By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
Woodstock officials face a dilemma that is pervasive not only throughout Vermont, but across the entire country.
The challenge before workforce housing and economic development advocates alike is how to address chronic housing shortages that are intricately tied to sustainable economic development in an era of insufficient and declining public infrastructure in terms of water, wastewater systems, and overburdened electric power grids.
Developer John Holland of LH Management
The frustrated efforts of developer John Holland and farmer-restauranteur Matt Lombard to renovate and expand the acclaimed Mangalitsa restaurant at 61 Central Street in Woodstock Village, while simultaneously building a four-unit townhouse development for workforce housing immediately behind the Mangalitsa and Santé dining complex, are illustrative of the vexing problems facing housing and economic development advocates locally, regionally, and nationally.
“To service the upgrades to Mangalitsa, Santé, the Decant Wine Shop, and the three residences above them at 61 Central Street, we needed to draw more power,” Holland explained last weekend. “We added an elevator [for Americans with Disabilities Act access] in a new addition and we upgraded the electrical service. And there wasn’t enough power available to get to 61 Central. Simultaneously with that, there was an issue with getting enough power to the four new units we’re building at Slayton Terrace.”
Holland said Green Mountain Power Field Representative Caleb Hawley told him last spring, when work first began on the Slayton Terrace townhouses, that drawing any additional power from the utility company’s transformer under Central Street could potentially overload and “blow up” the transformer. To make matters worse, Holland said Hawley told him that at the time there were critical supply chain issues regarding transformers and that Green Mountain Power had only two transformers in its replacement inventory statewide, making Hawley “very concerned” about protecting the integrity of the transformer under Central Street in the Village.
The solution to the power woes for both the townhouse and restaurant complexes was to tap into electric utility lines along Slayton Terrace to power an independent transformer that Holland purchased and is installing at the site of the townhouses. Once all excavating, foundation, and basic framing for the townhouse project is complete, Holland said he will run electrical conduit from the 0 Slayton Terrace site to 61 Central Street — and to neighboring 63 Central Street, where a former multi-unit office building, vacant for many years, is now in the process of being converted back into a large, single-family home by a Massachusetts couple.
An architect’s rendering depicts the four-unit townhouse complex now under construction for use as workforce housing at 0 Slayton Terrace, immediately behind the site of the Santé, Mangalitsa, and Decant restaurant and wine shop building at 61 Central Street in Woodstock Village. Water for the townhouses will be drawn from a 700-foot-deep well drilled by developer John Holland and farmer-restauranteur Matt Lombard because the Woodstock Aqueduct Company said it does not have the present capacity to service the complex. In addition, Holland has to install a dedicated transformer at the site to provide electrical power to the housing units. Courtesy of John Holland
“Adam and Ashley [Mikkelson] had the same problem — they couldn’t get sufficient power for their home remodel,” Holland noted. “That building hadn’t been used in many years and the electrical system, if it functioned at all, was way outdated.” He added that the nearly year-long delay in reopening Mangalitsa is tied to the fact that he’d had to implement a workaround to get sufficient power to the remodeled and expanded restaurant and wine shop complex. As things stand now, Holland said he expects Mangalitsa to finally reopen and the Slayton Terrace townhouses to be ready for occupancy in April of next year.
The Woodstock Aqueduct Company’s well-documented water woes have also posed a challenge for Holland, particularly related to the four-unit townhouse project. The complex is intended to help address regional labor market woes by incentivizing the hiring of quality culinary and farm staff by offering affordable housing opportunities for employees of the five companies that comprise the LH Management firm jointly owned by Holland and Lombard.
Those companies include Mangalitsa, Santé, the Decant Wine Shop, and Peace Field Farm on Pomfret Road — the long-proposed farm-to-fork restaurant at the farm. Early on, the Aqueduct Company told Holland it did not have the capacity to provide water to the new townhouses, citing the same deficiencies in its water lines, capacity, and ability to deliver water with sufficient pressure that have drawn the attention of state regulators and local officials in the past year.
Holland’s solution to the water issue? He’s had to drill a well to a depth of 700 feet in the heart of Woodstock Village to provide water to the new townhouses. That – together with the added expense of installing an electrical transformer at the Slayton Street site and running conduit to the two Central Street properties – has added mightily to Holland’s and Lombard’s expenses.
“For the most part, in Woodstock’s history, we haven’t had the type and scale of development that people are pursuing right now.”
— Woodstock Planning and Zoning Director Steven Bauer
Woodstock Planning and Zoning Director Steven Bauer
On the municipal front, Woodstock Planning and Zoning Director Steven Bauer recently worked with the Town Planning Commission to implement zoning changes in the Village designed to help alleviate the local housing shortage and bring the regulations in compliance with recent statewide changes occasioned by the passage of S. 100 – the Housing Opportunities Made for Everyone Act, passed by Vermont legislators in May.
The Woodstock Planning Commission asserts that the community needs as many as 500 additional housing units in the coming years to make it possible for families with essential jobs to live in the community, as well as making it easier for local businesses to hire enough staff.
Bauer readily acknowledges the difficult times ahead in reconciling the critical need for accessible workforce housing with the challenges facing the Woodstock Aqueduct Company, the town’s sewer and wastewater handling capacity, and the increasing demand for electricity.
“The Planning and Zoning Department, the Planning Commission, and all the different stakeholders have got to come together to address all these issues,” Bauer said Saturday. “Zoning doesn’t build houses. We’ve only taken the steps so that if people come into my office with an idea, we’ve got the regulations in place that allow that to happen. We just did step one and now we’re in the process of working with all our stakeholders, figuring out the most critical problem areas, and considering all the factors — what we can control, what we can’t control — that will get us to those 500 new housing units.”
As an example, Bauer cited the work of a study group that is closely examining the potential purchase of the Woodstock Aqueduct Company by the Town. “We’re investigating what the cost to residents will be, what the positive impacts may be if we purchase the water company,” Bauer stated. “If we take ownership of it, once we’ve made the investment, get it cleaned up, get it up to speed, then we’ll just have to see where we go with it.”
Regarding power, Bauer said the lack of adequate electrical service to the Village has “not been a major problem to this point, historically speaking.” But he acknowledges that energy planners can’t be complacent. “Because for the most part, in Woodstock’s history, we haven’t had the type and scale of development that people are pursuing right now. It’s those developers who are now coming in and asking questions of me. They’ll say, ‘I have approval to build this,’ and I’ll ask ‘Have you talked to Green Mountain Power? Have you asked how you get there with them?’”
Bauer said he and other regional and state planning officials are seeking a much more global approach to the question of having enough sustainable energy to foster significant housing and economic development growth. “We really need to look at the totality of the grid problem. Here in Vermont, when we have a high demand, we need to look at how we tie in more renewable sources, how we add more solar. You have some areas where the grid just can’t handle demand and then you have other areas where the grid can’t offload the power from renewables fast enough. We’ve got to find creative ways to balance supply and demand.”
Jeff Grout is the inter-municipal regional energy coordinator for the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission (TRORC), where he is responsible for developing, procuring, and managing town-level energy projects such as audits, community solar, replacing fossil fuel heating systems, installing EV charging systems, and promoting community education projects. While he is not directly involved in addressing grid planning issues in the region and state, he has clear thoughts about how and where local planners and utility officials need to collaborate and move in the future.
“Green Mountain Power has a pretty innovative plan to distribute battery power, instead of concentrating on building more power lines,” Grout said. “They’re focusing more on energy storage in individual houses and businesses, instead of building more regional power plants onto the grid. My opinion is that the use of microgrids — generating as much power as you can right where you need it, using renewables — is the way to go. Obviously, energy storage is going to be a big part of that — and if the microgrids are connected and distributed, you can move the power along where you need it when you need it. We need to move on this for a lot of reasons — for housing and new businesses, but also to meet climate goals,” Grout continued.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do — and we’ve got to do it kind of quickly,” the TRORC energy advocate concluded.