That Time Killington Tried to Secede from Vermont | Post 10 | Vermont

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Across the USA

6 min readFeb 26, 2016

It’s July 2009 as I click to the base of the Killington Ski Resort in central Vermont. The scene is bleak. Vast gravel parking lots at lodges and pubs are bare. And when I left state route 100 for Killington Rd., Street View downgraded from sunny, high-resolution imagery to grainy blurs that render Green Mountain National Forest and the ski slopes’s six peaks unintelligibly flat and mono grey-green. It’s like HDTV just turned into an old black-and-white movie.

Helping to ruin this day in the mountains is a gloomy sky that belongs to November, not the height of summer. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that such a sky shrouded Killington on the winter’s day in 2008 when Otto Iannantuoni, a 40-year resident of Vermont, walked into the Killington Town Offices to pay a tax bill and saw adorning the wall, to his great anger, the state flag of New Hampshire.

The town manager promptly acceded to Iannantuoni’s request that the neighbors’s flag be taken down, but later indicated the New Hampshire standard would be encased in a “commemorative display”. Commemorative of what? Killington’s two-year effort to secede from Vermont.

Vermont itself, the state, has a well-told history of secessionist interest. From 1777 to 1791 the Vermont government operated independently and clear of jurisdiction claims from British Quebec and New Hampshire and New York. Known initially as the Republic of New Connecticut, informally as the Republic of the Green Mountains, and by historians as the Vermont Republic, Vermont had its own currency and postal service, finally joining the U.S. in March 1791 as the 14th state.

While all indications point to the old Vermont Republic’s desire to eventually join the U.S., the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) today vents the opposite inclination. Founded in 2003 by a former Duke University economics professor, SVR is “a nonviolent citizens’ network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government, and committed to the peaceful return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly the dissolution of the Union”. In the 1990s the Vermont Statehood Bicentennial Commission ran debates on the merits of secession, and in 2010 an independent gubernatorial candidate ran on a secession platform. He won less than one percent of the vote.

Killington did better than that. In the mid-2000s, the town’s 1000 residents twice voted in favor of leaving Vermont and pledging allegiance to New Hampshire. Actual jurisdictional transport — the Granite State is 25 miles away — was never likely to succeed since both Vermont and New Hampshire’s legislatures and the U.S. Congress would have had to approve. But that didn’t dampen cries of “save our community” and “we have no rights, we have no justice, no representation”.

The Killington issue, of course, was about taxes. In the 1990s, Vermont passed a law changing how public schools were funded, doing away with a system based on local property tax to one based on a statewide property tax pool. The goal was to rectify a gross disparity in the quality of education between schools in rich towns and those in poor towns by, essentially, subsidizing poor schools with the property tax revenues of rich towns.

For a rich resort town like Killington, this apparently led to quite an imbalance between taxes sent to the state and funds received for schools. With one town selectman complaining that “there is a point where sharing turns to looting”, officials claimed that Killington annually sent Vermont $10 million in property taxes and $10 million in sales taxes, only to receive back just $1 million for its schools. When a 2003 revision to the tax law did not mollify Killington, the town decided to take its secession vote.

Secession wasn’t for everyone. Vermont pride could trump tax policy. Iannantuoni himself acknowledged “there’s a legitimate concern about taxes [but] if you don’t like what’s happening in Montpelier, you change it…. We’re not New Hampshire; we love being a part of Vermont”. Other opponents of a 50 square mile New Hampshire island outpost pointed out that sales tax is a tax levied by Vermont on everyone (including tourists), not monies paid by Killington residents to the state, and that Killington received other state benefits beyond school funding in the form of, among other things, services highly relevant to its economy like highway maintenance and tourism promotion.

Today the Vermont town that mounted the New Hampshire flag in its municipal offices of course remains part of Vermont. But there’s a final historical twist: Killington was founded in 1761, but not as part of Vermont. It was chartered via a New Hamphsire land grant. Killington only joined Vermont in 1777, upon the formation of the independent Vermont Republic.

Through a funny quirk of Google Street View I was forced to take my first spin on the Eisenhower Interstate System. Moving along in rural Groton, Vermont, I encountered a 500-yard gap in Street View’s coverage of U.S. Route 302, known locally as the William Scott Memorial Highway.

Unable to click a pixel further, I checked the map inset on my screen and peered ahead, certain that Street View picked up again just beyond the house far down the road on the left. Should I tap the overhead map and leap to that point? I decided against. Again, the goal of this journey is to click clear across the country without leaving the ground, without leaving the street. And so I tracked back to U.S. Interstate 91 and pushed south to Bradford, where I was finally able to tack back west on state route 25.

The trip across to Killington provided similar measures of scenic and sad. Vermont is beautiful. Barns are red, houses and churches and steeples are white. It is almost always sunny and clear in my virtual world, and fifteen minutes of passing digital Green Mountain State countryside glows my laptop screen, strong New England summer grass meeting dusty gravel at the warm road’s edge. A vintage car motorist passed me near Pittsfield.

Alas, illustrative of what may be an emerging theme of this virtual cross-country travel, rural Vermont — like Maine and New Hampshire so far — is riddled with abandoned property. Neither farmhouse nor trailer nor grand home is spared. Here are just four: