WINHALL, Vt. — From his post at the town dump, Scott Bushee spent the summer observing his new neighbors, transplants who pulled into his compound with heads full of rustic fantasy and license plates from New York and New Jersey.
Bushee is one of the half-dozen or so people who run the town of Winhall, Vermont, with a year-round population, before COVID-19, of 769. He is a cranky dude. That is his brand.
At the entrance to his compound, above the sign that warns his fellow residents that they cannot enter after 3:50 NO EXCEPTION, he has affixed a demented-looking baby doll, blank-eyed and with one hand replaced by a plastic fork.
Despite this clear warning, this summer’s population explosion has tried his last nerve, as he explained to one flatlander after another how things are done in Vermont. Yes, the dump attendant, a heavily bearded man named Jody, carries a firearm. And no, you cannot mix your magazines with your cans and bottles.
“Now you’ve got to deal with Vermonters,” he said. “They will tell you straight-up. I try to do it as politely as I can, but if you push the envelope, things are going to go sideways. I’m sure that they’re looking at Jody and I and saying, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve landed in Russia.’”
It has been this way since spring, when Vermont began to emerge as a model of virus control. As city dwellers scrambled to settle their families far away from hot spots, the state’s regular summer influx swelled by approximately 10,000, estimated Jeffrey Carr, an economist who advises Gov. Phil Scott.
State planners are crossing their fingers that many of them, now free to work remotely, will put down roots. The last time that happened in a big way was during the back-to-the-land movement in the 1960s and ’70s, when the state’s population grew by 35,000, among them such icons as Bernie Sanders and Ben and Jerry’s.
For years, Vermont’s population has been stuck around 620,000, a plateau so threatening to the labor force and tax base that in 2018 the state began offering a cash incentive of up to $10,000 for remote workers who moved to Vermont.
In towns like Winhall, that is really not the problem anymore.
Instead, officials are hard-pressed to keep up with the burst of growth.
Elizabeth Grant, the town clerk, reckons that over the summer the town’s population topped 10,000. When school reopened this month, the number of enrolled students had increased by 54, a jump of more than 25%, so the costs to taxpayers will exceed projections by $500,000.
The post office ran out of available P.O. boxes in mid-June. Electricians and plumbers are booked until Christmas. Complaints about bears have quadrupled. And as far as the dump is concerned, as Bushee put it, “the closest word I can tell you is sheer pandemonium.”
“It’s hard to know who is living in what house,” said Grant, 50, who is also Winhall’s treasurer, registrar of deeds, tax collector and presiding officer of elections. (She is also the ex-wife of Bushee. It is an amicable divorce; recently, when a wasp became lodged in his ear canal, she rushed over to his house with tweezers.)
That is part of how Winhall operates, though. Everyone knows one another. When taxes are due, Grant personally calls everyone who has not paid, just in case they forgot. These days, though, she looks around the dump or the post office and finds herself utterly bewildered.
“There’s people I’ve never seen in my whole life,” she said. “I ask them, ‘Where do you live?’ And they look at me and tell me what house. I’m like, ‘Oh, God, you really do!’”
Realtors in town knew something was up in late April, when Scott began cautiously reopening businesses.
Since then, the number of available single-family homes in Winhall and Stratton, the adjacent ski resort, has dropped to 29 from 129, its lowest level since 2003, according to Tim Apps, a Realtor with the Vermont Sales Group.
