This commentary is by Libby Moyer, who lives in Vershire and works in communications. I live in one of the two smallest towns in Orange County, Vermont: Vershire. About 670 of us live here, and just three buildings constitute our downtown. We are one of 30 towns whose planning maps are drawn by Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission (TRORC). That is how 15 to 17 acres of private farmland here were classified and color-coded in a restrictive Future Land Use category.  The map is not my deed. It is also no longer just a picture on a screen. TRORC’s maps classify a certain stretch of this farm as poorly drained Cabot silt loam. They colored it lavender-pink on the screen. The fields are emerald green, edged with goldenrod and milkweed. No one from the commission came with a shovel to test the soil. The label comes from opening a portal that digitally models a soil survey, not from a field determination of this ground.  The viewer I used was marked as outdated. It noted that Tier 3 work had been suspended. There is no licensed surveyor’s seal on TRORC’s work. At a public meeting in Bradford, I asked the executive director, who crafts these maps with his staff, whether he holds credentials as a surveyor. He said no.  I will not treat this map as a survey or a substitute for walking the ground. Vermont already says what kind of map defines rights in land. Making or altering maps used to fix rights in real property is the practice of land surveying. Tax maps and assessment maps are allowed when they are clearly not the legal boundary line. A state board created to oversee regional planning and Act 250 may find those pictures in “conformance.”  Conformance to what? What is the ideal this parcel is supposed to match? This is private property, a working landscape. It is not the idea that fills public meetings with those who disagree with the colored picture maps. The picture does not rewrite the deed. It changes the colors, the rules and the players who follow the parcel around.  People who defend the time and taxpayer dollars spent on these maps say they are only “guidance” for the future. Then the maps should not be used to decide which desks get a say in what happens next on the land.  READ MORE Our TRORC regional Future Land Use draft is 220 pages. The words “shall” and “must” appear a staggering number of times. That is not guidance. A document written in the language of duty is a rule.  It’s not just Vershire. The same pattern of classifications in color — wetlands, soil, forest, rare species, conserved land, even rural recreation — runs from the Northeast Kingdom to Bennington County. When 11 regional planning commissions slip from working with local taxpayers who know their own ground, the picture starts to govern the ground.  I filed objections where the process said they belong: a 120-signature objection from people across the TRORC region; our selectboard and local planning commissioner went on record; and formal objections to the Land Use Review Board and to TRORC.   Washington will not rewrite Vermont law. This is private working land across the state, and not one digital plane with a fixed pixel. A 30-town region is varied. The needs of a working hill town are not the same as those of a resort town.  Whose vision is the map? Out the window: a driveway, wind on the pond, pasture, house, barns, goats, a chickadee, woods on the edge. On the electric screen it’s a stack of paints. Lavender wetland wash over a house built in 1975 whose deep basement is forever dry. An ash-borer stain over pasture that has no trees. A bat-range overlay that swallows the barns without a nest survey.  The analog world still locates the parcel with a deed and a pin. Act 152 (formerly S.325) repealed the road rule and Tier 3. Yet the maps remain live. So does the missing page that town treasurers and the people would still like to see: cost to towns, effect on the tax base, effect on Current Use. Forests are already doing the carbon work the plans describe.  I try to repurpose the farm’s former bakery shop; the colors hand me a roster — town zoning, the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, possibly Act 250, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, and the scientists, engineers and lawyers I would have to hire. That is multiple expensive stops before the first hammer hits the board.  A tool for governing land should be cheaper than the harm it prevents, clearer than the custom it replaces, repairable by the people who live with it and grounded in the field. It should not replace the family who works and keeps the place, the town that taxes it or the forest already doing the public work.  TRORC already had a regional plan good through 2033. Yet the Legislature required every region to complete a new plan by the end of 2026.  If the commission wants a map, I will respect and label the drawing a drawing. Take the “shall” and “must” out of guidance. Restore deference to towns. Publish what the colors cost the tax base and Current Use. Then planning can serve the land instead of coloring over it. The goats instinctively know the path to the barn. The map’s instinct is to color in the blank on a spreadsheet. Read the story on VTDigger here: Your map is not my deed. ...read more read less