By james art 
On a bitterly cold day in December, weatherization technician Trent Larsen stood on the roof of a mobile home in Barre with a large plastic hose.
He and the rest of his Capstone Community Action team were there to pump cellulose insulation into the air space between the attic and the roof and then into the crawl space below the structure.
“The pulp is recycled newspaper or cardboard, depending on where we get it from,” he said. “And then it’s cut into almost like powder or little pieces of cardboard.”
These pieces are treated with boric acid to make them fire resistant. In a stick built house, they will also be blown into the walls. The idea is to fill the air space with a fluffy material that traps heat, a bit like the stuffing in a down parka.
The goal is to trap more heat inside the mobile home to save the homeowner money on heating fuel and reduce climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
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Capstone is one of five agencies statewide that do this work for free for low-income households.
“Weathering … at its most basic level is insulating your attics and basements and plugging leaky holes or any access to the outside,” said Sue Minter, who until recently was executive director of Capstone Community Action. “As my team was telling me: We want to stop outdoor heating.”
Capstone is also the agency you call in central Vermont if you can’t pay your heating bill.
Vermont gets money every year from a federal program called LIHEAP to help people keep their pipes from freezing, but it runs out every year — usually before the freezing temperatures even hit.
“Every year more and more people are unable to pay rent, food, health care and in the winter heat,” Minter said. “And this problem has been accelerating at an alarming rate for the past four years.”
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Vermont public
The state typically turns to other funding sources to help people in dangerous situations stay warm, but those resources come from the same funding that supports weatherization homes.
Minter said her staff regularly hears about people sleeping in front of their ovens to keep warm, or skipping meals to keep their pipes thawed, or forgoing essential prescriptions to pay their heating bills.
State data shows that air conditioning can cut household heating costs by nearly a third and save the average family more than $1,000 each year.
Vermont has had free homes for people whose incomes qualify for them since the 1980s, but the program really took off in the 1990s. The work is funded largely through a 2 cent surcharge on fossil fuels for heating, with some limited annual funding from the Department of Energy.
For Vermonters, what it reaches can be life-changing. It also has health benefits – especially for the elderly and young children.
But projects are expensive.
The average cost of weatherizing a home through the program was $11,000 last year. Really complex projects can cost close to $40,000.
In addition, many parts of the state have almost a year-long waiting list full of people who qualify, and wait times can be long for homes that need asbestos remediation or have deferred maintenance.
Deferred maintenance and asbestos
Because Vermont has some of the oldest housing stock in the country, historically many people would come off the waiting list only to be turned away because their homes needed major repairs and upgrades before their walls and ceilings could be stuffed with insulation.
“There’s a portion of the homes that we weather that have weather barriers that our weathering agents — our traditional weathering agents — can’t be used on, like fixing a leaky roof … or fixing a wet basis,” said Jeff Wilcox, who directs the state’s Office of Economic Opportunity windfall program. They provide the funding to agencies like Capstone who do the work on the ground.
Wilcox said vermiculite insulation, which contains toxic asbestos, is another big hurdle. It was widely installed in homes in the early 20th century, and he estimates that it was found in about one in 10 houses the program encountered.
For most of the program’s history, there has been no funding to help people with home repairs.
Then, during the pandemic, a historic influx of federal money allowed the state to double annual low-income weatherization funding to roughly $25 million.
And that money — specifically funds from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA — was more flexible than the previous federal and state resources the program relied on. This meant that, for the first time, Vermont didn’t have to turn away most people with holes in their roofs or dirt basements.
Wilcox said it’s the households that often struggle the most to afford to stay warm that are most vulnerable to needing help through the LIHEAP program.
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Vermont Public
“We don’t want to leave those people out because they typically have the greatest need for weatherization and the greatest need to waterproof their home or deal with these other structural issues,” he said.
But Wilcox said the ARPA funds the program has relied on in recent years for these types of repairs are expected to dry up this year.
The state has secured about $45 million in one-time federal money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act to maintain the funding level through the end of the decade — provided the IRA funds are not withdrawn by the new Trump administration.
But this funding does not cover home repairs or asbestos removal.
Wilcox said they will be able to weatherproof the same number of homes — just not the ones the program considers to be among the most needed.
If nothing changes, he said, they’ll have to start turning people away again.
Temporary outage?
Jane Lazorchak heads the state’s climate office. She called the revenue shortfall for that program very real and said her office has been talking with other state agencies about that looming revenue gap.
“There has been considerable talk of funding that can be redirected to low-income weathering – [but] it would be a temporary measure,” she said.
Lazorchak expects to see a proposed short-term fix in Gov. Phil Scott’s budget proposal later this week, and stressed that the administration will look to redirect funding from existing programs to that work.
Weathering is a critical part of Vermont’s plan to comply with its landmark climate law, the Global Warming Solutions Act, which requires Vermont to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by big deadlines in 2026, 2030 and 2050.
Modeling by the climate service shows that to meet the 2030 emissions reduction deadline, Vermont needs to protect 120,000 homes over that decade. The same modeling finds that we are only about a third of the way there.
Lazorchak said weathering has two big immediate benefits — it reduces climate-warming air pollution, but it also makes the non-negotiable monthly bill — for heat — more affordable.
But if homes need significant repairs before they can be insulated, that raises costs, making weatherproofing these buildings one of the most expensive ways to reduce carbon emissions, even if it helps make life more sustainable. -available to vulnerable households.
As pandemic-era federal funding flows in the coming years, Vermont will have to decide how much of that work it’s willing to fund — versus investing in cheaper ways to curb emissions.
We don’t want to leave those people out because they typically have the greatest need for weatherization and the greatest need to waterproof their home or address these other structural issues.
Jeff Wilcox, Weatherization Program Administrator
It comes as many MPs made pledges to their constituents to cut taxes as part of their election this year.
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Sen. Andrew Perchlik, a Washington D.C. Democrat who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he sees common ground between Republicans and Democrats on the climate issue, even though they have disagreed on energy policy in recent years.
“I have never heard anyone who is against it say, “There’s no problem with low-income people affording their heating bill,” Perchlik said. “It was kind of what you do about it.”
“I don’t know that there are any magic answers at this point,” said Congressman Jim Harrison, a Republican who is vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. “I think if we’re going to spend more on a program, and as important as air conditioning is, you know, it probably begs the question: Is there something else we’re doing that maybe isn’t as important today?”
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