Individuals who own these cottages receive few services and only have water available to them five months of the year - accompanied by quite a hefty water bill. Now only the rich will be able to own property on this lake. The makeup of this community will change. In this situation we are really taking from Peter to pay Paul, and Peter has no recourse. A prisoner in Vermont has more rights.
Socialism is now the Vermont way.
Whether or not the Vermont Legislature foresaw the damage they would do to the social fabric in their zeal to control everything from Montpelier with the radical school funding law, is hard to say. But, as with Maine, it looks like further cultural shifts away from rural values are ahead, as longtime taxpayers take a hit from Act 60. The social change prompted one retired, Castine in-migrant to grumble that if he and his wife had wanted to live next door to people from New York, they would have stayed there. He had admired and enjoyed the associations he had made with Maine people in his pre-retirement years and now they were almost all gone. The houses have been restored and the properties cared for, but towns like Castine and Camden are heavily populated with retired ad executives and former FBI agents, the types who thought the price and tax bills on their newly-purchased homes were reasonable compared to where they came from.