Rachel and Jim Bigelow of Royalton, Vt., do some cleanup around their farmstand on Friday, March 20, 2026.. The farmstand will not open this summer because the nearby Foxstand Bridge is closed. The bridge is not slated to reopen until 2028; it closed in 2024. Jennifer Hauck/Valley News This stor y by Alex Hanson was first published in The Commons on March 22, 2026. The first summer the Foxstand Bridge was closed, in 2024, patronage of the Foxville Farmstand declined, owner Rachel Bigelow said. At the time, there was talk of opening a temporary bridge, so she kept the stand, which is just across the bridge from Route 14, up and running. Business fell off to such an extent in 2025, which was when the Royalton Selectboard opted against a temporary bridge, that Bigelow decided she’d have to make a change. “We’re not reopening this year,” she said in a phone interview. “I stayed open last year, but it really wasn’t worth it,” she said. Come April, the Foxstand Bridge will have been closed for two years, and it isn’t slated to reopen until fall of 2028. The effect on the community of having the bridge closed, and of replacing it, is coming into sharper focus. The cost of replacing the bridge, which dates to the late 1920s, has risen to $11.3 million. Where the town had been expecting to pay nearly $350,000 in matching funds, this new estimate bumps the tab up to $565,000. The Royalton Selectboard voted last summer for a plan that installs a permanent replacement more quickly, but doesn’t include a temporary bridge in the meantime. And the town is facing a lawsuit from a resident who contends that state law exposes a town to paying for costs to residents from neglecting infrastructure. Town officials were aware of the bridge’s weakening state as early as 2012 and should have taken action sooner, resident Tyler LaGrange asserts in his small claims case against the town. If there’s good news about the bridge, which was closed in April 2024 after an inspection found severe corrosion damage, it’s that the state transportation agency has committed to replacing the bridge by fall 2028, despite a shortfall in funding that’s affecting other projects. The Foxstand Bridge connects Gilman and Royalton Hill roads to Route 14. For households on the gravel roads on the right bank of the White River, the bridge is the easiest connection to the state highway and from there to South Royalton, Bethel and Interstate 89. With the bridge closed, drivers must use a network of gravel roads. Back River Road leads to the Royalton Bridge and Route 14 and to South Royalton, and Gilman Road leads to the paved North Road and Route 107 in Bethel. Either one is a long drive to Foxville Farmstand, which sits at a bend in the river that flooded over during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. The farmstand, built up in the years after Irene, was busiest during sweet corn season, Bigelow said. In addition to vegetables, the Bigelows also raise cattle for milk and meat on a farm that’s been in her husband’s family for around 200 years, she said. Patrons of the farmstand would stop in after a visit to Roma’s Butchery, just across the river, Bigelow said. The bridge closure ended that shopping connection. “To me, the damage has already been done, so we’re just kind of restructuring our lives once again,” she said, as they did after Irene. In place of the farmstand, she’ll take the farm’s vegetables and meat to farmers markets in the area, she said. And they’re considering opening up a big field for camping. Just as pressing is the safety of the roads, which weren’t meant to carry quite so much traffic. “It’s really dangerous,” Bigelow said. “We’ve had some close calls on Back River Road,” which is winding and narrow in places, and which people drive too fast. “I’m surprised there hasn’t been a major accident yet.” The detour route has been the focus of extra attention from the town road crew, Ryan Britch, Royalton’s town administrator, said in an interview. The town has applied for grants to add guardrails in places and make other upgrades along the detour. That includes a section of damaged guardrail town officials would like to replace. The added time and wear and tear of driving the detour adds up. VTrans estimated a cost to the community of around $587,000 each year the bridge is closed, based on an estimate of 550 vehicles using the bridge each day. LaGrange has used those figures, from a Foxstand Bridge FAQ page posted last summer on the town website, to calculate that the bridge closure will cost his family a little over $16,000 in added vehicle wear and tear and fuel. His house is one of the closest to the bridge, giving him the longest detour. He sent a monthly claim to the town in October, which was denied, so he filed a suit in small claims court in Windsor County, seeking $10,000 in damages. “Four and a half years closed, that’s a long time,” said LaGrange, a computer game developer who relocated to Royalton five years ago with his wife and two children. It would have cost the town more to put up a temporary bridge, which also would have delayed the opening of a permanent bridge, but it’s also costing town residents more not to have the bridge open for so long. “They’re just transferring those costs to us to save money for the town,” he said. LaGrange’s court challenge, filed Feb. 12, rests on a Vermont law, 19 VSA sec. 985, that says, “If damage occurs to a person, or his or her property, by reason of the insufficiency or want of repair of a bridge or culvert that the town is liable to keep in repair, the person sustaining damage may recover in a civil action.” Towns have what’s called “sovereign immunity,” which protects them from being held liable for indirect costs such as LaGrange is incurring, the town has written in its defense. Part of the reason for the court action is to keep pressure on the town, LaGrange said. Britch declined to comment on the suit, except to say that town officials already feel plenty of pressure to resolve the bridge closure and to maintain the detour roads. In a March 18 news release, town officials told the public that they had gone to bat for the project with the state to keep it from being delayed. But VTrans officials said the decision to keep the September 2028 completion date was made regardless of outside pressure. Like other projects, the bridge had been pushed back, Jim Lacroix, bridge engineer and structures program manager for VTrans, said in a phone interview. “We look at our priorities every year,” he said. “This one rose up the list.” The estimated cost has risen, too. Town officials had been using a preliminary estimate for the project of $6 million. Now that the state has refined the construction plan, the cost has risen to $11.3 million, which is a total price tag that includes design, engineering and construction, as well as inflation, Lacroix said. Town officials will take up how to raise the additional funds to meet a 5% match, Britch said. It has been putting money into the town’s capital reserve fund, but could also seek other sources. The cost is bigger in part because the bridge will be, too. The current span is 165 feet long, but the new one will have to be 210 feet long to accommodate the flows of the White River, or as the engineers put it, “to meet our current hydraulic standards.” The longer bridge will require the state to raise the level of the road, which will require a lot of work at the intersection with Gilman Road, Lacroix said. According to a timeline on VTrans website, construction is due to start in spring 2027. Read the story on VTDigger here: Royalton residents chafe at costs of ongoing Foxstand Bridge closure. ...read more read less