Shayd and Laurie Pecor's house in Barre, Vermont, flooded twice, a year apart. They planned to sell it to the government and retire on the money. The city turned them down, along with 39 other households, for reasons that hold up at City Hall and leave the Pecors about where they started.
There's a permit on file with the city of Barre for 18 Third Street, in the North End. Anybody rebuilding in a flood zone needs one. This one showed up in the packet for a City Council meeting in March 2024. It lists what Shayd and Laurie Pecor were putting back into their house after the Stevens Branch came through it the summer before.
Hot-water tank, furnace, ductwork. Cabinets and support posts. Flooring and sheetrock. Two exterior doors, a kitchen window, trim and paint.
It reads like a list of everything that makes a house work, which I guess is what it is.
The river came in on July 10, 2023. Emma Cotton reported in October for VTDigger and FRONTLINE that the kitchen appliances floated into the living room. Furniture, photographs and family heirlooms were ruined. The Pecors slept on their daughter's couch, then in a camper. The repairs took four months. They paid with insurance and savings and moved back in.
The permit took effect March 12, 2024. On July 10, 2024, the river came back and put four feet of water in the basement, a year to the day after the first time.
Shayd recently turned 59. He told Cotton he's been working since he was 14. The plan was to sell the house and retire on what it brought, and the buyer they had in mind was the government. The published reporting quotes him and not Laurie, so most of what's on the record is his side.
Who gets to say yes
A flood buyout is simple enough to describe. FEMA, the federal disaster agency, sets money aside to cut down on damage from future disasters. In Vermont, the state's emergency management office uses some of that money to buy flood-damaged homes from the people who own them. The house comes down and the lot stays empty for good, so the next time the river rises it has somewhere to go besides somebody's kitchen.
For the 2023 floods, the state told legislators that qualifying homes could be valued as of July 9, 2023, the day before the water. That's the part that makes a buyout worth wanting: you get paid for the house you had.
The homeowner can't apply for that money on his own. In Vermont it starts with a call to the town manager or the town's elected board. After 2023 the state offered to take on most of the work, the appraisals and the demolition contracts. But the city still has to agree to take part, and the city ends up owning the land. Nothing in the state's published instructions gives an owner a way around a city that says no.
The Pecors didn't need anybody's permission to pay for their own repairs, but leaving the way they planned requires somebody else's signature.
Sixty-seven Barre households asked for a buyout. The city put 27 forward and turned down 40. The Pecors were in the 40.
Cotton's reporting doesn't say when they applied or when they heard back. The city's records do show when the council set its priorities, which was February 27, 2024. That was two weeks before the Pecors' repair permit took effect and more than four months before the river came back.
What the city was looking at
According to the minutes of that February meeting, the council voted to focus first on three areas: Vine Street and Scampini Square, River and Granite streets, and Harrington Avenue. The city manager said the experts favored houses right on the river, houses grouped close together, and places where the land could go back to being floodplain, the low ground a river naturally spills onto when it rises.
The city's flood resiliency plan later spelled out the reasoning. Take one house out of the middle of a block and the river barely notices. Take out a row and the water has real room, and the houses on either side get a little safer.
Third Street wasn't one of the three areas.
Federal rules don't require buying in groups. A state official told the council in January 2024 that single properties could qualify. Grouping was Barre's own priority, picked for what it would do for the whole city.
Taxes came up too. Thom Lauzon, a city councilor at that 2024 meeting, is recorded in the minutes saying it was a hard job to tell people no, "especially when looking at permanent removals from the grand list." The grand list is Vermont's name for all the taxable property in a town. A house that gets bought and torn down comes off it and stops paying property tax.
Not everybody on the council went along. Councilor Teddy Waszazak opposed turning the requests down.
Barre has about 8,200 people. A city presentation estimated it will lose $124,564 a year in property taxes once the approved buyouts are finished. If the city had put forward all 67 households, The Washington Post reported, the loss would have been around $280,000. The two estimates were worked out at different times and may not count the same taxes. In Vermont, school property taxes go to the state, and neither figure says whether it includes them. So you can't just subtract one from the other. Still, every house the city turned down is a house still paying. The city's main operating budget last year was about $14.7 million.
Next to the budget, $124,000 doesn't look like much. The way I read the city's side, the trouble is it doesn't come back. A lot that's been turned into grass pays nothing next year or twenty years from now, while the streets still need plowing and the police still drive the same routes. With fewer houses paying, the people who stayed cover that.
This fall Lauzon, answering for the city, gave Cotton the short version: "we couldn't make the case that this would benefit the city as a whole." He called the choices "terrible decisions." I don't think those two statements fight each other. They sound like somebody who did the arithmetic and didn't like where it came out.
The arithmetic shifted some after Barre had already chosen. A state program that took effect July 1, 2025 pays towns back for the property taxes they lose on qualifying buyouts. It covers the full amount for five years, then half for up to five more, less if the program runs short. After ten years the payments stop, and the lot never goes back on the grand list.
Selling to a stranger
Shayd Pecor can sell the house. Nobody's stopping him.
Vermont law requires a seller to tell the buyer whether the property flooded while he owned it, hand over the federal flood map showing the risk, and say whether flood insurance is carried or required. A buyer who wasn't told can back out before the sale closes or before moving in, or sue for damages afterward. The law doesn't keep anyone from selling a house that floods; it makes sure the buyer was told.
What bothers Pecor is what would happen to whoever bought it. Explaining to Cotton why he didn't want to sell, he talked about "knowing that it would happen to them possibly soon."
The market nearby gives some idea of what he'd be choosing between. City sales records show 16 Vine Street sold in April 2025 for $45,000. Vine Street was one of the city's priority areas, but not every house on it went into the buyout, and this one sold privately. The listing disclosed basement water that had damaged the heating and electrical systems and asked for cash, as-is. That August the city closed on its buyout of 23 Vine Street for $199,755.
Those are different houses, and nobody's published what either one was worth before the water, so the two prices can't tell you what a flood takes off a house. They do show how far apart a buyout check and a cash-only, as-is sale can land on the same street.
The city valued the Pecor property this year at $193,300 for tax purposes. That's the assessor's number, not an offer.
So he can stay in a house that has flooded twice and wait on a third time. Or he can fill out every form the law asks for, take what someone will pay for a flooded house, and spend the next few Julys knowing who's in it. Other people in Barre have sold, the Vine Street owner among them. That's allowed, and some of them probably didn't have a better choice. Pecor would rather keep a risk he's lived through than hand it to somebody who's only read about it on a disclosure form.
I figure that choice costs him a retirement, or some of one.
The next few years
The buyouts that were approved are moving slowly. By June of this year, according to a city presentation, 16 of the 27 had closed, eight more had FEMA approval, and three were still waiting on it. Nine houses had come down. Stephanie Smith, deputy director of Vermont Emergency Management, told Vermont Public that federal rule changes in early 2025 forced her team to redo applications.
The state's buyout page says there's no open funding round right now. It keeps a list of interested homeowners in case money shows up. Neither the city's minutes nor the state's instructions describe a formal way to appeal when a city declines to put a house forward. The appeal the state does mention is for owners already in the process who think their home was valued too low.
Meanwhile the city is working on other ways to live with the river. Vermont awarded $856,428 to widen the floodplain near Harrington Avenue. Three homes are being raised off the ground with $900,000 in state money, the owners covering what the grants don't. On city land just outside the flood zone, developers plan 17 two-bedroom townhomes at a target price of $270,000, with construction expected to start in May 2027. The city is handing over the land for a dollar. The homes aren't set aside for people the floods pushed out.
Most of that makes sense, and none of it is on Third Street.
Further out, the state's tax payments to towns run ten years at most. A Vermont climate summary backed by NOAA, the federal weather and climate agency, projects heavier downpours across the state, and more of them, in the decades ahead. It's less sure how much rain summers will bring overall. Neither it nor anything else can say when the Stevens Branch reaches Third Street again. Last time it took a year.
Shayd Pecor will turn 60 sometime in the next year. The reporting this fall doesn't describe a sale or a move. The house is still his to sell, and he still doesn't want to sell it to anybody who'd have to live there.
The permit from 2024 is still in the city's records, furnace and ductwork and two exterior doors, all of it from the first flood. Whatever the river took the second time is theirs to deal with, same as before.
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Who can buy Wobby Park: The final buyer income limits and the down-payment assistance for the 17 North End townhomes were still being worked out when Vermont Public reported on the project, so it's still open whether a household like the Pecors would ever qualify.
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The last approved buyouts: As of the city's June 2026 progress presentation, eight approved properties were waiting to close and three were still waiting on FEMA, and how long those take shows how long the households Barre said yes to are left waiting.
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What Barre gets paid: The state's Municipal Grand List Stabilization Program sets the formula for paying towns back for lost property taxes, but the actual payments to Barre, and whether the fund runs short, haven't been published.
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Barre's newest flood plan: The city's document library links to a 2026 edition of its flood resiliency plan adopted July 14, which may show whether Third Street or other declined areas figure into the next round of flood work.
