Vermont Not on Track for Lake Champlain Cleanup Despite Nearly

Vermont Not on Track for Lake Champlain Cleanup Despite Nearly $1 Billion Spent

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On the last day of August, Jeff van den Noort waded into Lake Champlain up to his ankles and dipped a jar into thick swirls of neon green film coating the water just steps from his home on an island in northern Vermont. It was the worst he had seen all summer. Later that week he loaded Mason jars and a smartphone into his rusty Saab, drove to four more spots along the shore, and uploaded his findings to an online database as part of a volunteer monitoring effort. ProPublica reported that van den Noort has watched this water change since his parents bought the house in 1966, when the lake was clear, and especially since he moved in full time in 2010 to care for his ailing mother.

After a decade and nearly a billion dollars spent on water quality projects, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency told Vermont last year that the state is “not on track” to meet the phosphorus reduction targets it must hit by 2036. Halfway through the two-decade timetable, Vermont has achieved only 35% of the goal, according to the state’s most recent estimates, and the EPA warned the state would need to more than double its annual pace.

Seven Stations Have Failed Every Year Since 2015

The culprit is phosphorus, a nutrient essential to life but pouring into the lake from fertilized farm fields, manure, dirty stormwater, and sewage plants overwhelmed by heavy rains. Too much of it tips the ecosystem out of balance and fuels blooms of cyanobacteria — blue-green algae that have killed pets, closed beaches, and hurt businesses and property values along the shore. A Seven Days and ProPublica analysis of lake monitoring data through 2025 found that seven of Lake Champlain’s 15 sampling stations have exceeded the EPA’s annual phosphorus limits every year since 2015, and four stations recorded higher average phosphorus levels over the past decade than in the decade before.

The lake supplies drinking water to about 200,000 people. Vermont shares the 120-mile water body with New York and Quebec, but it is the source of about two-thirds of the phosphorus flowing in. Ingesting cyanobacteria-laden water can cause vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness and liver damage; skin contact can cause rashes. Researchers have also detected possible links between chronic exposure and heightened risk of Parkinson’s disease and ALS.

From Shumlin’s 2015 Promise to a Decade of Delay

Just over a decade ago, state leaders seemed ready to act. In 2015, then-Gov. Peter Shumlin stood by the Burlington waterfront and signed Vermont’s Clean Water Act, tightening pollution limits and creating the Clean Water Fund to pay for the work. In 2016 the EPA finalized tougher cleanup targets — a total maximum daily load — that the state must meet by 2036, replacing weaker goals set in 2002. A 2020 EPA report card even acknowledged that Vermont had checked off every milestone up to that point.

A former EPA official who helped set the 2016 target, wrote in an email that the early steps the state took, such as upgrading sewage treatment plants, were “low-hanging fruit.” By the time he retired in 2021, he and his EPA colleagues had grown concerned about lagging enforcement on farms. One clear fix, the official wrote, would be ensuring farms comply with required practices and avoid spreading manure before anticipated rainstorms, which have caused “major phosphorus runoff events.” Vermont has also delayed acting on an EPA directive to strengthen regulation of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs — the larger consolidated dairies that New York has regulated with such permits for decades. A recent state task force report recommended studying the idea for another five years, and the state still splits farm pollution oversight between two agencies, the Agency of Agriculture and the Agency of Natural Resources, a division that has caused lapses in inspections and enforcement.

“We are moving apace with the commitments we’ve made, in terms of the projects, but it isn’t manifesting itself nearly as quickly in the lake monitoring data,” said Julie Moore, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources. “This is a complex ecosystem, and we need to come at this work with a whole lot of humility.”

Leaders of the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets echoed the patience argument. “The first five years, we were really developing an enormous amount of programs,” said Laura DiPietro, the agency’s water quality program director, but implementing them “doesn’t happen overnight.” She expects greater phosphorus reductions in the coming decade. In September, the Department of Environmental Conservation told the EPA that in two northeastern sections of the lake most chronically plagued by runoff, the state is not nearly on track — reductions in farm pollution in the Missisquoi River watershed have slowed since 2023, and stormwater runoff remains unaddressed.

The View From the Shore in North Hero

For residents like van den Noort, the data is personal. “I just don’t feel like enough is being done,” he said. “And I think the state needs to take this seriously.” In September he found turquoise and white patches of cyanobacteria in the lake near his home — colors scientists say appear when blooms break down, potentially releasing toxins. “The worst days ever are really, really bad,” he said. “Just as far as you can see, the whole bay is green.”

If a small, conservation-minded state cannot tackle this problem, the cleanup struggles facing the Great Lakes, the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico look even steeper. The next dated milestone on record is the one the EPA set in 2016: Vermont must meet its phosphorus targets by 2036, and with seven stations failing every year since 2015, the state’s own agencies now acknowledge they are not on track, having delayed action on farm regulation, stormwater control, and fixing the split oversight of farm pollution.

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