After the second July flood, Bram Towbin had to write to his neighbors. As clerk and treasurer of Plainfield, Vermont, he owed roughly 600 households an explanation for why the municipal tax rate had jumped more than 11 percent in a single year — from 0.958 to 1.0665.
The arithmetic wasn't complicated. Two floods thirteen months apart had drained the town's reserves, eaten the surplus that normally softens the rate, and destroyed houses that nobody was going to rebuild. Those houses would not pay property taxes again. The costs they had been helping cover did not get smaller. So the rate went up on everyone who remained.
"Because the system is not designed for this," Towbin told VTDigger that August, describing residents who came into the town office having lost everything, while the town itself faced roughly $15 million in damage on top of $320,000 in unfinished repairs from the year before. Fifteen million is about ten times what Plainfield spends in a year.
Towbin has since left both positions. The problem he was describing has deepened.
The denominator
Every Vermont town keeps a grand list: the total assessed value of all taxable property inside its borders. Think of it as the denominator in a fraction. Each March, voters gather at Town Meeting and approve a budget, which is the numerator. Divide one by the other and you get the tax rate.
If voters approve $1.3 million in spending and the grand list is $130 million, the rate works out to $1.00 per $100 of assessed value. If the grand list drops to $120 million but the town still needs $1.3 million — because it still has the same roads, the same culverts, the same water system — the rate rises to about $1.08. Everyone left pays more for exactly what they had before.
That is the mechanism that makes repeated disasters fiscally corrosive in a small town. When a property is demolished, abandoned, or purchased by the federal government, its assessed value leaves the grand list. The obligations stay. Plainfield still maintains 39.55 miles of road, 93 percent of it gravel, and 321 mapped culverts, 37 of them classified as critical or needing urgent attention. It still runs water and wastewater. It still has a volunteer fire department. The operating budget for the current fiscal year is about $1.84 million.
Plainfield is a town of roughly 1,200 people in the upper Winooski valley in central Vermont. On July 10, 2023, five to seven inches of rain fell on the area. Thirteen months later, on July 10, 2024, six to eight inches fell again, tearing through the village core, houses, roads, and bridges. The town's flood-recovery page reports that almost three dozen households were displaced in the second flood and more than two dozen people stayed in the temporary shelter.
Three years in the town reports
Plainfield publishes an annual report. Read three of them in sequence and you can watch the budget change shape.
In the fiscal year ending June 2023, before the first flood, the municipal grand list stood at about $117.9 million and the tax rate was 0.837.
By the report ending June 2024, after the first flood and before the second, the grand list had edged up to about $119.2 million. The rate had already climbed to 0.958. The highway line explains why: the town planned to spend $725,840 on roads and spent $1,077,411, including $320,283 in unbudgeted flood repairs.
By the report ending June 2025, after the second flood, the grand list had fallen slightly, to about $119 million, while the municipal levy had risen to roughly $1.27 million. The rate hit 1.067. The town clerk's report noted that the flood had erased "over two dozen households from the grand list." The Planning Commission added a second consequence that gets less attention: the lost housing also removed customers from the water and wastewater systems, which cost the same to run whether or not the people who used to pay for them are still there.
| Fiscal Year Ending | Grand List | Tax Rate |
|---|---|---|
| June 2023 (before floods) | ~$117.9M | 0.837 |
| June 2024 (after first flood) | ~$119.2M | 0.958 |
| June 2025 (after second flood) | ~$119.0M | 1.067 |
Over three years the rate climbed 27 percent. The base it draws from barely moved, then contracted.
At a special Selectboard meeting that October, Towbin said Vermont's tax-abatement process — the way a town forgives or reduces taxes in hardship cases — wasn't built for damage on this scale. He took responsibility for how poorly the town had communicated with residents who'd lost their homes, and pointed to staff turnover and an administration without the capacity for what was being asked of it. The same small office sending out tax bills and processing abatements was also handling FEMA paperwork, buyout applications, and grant compliance across several programs.
What happens when a house is bought out
When a flood-damaged property is acquired through FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, the owner is paid and the structure comes down. The land is deed-restricted as permanent open space. It can never be built on again, and it can never be taxed again.
For a family, a buyout is supposed to be the way out. I wrote earlier this year about what that path actually looks like in Buncombe County, North Carolina, after Hurricane Helene — the months or years between a FEMA award and a closing, during which households carry a mortgage, rent, and uncertainty at the same time. Plainfield's records show the other side of that same waiting period.
In September 2026, Vermont Public reported that FEMA had approved funding for 18 Plainfield acquisitions, the largest share in a new statewide round. Vermont Emergency Management noted that the approvals still had to pass through appraisal and real-estate closing before anyone was paid or anything was removed. As of that reporting, none of the vacant structures from earlier approved buyouts had been demolished — the houses were still standing, empty, two years on. The town's 2025 annual report said shifting federal requirements had forced some applications to be resubmitted as many as four times.
An approved buyout and a finished buyout are different things, and the distance between them is measured in staff hours the town doesn't have. The property generates no revenue in the meantime, and the town can't plan around a schedule it has no control over.
Plainfield's CDBG-DR grant application estimates that compromised property accounts for about $14.2 million in assessed value, roughly 11 percent of the town's pre-reappraisal base. That number comes from a grant application rather than an audit, and it describes affected valuation, not completed removals. Even as an estimate it's a lot: a town that collects about $1.3 million in municipal property taxes a year is looking at the permanent loss of a meaningful share of what generates it.
The local share
Federal disaster and resilience programs usually require the community to pay part of the cost — commonly 25 percent for FEMA programs, 10 percent for Federal Highway Administration work. The formula assumes the town can produce its portion. As the base shrinks, that assumption stops holding.
Plainfield's clearest case is a USDA Emergency Watershed Protection project to stabilize eroded riverbank. The federal government would cover 75 percent. Plainfield's quarter came to somewhere between $250,000 and $304,000 as costs moved around. For a town with an operating budget under $2 million, that is an enormous ask.
The town tried to fold the match into a larger $9.7 million CDBG-DR proposal for housing built outside the flood zone. The plan required voters to approve a $600,000 bond to buy the development site. In November 2025, voters turned the bond down, 298 to 238.
Those 298 people had watched their tax rate climb 27 percent in three years and were being asked to add $600,000 in new debt to it. The CDBG-DR application failed with the bond, and the watershed match went down with it. The shrinking base also narrows what a town can plausibly ask its residents to borrow, and borrowing is how a place this size produces the local money that unlocks federal money.
As of September 2026 the watershed project was still active, but the town's grants update named no replacement source for the local share. The same memo reported that FEMA had audited Plainfield and flagged three areas of questioned compliance, involving procurement, contract language, and how FEMA accounts were handled within the general fund. This is the problem Towbin had described two years earlier, now showing up in an audit finding.
Borrowing against reimbursements that haven't arrived
To pay for work while waiting on federal money, Plainfield borrowed $1 million from the Vermont Bond Bank's Municipal Climate Recovery Fund, a program built for exactly this gap. The terms require reimbursements, when they come, to go toward repaying the loan. When the Selectboard renewed the borrowing in December 2025, the interest rate had tripled, from 0.5 to 1.5 percent.
By July 2025, then-treasurer Josh Pitts told the Selectboard the town was "rolling into tax day on fumes," with a closing balance of $98,567.52. Half of an expected bridge reimbursement, he said, would go straight back to the Bond Bank.
Reimbursements have improved since. By September 2026 the Federal Highway Administration had repaid more than $800,000 for emergency work on Brook Road at 100 percent. Permanent road and bridge projects stay on a 90/10 split, and design work on some of them was still underway, so the town's eventual local share isn't fixed yet.
One thing the records don't show is a flood premium. Plainfield's insurance line has moved between roughly $25,000 and $29,000 across recent budget cycles, with no consistent upward trend. If climate exposure is raising what the town pays to insure itself, it isn't visible in the documents available.
A state program with an expiration date
Vermont has recognized the hole that buyouts leave behind. The Municipal Grand List Stabilization Program reimburses towns for municipal property-tax revenue lost when flood-prone properties are acquired and converted to permanent open space. It pays 100 percent of the lost revenue for five years, then 50 percent for five more.
Two features matter for Plainfield. The program covers municipal taxes only, not the education property tax, which is a separate and often larger share of a Vermont tax bill. And payments start only once the acquisition has closed and the deed restriction is in place. Because most of Plainfield's approved buyouts hadn't reached closing by October 2026, the clock hadn't started on them.
The money comes from a $1 million appropriation out of the state's PILOT Special Fund, and the statute requires claims to be cut proportionally if the fund can't cover them all. No proration has been documented, but the program is new and the number of eligible properties statewide keeps growing. Fully funded, it replaces the revenue for five years, half of it for five more, and then stops. The land stays open space.
What the community is deciding, in public
The past year of Plainfield's public record is a town working through tradeoffs that don't have clean answers.
In January 2026, Selectboard members discussed whether to put money back into bridge and culvert reserves, because the next flood could come in July while federal reimbursements wouldn't arrive until September. They prepared a lower-spending backup budget before confirming that $200,000 in surplus could be applied.
At Town Meeting in March 2026, a motion to postpone the $1.84 million operating budget failed and the budget passed by voice vote. Voters also authorized the Selectboard to use any current-year surplus to reduce the following year's taxes, trading future cushion for present relief.
The disaster-reserve appropriation in the current budget is $5,000. Last year it was $10,000.
What remains uncertain
Plainfield finished its first townwide reappraisal since 2008 in 2025, which roughly doubled the nominal grand list. That makes year-over-year comparisons misleading: the jump reflects updated valuations across every property, not recovered housing. Towbin cautioned that most households would pay more even though the rate number had come down, because their assessed values had gone up. The squeeze got re-expressed in different figures.
A lot is still open. Nobody knows whether the stabilization fund will keep pace as more Vermont towns qualify, or where Plainfield will find the watershed match, or whether the 18 newly approved buyouts will close before another flood season. The town's FY2024-25 financial statements — the first full year after the July 2024 flood — are unfinished, which means there is no audited accounting of total flood costs, unrestricted reserves, or the real gap between what Plainfield has spent and what it has been paid back.
The direction, though, is visible in the documents. Completed buyouts permanently remove assessed value, raising what remaining owners pay or reducing what the town can do, and that shrinking capacity makes the next local match harder to produce.
In late September, Plainfield's grants administrator, Karen Hatcher, reported that the town had reconstituted its grants working group, partly so that deadlines and matching-fund requirements get coordinated with the treasurer's office before they land rather than after. It's unglamorous work — a small town assembling the internal capacity to track what it owes and when, because no one else is going to track it for them. The 298 voters who rejected the bond and the 238 who wanted it are all still here, paying into a base that keeps getting smaller and showing up in March to decide what the town can afford.
- BRIC mitigation money stalled: A September GAO audit found that FEMA had reimbursed only 13 percent of the $2.5 billion allocated through its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, with roughly 50 subapplications waiting more than two years for an award decision — raising the same question Plainfield faces about what communities spend while federal files advance.
- North Carolina buyout limbo: WBTV reported that approximately 40 percent of nearly 900 western North Carolina buyout applications remained pending a year after Hurricane Helene, with families like Linda and Robert Brown living on relatives' property while waiting for a federal process they cannot accelerate.
- Flood insurance outside the lines: A new GAO report found that roughly 86 percent of properties at high flood risk lacked any flood insurance, with coverage dropping to about 2 percent for properties outside FEMA's designated high-risk zones — the same zones that determined whether eastern Kentucky homeowners rebuilt with insurance payouts or returned to damaged houses with nothing.
- Hawaii's overlapping recoveries: Civil Beat documented farmers, utilities, and county responders in Hawaii managing successive storms while older recovery work remained active, showing how the capacity problem Plainfield faces with staff and grants administration scales when disasters stop waiting for the last one to finish.
