's two problems that, you know, identify the need for the important work we do. And that is that there are hundreds of aging dams out there. They're abandoned, they no longer serve a useful purpose, and they are obstructing our waterways. So they're spanning our waterways and blocking the natural function of the river. So their public benefit is in question. They're not providing a public benefit. And second, that there is support for dam removal of these derelict dams, but not at the scale needed to adequately address the issue. The process is convoluted. It is not straightforward. These are big projects, they're very complex, but we need to be able to move them forward in a more efficient manner to really address the need for nature based solutions for climate resilience. So what are we doing? At the high level, and this is we, not just me. I am one of many partners, watershed organizations, conservation districts, municipalities, regional planning commissions that is working to do this work. When I'm speaking, I'm speaking for many. Something called the Vermont Dam Removal Initiative is Our goals are to raise awareness, identify derelict dams, prioritize projects, collaborate, and remove dams to restore rivers. Since we've been tracking this work, we've removed 81 dams in our watershed, which is pretty exciting. There's something called the Dam Task Force, which unites us every other month to come together and discuss the problems we're having, find solutions, learn from research across the country and world, and advance this work. Some highlights from 2025. Vermont removed nine dams this year in nine different towns. So really spread across the Strait of the state. We reconnected over 125 miles of river. We restored over 6,000 linear feet of stream channel. We restored 10 acres of floodplain. We removed one significant hazard dam, all nine of the dams were in poor condition. Can you explain

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: some of these numbers? Like, what does 125 miles of reconnected river mean?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Yes. Good question. You. So a dam is a barrier to a river, and it blocks that natural stream process. I've actually testified in here for this committee on how rivers function. So when we're taking that barrier out, we are reconnecting the river to the next barrier. So when we talk about upstream miles connected and downstream miles connected, that's miles connected to the next barrier, which could be a culvert, be another dam, it could be a road that's acting as a dam. So that's what we're talking about when we say reconnected river miles, and that is for aquatic organism passage, for fish passage, and other aquatic organisms to move up and down that system. So is your number here upstream? It's both combined. So, yes, we we do I I was track both, but this number is combined.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Don't know if there's other numbers that I

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: want you to explain before.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I see there's a couple other people with questions. Yeah. Linear feet of stream channel restored is just because it's left and right side total.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Yes. Actually, no. We're just calculating the So typically, when you remove a dam, there's this pond that's been created, the impoundment behind the dam. When you take that sediment out, you try and find the historic channel of where the stream was before the dam existed, and you create something called a pilot channel. And so it's restoring that channel. So it's that upstream work above the dam that we're restoring, and it's just the linear feet on one side, the total linear feet upstream of the dam that we're working in that channel, if that helps.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: 10 acres of floodplain. Got that. And the number I don't have on here,

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: which I wish I did, was acres of wetland restored. Because in doing this, these dams were historically put in low gradient streams. So in flat areas where the river settles down, the microtopography is flat, and there's usually a natural spring source or sea. Often you can't identify that there are wetlands in these spots until you take out the dam, but those wetlands have been inundated and underwater in this pond impoundment, you take out that dam and you have a restored wetland. So that is a metric that I want to start tracking as well.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Representative Chapin and then Pritchard.

[Ela Chapin (Member)]: I was just hoping you could define a little bit more derelict dams and sort of when you focus on a dam versus Yeah. So derelict dams are non powered dams. They're dams that have been abandoned, left in a river, and no longer are providing water supply, which could have been an example of a dam providing an impoundment for recreation with public access. So these are just typically old mill dams or water supply dams that have been left in the channel, and no one's really keeping up on them. You're assessing a visual note. You said this earlier, there's no real public commitment left. Correct. Correct. It's only really an impediment to ecological function? Yes.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Representative Pritchard, sorry, go ahead. Were you finished? If you're not finished, Karina,

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: go ahead. Well, I mean, I have like 20 slides, but I'll slow down into questions.

[Rob North (Member)]: You said barrier, a culvert as a barrier. So is that because of the constriction or is it?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Yes, Because of the constriction, and sometimes the culverts are perched, so they're higher than the river. Fish can't move up and down them because it's too high a perch. So they weren't properly sized for the stream. So now with these larger storm events and our understanding of stream physics and geomorphology, we want a culvert that's right sized for the stream so that you can actually the stream can fit and banks on either side of the stream can fit.

[Rob North (Member)]: Okay. What are other examples of barriers? Would that culvert be the only other one?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: I'm trying to think if other people can think of other barriers. Roads often act as barriers, and sometimes those roads are across wetlands that are part of the surface channel, so causeways.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: It'd be really kind of a dam or a culvert with a road.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Another dam. Yeah, exactly. So in 2025, over $4,000,000 was spent in the local economy hiring contractors to remove these dams. So that's heavy equipment, excavators in the river. This work costs money and it takes time and it does employ the local economy. This number, 4,000,000, does not include the engineering and design costs, which is also local firms that we hire to do this work. And it results in improved recreational opportunities, health of rivers, water quality, wildlife habitat. So it's that concept that holding back a river, you're not allowing the river to transport sediment. The water's warming up behind that impoundment. It's decreasing dissolved oxygen. So all of those things are important when we are reconnecting river function. And access to the floodplain. So the floodplain was underwater because it was a big pond, and now you have a channel again, and now the river has room to move onto the floodplain. And it brings communities together. So eight watershed organizations removed these nine dams, but there were so many more organizations involved in this process, from a funding perspective, from the engineering and construction, from the municipality, from the regional planning. So really, a lot of partners. And this work is about implementing nature based solutions and understanding that we need our rivers to function as natural systems as our best line of defense with a changing climate. And that is not new. That's been spelled out and supported in many statewide planning documents, including the Vermont Climate Action Plan, the Governor's Resilience Implementation Strategy. It's one of his five core components, nature based solutions, and implementing them. Vermont Conservation Design, Vermont's Hazard Mitigation Plan, the Lake Champlain TMDL. So all of these plans focus on leveraging natural systems. And I think you heard that earlier this week from Lauren Oates from The Nature Conservancy. Similar idea. These ideas are not new. They have existed. We just need to keep up with them. So, the goal here is to make us safer and manage our rivers toward an equilibrium condition. So that is giving the river the room to move and find its path of least resistance. The goal of that is to reduce risk to people and prevent future property buyouts. One dam removal can lower the flood elevation for 10 homes. So one dam removal is a lot cheaper than buying out 10 homes at over $200,000 for each home. And this is important not only for flood resilience, but also for drought resilience, because reconnecting rivers feeds the groundwater table. So it restores groundwater table, it restores connection. So it's not just about flood resilience anymore, especially as we experienced this year in Vermont. And it saves taxpayers dollars. It's paying now for the dam removal versus spending millions after the fact to clean up the damage. Tell us a little bit about that picture. Yes, thank you for asking about the pictures. This picture is in Salisbury at a dam removal tributary 10, which is below the fish hatchery in Salisbury, if anyone is familiar with that. It's called the Wainwright Dam Removal. This is actually Middlebury College class, environmental class, that wanted to come out and learn about what we were doing. And I will just apologize, I don't have pictures from all over the state, and that is because I work on the Lake Champlain Basin side of the state, Because someone else, the Connecticut River Conservancy, the White River Partnership, there are other really great folks and conservation districts doing this work on the other side of the state. So just as a matter of sharing and I don't want to have all the dam removal projects. I try and pass them off to other organizations, but I end up with the ones where there isn't a watershed organization to take it on. So there aren't enough watershed organizations in the state to do this work. Otter Creek is an example of that. The floods of 'twenty three and 'twenty four. I know you've heard a lot from dam safety in the past about this, definitely Vermonters recognized, I think, are thinking more about the dams that exist in the state and the condition of them. In the flooding of 'twenty '3, dam safety inspected over 400 dams. Five dams failed, 53 with major damage, and 57 were overtopped. Again, dam safety only So they have jurisdiction over non power, non federal dams. And a lot of the derelict dams So that includes the derelict dams that I work in, that realm. So we're talking about these numbers, I just wanted to explain that it includes those dams. And so with that, we were busier than ever. There was an increased interest in dam removal work and the benefit of nature based solutions. There was some connecting the dots as far as the money and cost and liability of having a dam in your backyard. And that was expressed in two articles. There are links to it here. One dam, Rulopond Dam in Williamstown. Williamstown suffered a lot of damage, and this dam was upstream of that town. And then a seven days article. So the average age of a dam in Vermont is 89 years old. So that's pretty old. And the state has, as I said earlier, over 1,000 dams. So a lot of dams, and they're getting older. So in 2025, a national infrastructure report card said high hazard potential dams nationwide have increased by 20%, driven mostly by development in downstream areas. So the hazard rises when more development is downstream of that dam.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I think that's an important point.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: In Vermont, there are 44 high hazard dams. And this, I will say, I'm using dam safety data from last year, so this could have changed. I didn't get updated data. 133 are significant, two fifty two are low hazard, and over 500 are either not rated or minimal hazard. That's a lot, 500 of 1,000 dams. ANR owns 100 dams. 80% or more are greater than 50 years old. What keeps the dam from being raided? I think capacity I think capacity. And and the landowner making the call, or the community making the call, the town can call up Dam Safety and say, Please come, raid this dam. But that would be a question for dam safety.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Can we speak to landowner liability? Is that should we hold that one off for landowner

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: As or for the part of the Flood Safety Act, we testified related to landowner liability, And it's something that I think we need to think about more as how it's really important for these landowners to understand what they have and be responsible for it. I will just say that the state audit, I think it was a couple years past now, made recommendations to accelerate dam safety rulemaking, accelerate inspection and inventory and staffing for the Dam Safety Division. The American Society of Civil Engineers 2023 report card, which is their most recent, gave them a grade C for dams, and recommended that we staff up dam safety, we remove the split jurisdiction of the PUC dams versus the DUC dams, and staff up the rivers program.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: You've done.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: All of those things were in flood safety acts, they have not been done. I mean, the staffing piece is Yes, correct. The staffing piece. Although I believe dam safety is still working to hire. It's not easy. In 2018, we passed Act 161, which is dam safety regulation. Phase one of that has moved through, and that was the administrative phase, which really worked on dam owner responsibility and obligation, recording the dam and the land records, periodic inspections, hazard classifications. Phase two has been delayed, and it is still delayed. We're hopeful that it will move in 2026, but that really beefs up the dam safety technical standards and includes more inspections and monitoring and record keeping criteria for that hazard potential classification, emergency action plans, dam order application requirements. I'm going to speak to dam orders in a little bit, but I just wanted to call attention to that. So we have in 2018, we passed Act 161, and we're still working on that.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: You know what? Is there a request for extension on this one? Do you know in our bill that we're looking at? I don't know. Are they behind on a deadline for these? They are. Do you know the deadline that they are supposed to have met?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: I know that it was officially extended once for, like I think 2025 was the most recent deadline they were supposed to have met. And it was initially 2023. And I know that one was there was an extension, or at least we had a meeting about a request for extension. But I'm unclear. And then the Flood Safety Act. I think I can move through this slide fairly quicker because you guys are more familiar with that. That was passed in 2024. The staffing piece has been addressed, but the implementation of the dam safety portion of that legislation has not. And that's strengthening the oversight and maintenance requirements for dam owners and investing in the removal of dams that exacerbate flooding, as well as the wetlands piece and the rivers piece. So back to the work we're doing with the Vermont Dam Removal Initiative is trying to meet the scale of the need. And what we need is a policy that supports our work. So a policy that supports restoring and implementing nature based solutions for streams, rivers, riparian areas, and floodplains towards natural stream process in order to expedite the outcomes and reconnect land and water critical to restoring water quality, aquatic habitat, and reducing flood and fluvial erosion hazards. Right now, the process is really slow. Some of these projects take three years, some of them take eight years or more. There are many permits, depending on where you are and the nuances of the dam, and it's not always a clear path as to which permit you need to move forward. So an idea is trying to simplify that process and clarify that process so that we can move these projects forward.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: But which of these bullet items don't need to get done for a restoration project? Well, is sort of a list of permits you need, I think. Yeah. These are And so if you were I mean, it seems like a lot of these reviews would still have to happen.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: They would still have to happen, but they don't have to happen by having separate reviewers in each district. So, an idea is having a restoration team that is all on the same page with how these projects work has the same experience and can review them and move them forward and know, Okay, this one's going to be extra tricky, but we know this. Really having, level setting the regulatory review process and those people reviewing those projects. Because right now we've had a lot of inconsistency with that.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: There's multiple districts in different regions. So someone maybe who's never reviewed a restoration project all of sudden has to.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: And then someone leaves and then there's no one in that area, and so someone else has to take it up. These projects also aren't moving because they're not considered public safety projects.

[Rob North (Member)]: So they

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: prioritize at least the Rivers program has had to prioritize those projects that are immediate public safety. I would argue that this is providing public safety for the long term and is equally important and needs to move forward concurrently. And so, yes, not always do all of these permits apply, but all of these permits can apply and have been. With the section four zero one, I'll just say that one, we were we thought we needed to obtain that one for a project, and in the end, we were able to avoid that. So, normally, you don't have to do that one. Yep. And then this so I'm just gonna do a couple case studies of two dam removal projects that I did this summer. This is Breadloaf Dam in Ripton, behind the Rickert Nordic Center, if anyone is familiar with that area. And this was an old you go. So this dam was built to provide water supply for the Bread Loaf campus. And it was built in 1938, so not that long ago as far as dams go. I've removed dams that are 300 years old. So what was unique about this project is we actually had the engineering designs, the blueprints from the construction. So this dam had been abandoned for water supply for a good amount of time, like thirty years. They were using it informally for withdrawing water for snowmaking, but they didn't actually have it. It wasn't designed for that purpose, and it wasn't the most efficient way to serve that purpose. So this removal just was a great collaboration with Middlebury College, the Otter Creek Conservation District, who originally identified this project in the scoping study in 2020. We removed it in 2025. In addition to many of the permits you saw in the last slide, this one also had an Act two fifty permit because Red Loaf Campus has an Act two fifty permit. So that was something we have to navigate as well, but expected based on the scenario. And we also had to design a water intake structure for the snowmaking in order for Middlebury to support removing the dam. So it was sort of a two part project of removing the dam and designing new water intake for Rigor Nordic Center.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: So did having the original engineering did that save any engineering money? The design?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Yes, it did. It saved money, and it really helped with the design piece because we could see where the historic channel was and the topography that was historically there. And this dam was Often dams fall into different categories: fish passage priority, water quality priority, or flood safety public safety priority. This dam and sometimes they meet all of those and sometimes they only meet one. This dam checked all of those boxes. So it was upstream of Rickert Nordic Center. There had been flooding on that National Forest Road in the past. Brandy Brook, the river that this flows through here, is a lovely brook trout fishery. So brook trout were a big thing. So this was funded both by US Fish and Wildlife Service and FEMA through Vermont Emergency Management's Flood Resilient Communities Fund and through Lake Champlain Basin Program. I'm trying to make sure I've listed all of the funders. So I'll just say that it's always a puzzle of funders because these projects are expensive and you typically leverage money by having some portion from one funder and another from another. But the projects are stronger when we have that many different stakeholders at the table. For this pre bid meeting for dam removal construction, we had 17 contractors show up, which is not uncommon, but a good number. So there's, like, a strong interest in this work from the local contract construction crew. And I believe most of these contractors are all in state, which is really great.

[Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Representative Saccoons. Karina, going back to the last slide, I just wanted to get a scale of the project. Can you tell us about how tall that dam is?

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: It's very approximately and of for for me to get a

[Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: sense from the fair down.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: We don't have them here, but I think this one was over 50 feet high. Actually, think I that's an exaggeration.

[Rob North (Member)]: I don't think it's that.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: No, I think closer to 12 or something like that. Sorry. That was way off. And yes, you could probably Google it and it would come up, because I wrote a press release with all these facts, but I don't have them in front of me.

[Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: And how much did it cost him?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: I think I have that in the next slide. Right here. Dollars 347,000. No, the low bid was $200 My screen share is on top of the number, but I think you guys Oh, it hasn't advanced. Good news. So the low bid was $265,000 The engineers' construction estimate was $347,000

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: That's just the construction removal cost, not the engineering Correct.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: That does not include engineering. That and you can see the range of bids. So pretty big range. If we have one that's coming in at $265 and one that's at 837,000 And this is the water intake that was designed downstream in Brandybrook right next to the Nordic Center. So that's the new So we're taking out a dam and replacing it with this, what's called a water intake, but it is a different form of a dam. It's a plate that comes in and out. It is passable by fish, so you can see there's always flow going through, but that plate is only in for the months that they need to draw snow. So I think it's like two or three months in the winter season, and then it comes out.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: But that little fish passage is what the fish get when it's in?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: That's what the fish get when it's in, which is not a time when they're moving as much. Wait. I think this has some of the damn facts. It doesn't have the hiding. There is a link here. Just for the sake of time, I'm not going to share it. I'm going try and share another one. But there's a YouTube link here where you can actually watch. We did time lapse photography, and you can watch the excavation work. Go ahead. Oh, sorry. Representative North.

[Rob North (Member)]: Yeah, I had the joy of being on the Act two fifty Commission that did the Act two fifty major minor decision on permitting for this. I got to go visit it beforehand. This is

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I hadn't seen it. Have

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: to go out there. I thought you looked familiar.

[Rob North (Member)]: One of the main issues that we were discussing at the time was what to do with all the silk. That was one of the reasons why it was impaired is it wasn't holding any water but the whole thing was essentially full of silt. It was only just a little layer of water on top. And the whole pond there. Well, this is a nice big pond. This is holding back. No, it's not. It's holding back very little water. Gotta just go right over. Exactly. Where did all that silt go? I I know there

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: was a plan for it, but got No, think that's a

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: good question. So when these dams are abandoned, an active dam will be cleaned of sediment and silt through, you know, if it's being used for energy or for blood storage. This dam was not being used, so all of that had accumulated, so really there wasn't so it really was raising the river elevation there. All of the sediment went to a field as you're right after the cemetery on that road, the Road 599. Thank you.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I know a lot.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Yeah. So it went to a field. There was a big pile, and I think it looks pretty good. It was out of wetlands. It cleared archaeology and historic impact. It was away from the river, and it was piled and seeded with native seed mix.

[Rob North (Member)]: Yeah, exactly.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Right. Smooth out the farm field.

[Rob North (Member)]: That'll work. I know the numbers that were given at the time were like two forty truckloads. We were worried about that little road handling two forty round trip

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: big Right.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: You found a pretty close place.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: We found a close place. And I will just say that's what drives the cost of these projects, is the sediment management. And that is part I mean, I think we, as a state, need to learn to be more comfortable with letting some of that sediment go downstream if the infrastructure downstream can handle it. Because the river has been starved of that sediment for a long time, and that sediment has nutrients that feed the ecosystem. So it's a balance, and there's not a blanket answer for every site and every place. But that's what drives up the cost, removing that sediment and finding another place to put it and dealing with all of that.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Has anyone that you're familiar with had an incremental approach to releasing that sediment over a few years or some other way of letting it flow through more naturally?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: There are other examples in other states based approach, and we did that partially at the Wainwright 1 on Tributary 10 in Salisbury that I showed you, not all of the sediment, I think about half, was taken from that site. We tried to take out less. The original design was really not to remove much. The problem with the phased approach is that it's really expensive to mobilize equipment multiple times to a site. And our grants have a timeline. So the funding is constrained, so to stretch it out doesn't work for all the pieces. But I think the Rivers Program and the Army Corps, who are the regulatory bodies that really review the sediment piece, we're all working together to try and address that sediment question. And I think a lot of this conversation about the permitting hurdles have come from that piece. I'll just name that, like the sediment management is the basis. And I think there's a little bit of a rub with the TMDL for Lake Champlain that, so that's part of it.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Yeah, because that sediment is full of phosphorus. Right. Representative Tagliavia?

[Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: A couple of questions. I think you asked part of it with respect to the cleaning. The dams in Vermont, are most of them cleaned of the silts simply by excavation and not by some sort of a design feature?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: The active dance? Yes. I don't know that I I would be the person to speak to about that. I don't have the answers for that. I think it varies. Yeah.

[Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: With respect to this silk, I agree that some of the silk should be able to go downstream. I mean, if we allow ourselves to look at the history of the Earth, that's where it all went anyway. So to try to play God with some of this stuff, I think it's more dangerous than good. With respect to the cost of removal, when you go to the dam removal? Daniel Keeneman? Yeah, Keeneman. I question him a lot about

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Mill.

[Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: So you brought up the cleaning and the silt. So I wasn't gonna say it, but when you brought it up, there was a site right across the road from that where the off road dump truck could have driven across 22 feet of pavement up someone's driveway into a massive hole, but they were denied. And I still can't get a realistic answer of why, because it would have saved, like you said, you pointed out, a lot of wear and tear, a lot of truck miles, a lot of additional burned fuel, and somebody who won it right across the road was denied. So I think that we really need to re examine that piece of the puzzle.

[Rob North (Member)]: Thank you for opening the door for me to allow me to bring that up again.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Yeah, I appreciate that, and I agree with you. I was gonna play this little so this is a livestream video of Brandy Brooke. So this is the river after the dam removal is out. See if it works.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Sometimes there's a little delay. We'll see. Oh, there it goes. There it goes. Maybe. Yeah.

[Rob North (Member)]: That's literally a live view right now.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: It's working on my computer.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: It's working, you have to give it time. I think it started to run.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Really slow. Oh, it's not moving at the same speed. It's only like fifteen seconds, but it just shows the river meandering and finding that channel and creating its own path over time. So it's just pretty fun to leave those cameras up for a little while and see how the river functions.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Any good wildlife on that one?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Not yet. It's right there. There

[Rob North (Member)]: was no tracks in the picture prior.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: There you go. Oh, now

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: it's I guess definitely a delay.

[Rob North (Member)]: What time of year was this? Because those look like bear tracks on the other side.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: This was in the fall. So this project started in August, and actually it only took one of our record removal projects, and all the excavation work took less than four weeks. So the contractors were in and out of it really, really efficiently. So, yeah, the snow did come early. This is another dam removal that we did. I'm just wanting to keep I think I'm doing okay on time.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: We have nothing else scheduled out. So you have you have a lot of time.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: This is Youngs Brook Dam in West Rutland. So this was the one that was like 70 feet high. It was a very tall dam. And you can see me in that picture and the dam, and then the brook flying freely after the dam removal. But this was also a water supply dam. The theme of 2025 was abandoned water supply dams that were removed. And they tend to be really high dams because they're holding back water. And this dam was a significant hazard dam. It was blocking a lot of river. It had been built in the 20s, but it had been breached in 1985. And then even after the breach, and that was from a storm event, the risk to downstream infrastructure continued. Dewey Avenue, which is the road below this brook, was washed out in, I think, Irene, and then even again in one of the recent flood events. So there's been a lot of impact on that stream. This one did not check the fish passage. Funding for US Fish and Wildlife Service was not here for this one because there was a bunch of natural waterfalls that were determined to preclude fish passage formally. I think habitat was definitely restored through this one, so it was really great for that.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Was it a town water supply?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: It was a town water supply for West Rutland. And I have another time lapse that was one ish no. No. It's really much better on my screen than it is up there. But huge

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Yeah. It is better on your screen. Yeah.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: It's just slow on that one. It was a stretch to bring it, but I just thought it's so cool. But you can find this on our free Vermont Rivers website too. Is this still going? So, yeah, this was these contractors, Fabian, excavating from West from that area, Rutland, I think. They did a great job. This one took a long time. There was oops. I didn't mean to do that. So they've been working hard at it. It was finished, but we did have to get an extension October into winter work season for this one. And the stockpile. So this one had a lot of sediment that needed to be removed. The dam was like a mixture of concrete and earth, and you could actually still see the wooden forms of the concrete when we got down to the But the stockpile is still not solidified. There's so much moisture in a lot of that sediment that it takes time to drain it. The contractors are actually going to be working on it again this spring, just trying to stabilize that stockpile and seed it and mulch it. We seeded it for the fall, but still a little mucky out there.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: What kind of monitoring are you doing after you take out a dam?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: That's a really great question. So some of our permits require monitoring for our dam safety permit, for dam order, and often our Army Corps of Engineer permit, sometimes our river program permit. So we have to do monitoring when it's required, and we try to do monitoring for every project, but sometimes there is no funding for monitoring. So it's a funding issue and a capacity issue because there's not even enough funding for dam removal. And then to do the monitoring piece, that gets pushed off because a lot of the funders just want to move on from the project, and the monitoring takes years after the project is done. So there's definitely a funding barrier for monitoring, but we've tried to work around that and find funding and be creative in different ways to get that work done. So all of the projects that BNRC is working on have monitoring. Some are not every year, some are every other year. But I am visiting the sites every year.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: What are you monitoring for?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: The monitoring is for the stream change. So we actually do photo points in the channel, channel profile change, so how the river changes. Invasive species is a requirement of some of our permits. Tree planting, so tree planting happens in survival of the trees and some of the sites. Water quality monitoring is happening in some of them, but not all of them. So just temperature and dissolved oxygen.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: No benthic macroinvertebrates or fish?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Reach out to Vermont Fish and Wildlife to do that work when they can, and they have an interest. So they are tracking that. And we'll also ask them to do fish surveys for us before sand removal to identify what species are out there. But we'd love to do that more. And we are where we can, but not always.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Just a sense of who your funders are.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Vermont Emergency Management via FEMA. So this dam in West Rutland was funded through congressionally delegated funds through Senator Leahy. So we applied for these funds back in 2001 or 2021. Or the Flood Resilient Communities Fund has helped fund a couple of these projects. Lake Champlain Basin program, US Fish and Wildlife Service. And US Fish and Wildlife Service has different funding mechanisms. Great Lakes Fisheries Program is one. National Fish Passage is one. Is everything okay?

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Yeah. We just have a radio that comes on this time every day. Really very I'm also not

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: sure why my slide is not advancing. I'm trying to make that figure that. Let me just see if I can stop share, find my slide.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: To the news every day, is this the last thing? Almost make it up. You can almost make it up? Oh, really? Like, what I hear.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: I'm stuck in those time lapse videos. Sorry, it has to go through, though. So I think those are most of the funders I've mentioned. Watersheds United Vermont, DEC, through the Clean Water Program, Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: How should United oh, they access money.

[Rob North (Member)]: They hold

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: funds and distribute them. And the Clean Water Service Provider has chipped in on funds when they can and when they meet the FFI criteria. Okay, so back to Just a couple more slides. But back to the problems. We have all these aging dams. And I think Vermont is more aware than ever that we need to do something about our aging dams. And after these storm events, we had more dam removals than ever. We did nine this past year. The year before, we did six. But meanwhile, dam repair is really popular. We're having to repair all of these dams that were impacted in the flooding. So there was over 400 dam inspections after the twenty twenty three flood. DC looks over 900. They have jurisdiction over 900 dams. Those non powered, non federal dams. So when these dams are impacted post flooding, they need to be repaired or sometimes the landowner will decide to remove them. But the question remains in certain circumstances whether the dam should actually be repaired. Whether it's providing a public good that is the greatest benefit to people of Vermont. And whether the safety of repairing it in the short term is the answer versus the long term safety of a restored river for water quality, flood resilience, biodiversity, and climate resilience. So all of those things need to be factored in. And the dam order, as it's currently structured, the analysis starts with repair instead of whether the dam should even be there in the first place. So, as we haven't moved forward on our Act 161 legislation for Phase two, as we haven't moved forward with the Flood Safety Act, dam safety implementation, And as we have more of these dams that were damaged and are needing repair, we are missing an opportunity to not think about those dams and whether they should be repaired. And so that's the other piece of this that we're thinking about. Because we also review those dam order applications that come in and provide comment. And I'll just share this as an example of one that was impacted in the flooding. It's Marble Mill Dam on the Battenkill, right below Dorset Marsh, which is a class one wetland on the west branch of the Battenkill. The Battenkill is an outstanding resource water for Vermont. It is a privately owned dam with no public access. It's on a river that's a world class brook trout fishery. And the impoundment is impacting water temperature downstream through the solar heating of the impoundment itself and impacting Vermont water quality standards. So it's blocking recreational access to the river and fishing and swimming opportunities for the public. So this was an example of one that came across our desk where we provided comments because we thought the public benefit was greater for not repairing the dam.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: But it got repaired.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: But it got repaired.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: And it's blocking public access because a pond along a river is private? Mean, this water is in the state of Vermont.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Right. There's no right. So if someone were to stay in the water and slide over the dam, I guess they could have public access. But because it's a concrete barrier that's spanning the channel, and they are in charge of maintaining that.

[Rob North (Member)]: And it's posted Is this dam right in the

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: center of this town? I'm not familiar. Right

[Rob North (Member)]: in the center of Manchester where the rock boat is? No.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: No. That's a different dam. This is downstream of that. Yeah. On a side road. So this is just a private this is a house that was built where maybe an old mill was, and they enjoy having the dam.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Represent title ideas.

[Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: Impoundment increases downstream temperature, solid heating. Don't beaver dams with impoundments increase downstream temperature?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Beaver dams can slow water down and create pond areas. I don't study beaver dam temperatures, so I don't know exactly. But beaver dams tend to be higher in parts of the watershed where there is groundwater underneath that's providing springs and keeps them cool. But, yeah, it could be argued that fever dams.

[Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: We don't know if there's that much of a difference in temperature because of these? I'm just trying to make it make sense how one temperature increase we know for sure is bad, but the other one we're not sure of.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Yeah, and I think that's an important question, and I don't think you should just look at temperature. I think it's all of the impacts. So it's dissolved oxygen, it's lack of sediment transport. Beaver dams don't do those things because there's still flow moving through a beaver dam on the sides. It's made of wood. It still has some like fish can move up and down it, so it's really not blocking the whole stream from its natural function.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Representative Pritchard.

[Rob North (Member)]: The Dorset Marsh, is that the marsh between Route 30 and West Row? Is that? It's pretty long. Yeah, yeah.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Okay. Because

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: I don't know the areas maybe as well as you, so I will

[Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: say Yeah, I

[Rob North (Member)]: mean, that's pretty big wetland, because it goes, I I would say it starts like Downtown Dorset in back of the Dorset, in Dorset Playhouse. And that marsh, I think, goes all the way down to almost Manchester Climb. It's a pretty cool wetland.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Yeah, it is.

[Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: Yeah.

[Rob North (Member)]: And that's being affected by?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Well, that's just the upstream habitat is Dorset Marsh. So it's just another feature of this area.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Have you ever identified a dam for removal and been denied the opportunity to remove it?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: We can't remove dams where the landowner isn't willing. So all the time. Like, there are

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I guess what I meant was through the permitting process. No.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Just delayed and spent more money, changed design, gone lots of crazy ways because there wasn't a clear process.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Austin, can

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: be for energy production? Yes. Dams can be used for energy production.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: So can you just walk us through your vision for a different permitting process? What are you imagining?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: I was just trying to advance to the last slide. I think there could be different scenarios, and we're really flexible to this. But the group of stakeholders, engineers, practitioners of dam removal watershed organizations have been talking about this. And one idea was a general permit for restoration, for implementation of freshwater restoration projects that would address all of these permits and review from all of these different regulatory bodies, but would be under one permit. Another idea was a restoration team within DEC. So not adding more staff or more work, but having the same people reviewing these projects so that we're not bouncing all over with inconsistent people. Or a restoration permit specialist, like someone who would just look at these projects and was familiar with them so that we could move them forward at the scale that was needed.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Have you been talking to ANR about this?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Yes, we have.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: At ANR, if I may ask, has it been the

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: It's been So all over the summer, we had meetings, and this really stemmed from the sediment issue with the Rivers Program specifically. And then as we sort of developed this idea, we've been talking with Neil, Kevin Burke, Emily Bird, Kim Greenwood, and then made sure to have conversations with the Rural Rock Fish and Wildlife Department as well and their opportunity to weigh in on both the dam order piece of this when dams are being repaired and the restoration piece when removing dams and dam safety.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Anything else you'd like to share with us?

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: I think a really important time to move this work forward concurrently with the work we have on the table related to nature based solutions and climate resilience and this dam safety legislation that's moving forward. So I encourage you to look more into this process and explore the dam order review process, and thank you for your time.

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Thank you for your presentation and your work.

[Karina Dailey, Science & Restoration Director, Vermont Natural Resources Council]: Okay,

[Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: members. I think that that's all the testimony we have for today. I would encourage folks to I'm going to print a couple of the bills DC miscellaneous. You don't all have to print it if you don't need to, but I think it's a good time to follow-up on some of the testimony that we've taken and think about next steps for topics.