Tree town
Postseason action
Committee digs in deep with its mission
Redhawks move toward title play in strong position
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Volume 52 Number 43
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October 26, 2023
Futures Project says state needs to grow
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Youth soccer players embrace the spirit of Newberry Cup with coordinated hair color. See more about the tourney and awarding of the Joe Cenis Service Award on page 11.
For Kevin Chu, executive director of the Vermont Futures Project, the statewide data speaks clearly: “We’re growing older and we don’t know what we want to be when we grew up.” The Vermont Futures Project, an independent nonprofit, is pursuing a way to develop and use data to support the evolution of Vermont’s economy and what it calls a future full of opportunity for all. “Data is a really good way to bring people from different perspectives together and have productive discourse toward common values and goals,” Chu said at a Shelburne Selectboard meeting in late September. The group is primarily working toward developing an economic action plan for the state that will span all political administrations and proposes a goal of growing
Vermont’s current population of 640,000 to more than 802,000 by 2035. “The numbers say around 800,000 to 810,000,” he said. “I took the liberty of picking 802,000 because we can take pride in a number that we’ve put a lot of social value in as well.” The calculation is based on a workforce age gap analysis that shows a growing number of retirees and a diminishing workforce due to a shrinking number of high school students, increasingly low fertility rates, and a large aging population. “The primary numbers I’ll point to is the 14,800 retirements per year as projected by the Vermont Department of Labor just through the end of this decade alone,” he said. “Then if we look at the supply side of who the homegrown talent See FUTURES PROJECT on page 12
Next phase of Shelburne zoning bylaw rewrite takes shape LIBERTY DARR STAFF WRITER
After nearly seven months of work with a consultant, the Shelburne Planning Commission announced last week that it has moved to the next phase of its two-year zoning bylaw rewrite that focuses on community input. Aaron DeNamur, director of planning and zoning, said that the
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planning commission has spent the last few months dissecting bylaws that focus on administrative procedures along with site-design standards. “Some very technical draft language, kind of dry stuff,” he said. But now, the commission has released the first draft of the new zoning map that has been developed by the town’s consultant, PlaceSense that will usher in months of
community input and discussion sessions. “The map does a really good job of giving the community a narrative as to what’s going on and what the considerations and what the new statutes are with Act 47 and some of the implications of that on our zoning,” DeNamur. said “Then, connecting things we’re talking about to the town plan and the growth areas.”
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In addition to the zoning map is a discussion guide that presents a working draft of new zoning district boundaries and a series of questions to start the conversation rolling within the community. The map can be found at bit. ly/45OEgvU. DeNamur said that this will be the core of the conversation for the next several months, “what we’re calling listening sessions. That will
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just be to give the public a forum to come in and advocate for their interests and acts versus their concerns to the planning commission.” The commission will then hold five community meetings at different locations throughout the community “The goal is to get as many See BYLAW on page 12
LEARN MORE AT: https://www.vermontfederal.org/