Cavendish board holds hearing on subdivision regs

By Lorien Strange
© 2025 Telegraph Publishing LLC

Cavendish’s Select Board kicked off its Monday Dec. 8 meeting with a public hearing for the proposed subdivision regulations.

It’s a touchy subject for the town. The prospect of a quarry on a small, subdivided lot on Tierney Road stood at the center of a years-long controversy about interpreting Act 250, the state’s land use and development law that made it all the way to the Vermont Supreme Court.

The proposed bylaws are the culmination of two years of work by the Planning Commission and Mount Ascutney Regional Commission. If approved, they would govern the process and requirements for dividing pieces of property into smaller lots in Cavendish.

MARC’s Jason Rasmussen explained that the ultimate goal of the current proposed regulations is to protect property values. Under state law, the Planning Commission and Land Development Review Board may waive the regulations’ requirements on a case-by-case basis. In an email to the Telegraph, Rasmussen also clarified that “Cavendish included a provision that would allow applicants to request a broad array of waivers in order to make these proposed bylaws more flexible based on the special circumstances of each site.”

Monday night’s hearing was the second and final Select Board public hearing for the proposed subdivision regulations, following two Planning Commission public hearings. “We were asked to simplify things a bit and make them easier to understand, so we did,” said Rasmussen referring to the select board’s comments at Monday’s meeting.

The regulations outline two types of subdivisions. Major subdivisions involve splitting a property into four or more lots. They require more extensive review than minor subdivisions, which involve two or three lots. Boundary adjustments that don’t create a new lot are exempt from these regulations.

The minor subdivision category “is really just to protect families who want to give land to their (relatives),” Town Manager Richard Chambers explained to the Telegraph in a phone call. That part of the regulations would prevent them from having to go through the expensive process of an engineering survey, as is required for major subdivisions.

But it was a proposed minor subdivision for commercial purposes that sparked outrage among the residents on Tierney Road—and was at the heart of public comments at the Dec. 8 meeting.

In 2017, a local quarrier requested a Jurisdictional Opinion from the Agency of Natural Resources on whether or not he could buy the site of a former granite quarry on Tierney Road, replacing the depleting one elsewhere that formed the basis of his livelihood.

For towns without zoning like Cavendish, the Act 250 dictates that commercial operations need permitting if the total land area they use is an acre or more. The proposed sale was for a 0.64-acre lot, to be subdivided from a 176-acre property, with a 0.29-acre access easement on a road on the sellers’ property—0.93 acres total. (For towns that have zoning, Act 250 kicks in at ten acres rather than one.)

Many Tierney Road residents opposed the operation, fearing that it would set a precedent for commercial operations to find loopholes around Act 250 regulations, cause noise, air, and water pollution and devalue their properties, among other concerns.

After a lengthy series of debates and legal battles in the community, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that the operation would not involve the rest of the sellers’ land or the sellers themselves and therefore did not require a permit under Act 250.

Residents of Tierney Road have sought other ways to prevent the small operation from expanding and to stop other companies from doing something similar in the future. The quarry’s owners have asserted that they have never intended to grow the company beyond a two-person, seasonal operation.

Svetlana Phillips, one of the residents who has been deeply involved with the controversy, came to the public hearing Monday night to express her concerns with the new regulations.

In both an email to the Select Board and in-person, Phillips expressed concern that the proposed regulations didn’t appear to place limits on the size of subdivisions or how frequently a property could be subdivided.

Writing for “Concerned Tierney Road residents,” she asked “what legal tool other than litigation the Town has to protect the taxpayers’ properties” from pollution and devaluation “which could result from mineral extraction, a waste dumping operation or any other use of the multiple subdivided under-one-acre lots.”

“As it looks, the approval for subdivision is a simple and no cost procedure. No engineering survey is required,” she wrote, referring to the requirements for a minor subdivision

She argued that someone could make a series of minor subdivisions within a short period of time to get around the major subdivision process, potentially for commercial extraction purposes.

In response, the Select Board and Rasmussen discussed adding wording of the bylaws to address the timing issue.  

Going forward the regulations will clarify that “a minor subdivision creates up to 3 lots within a 5 year period,” Rasmussen wrote in an email to the Telegraph. So if someone subdivided their property into two lots one year and then tried to subdivide again two years later, they would be subject to the major subdivision review and approval process. That process includes a public hearing.

While major changes in a regulation at a hearing would require sending it back to the planning commission for a hearing at that level before it could come back to the select board, Chambers didn’t believe the changes rose to that level. In an email to The Telegraph Chambers wrote “Since it was discussed to add at this Public Hearing and is not a significant change to the document it can be changed….minor changes can happen and should happen since that is, in my opinion, what Public Hearings are for. Gives the public a voice in the document.”

Rasmussen also explained that while the proposed regulations don’t place restrictions on minimum lot size or the maximum number of lots, “the maximum number of subdivision lots would practically be limited by state water/septic rules, any applicable subdivision standards and/or the developability of each site.” Act 250 also has additional restrictions for subdividing a property into five or more lots.

Mount Holly’s Planning Commission Chair Jon McCann was also in the audience. Like Cavendish, Mount Holly has no zoning, but they did adopt subdivision bylaws in 1998. Town Manager Richard Chambers asked McCann if Mount Holly had discovered anything their ’98 law didn’t cover.

“We’ve found that things work fine when everyone is acting on good faith,” said McCann, adding that professional developers like to find loopholes. Boundary line adjustments had particularly been an issue, he said, and Mount Holly has seen some “borderline dishonest” proposals.

Cavendish’s voters will decide whether or not to adopt the proposed subdivision bylaws at the polls in March.

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Later in the meeting, Chambers said that Diane McNamara, who has been Cavendish’s Town Clerk and its Town Treasurer for many years, will not be running for either position this March. Which means that Cavendish needs to find someone to fill each or both positions, as soon as possible.

Town Auditor Andy Amstutz stressed that both positions, but most especially that of the Treasurer, are “relatively technical”—it will be important that whoever is elected is well qualified.

Select Board member Sandra Russo acknowledged that it is difficult to find an adequate replacement for someone who has been serving the Town so long and has so much knowledge about the way the system works.

Chambers agreed with Russo’s and Amstutz’s concerns but added that he wouldn’t like to discourage anyone from running for either position. He recommended the Vermont Secretary of State website as a resource for anyone who wants to learn more about each job.

Anyone interested in running should submit a petition to the town (one for each or either position) with at least ten signatures from registered Cavendish voters by January 26th.

Due to a Zoom bombing, the virtual meeting was offline for about five minutes, starting during the break between the public hearing and the regular Select Board meeting. It came back on after the first article of the regular meeting had already begun, during the discussion on Act 181 and Cavendish’s new Future Land Use map in which Rasmussen answered the board’s questions about the process of crafting the new map.

The Select Board also approved three liquor licenses, discussed the parking ordinance, briefly discussed changes with Act 181, and recommended Debra Norton as a temporary replacement for a vacancy on the Proctorsville Fire District Prudential Committee. Chambers also told the board that the Old Town Garage will need to be tested in the spring, funded by the petroleum clean-up fund, because wells were too low in the fall to conduct testing.

Chambers and the board also set two budget meetings for December 22 and January 5, both at 6:00pm.

The Cavendish Select Board’s regular meetings are at 6:30 p.m. on the second Monday of each month, at the Town Office, 37 High St.