Fix is in
Last duty
Spear Street flood repairs need to be done by April, workers aim for sooner
Area cops attend funeral for longtime Shelburne police officer
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February 13, 2025
Weekly news coverage for Charlotte and Hinesburg
Engineer lays out options for better drinking water sources
Faceoff
thecitizenvt.com
BRIANA BRADY STAFF WRITER
Last week, a civil engineer from the firm Engineering Ventures presented the Hinesburg selectboard with some possible solutions for getting clean drinking water to the town garage and residents affected by contamination from the closed town landfill off Beecher Hill Road, which has been leaching chemicals into the groundwater for the last few years. The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation originally detected high levels of methylene chloride, a toxic chemical often used in stripping paint, and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), synthetic compounds linked to cancer, in the water supply for the town garage and a residence on Forest’s Edge in 2021. Since then, testing has continued to show PFAS in town monitoring wells near the landfill site as well as the water supply for the garage and other residences on Forest’s Edge and Beecher Hill Road. According to the fall 2024 monitoring report from Stone Environmental, the company testing the groundwater in Hinesburg, there are increasing trends of PFAS in two of the monitoring wells and one of the affected homes. Stone has not found indications that levels are increasing beyond the landfill boundary and the residences that are already being monitored. “If something is alarming, then we would See LANDFILL on page 13
PHOTO BY LEE KROHN
A flash of color on a snowy day, as both cardinal and squirrel puff themselves up while occupying the same branch.
Charlotte sought affordable housing, 30 years ago LIBERTY DARR STAFF WRITER
“Rents are so high that it is impossible to save for a down payment. The ‘American dream’ of ownership is unreachable,” one respondent to a 1991 survey regarding affordability and housing in Charlotte said. “Charlotte is becoming an elitist community without a healthy income mix,” another said. With a lot of statewide discussion about
housing — the lack of it and new state regulations to spur building it — swirling around recently, the topic of development and affordability isn’t new to Charlotters. According to some town records, the town and its residents have been discussing it for the past 30 years. In the spring of 1990, Charlotte received a special planning grant from the Vermont Department of Housing and Community Affairs for conducting research and formulating an affordable housing policy for the town. The town retained a planning consul-
tant out of Essex to study the town’s current housing stock and provide recommendations on how the town could move some of the work forward. According to the report, the town, at the time, needed approximately 75 additional units of affordable housing, a mix of accessory apartments, elderly affordable housing, or affordable single-family dwellings — what See AFFORDABLE HOUSING on page 10
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