Dana Allen: What’s at stake when we vote on the Randall Meadow bond
February 27, 2026 | By Dana Allen 
Morning of July 12, 2024: This drone shot shows flood waters from the Winooski River filling Randall Meadow (left), Dac Rowe Park (top) and the Randall and Elm street neighborhood. Photo by Gordon Miller
The debate over the Randall Meadow bond vote has generated a lot of discussion in recent weeks, and it’s easy to understand why. Flooding has cost this community enormously — in dollars, in stress, in lost time — and people want to know that we are making wise investments. I’ve been close to this project for the past eighteen months and I want to respond to some of the comments that I’ve been hearing recently.
First, the financial picture. I keep hearing that this will be a $4.3 million burden on Waterbury taxpayers, and that framing concerns me because it isn’t accurate. We have already secured $2 million in federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) disaster recovery funding — nearly half the project cost, before we spend a dime of local money. The town’s actual repayment obligation could be around $2.3 million. If paid back over roughly ten years through the Local Option Tax fund, that’s $200–$300k per year — with a real path to avoiding any direct property tax increase at all. And we are still pursuing additional grants that could reduce even that.
Second, I want to be honest about uncertainty, because I think pretending it doesn’t exist does this project a disservice. The current designs are conceptual. The hydraulic modeling, which is what flood elevation reductions are based on, will be refined. The environmental assessments haven’t been completed. Some have pointed to these gaps as reasons to vote no. I see them differently: they are exactly what this investment funds. The bond authorization — paired with the grant — is what moves us from conceptual to engineered, from estimated to known in an efficient, effective manner. Voting no doesn’t resolve those uncertainties. It just means we go into the next flood without having tried.
Third, I want to say something about the cost-benefit analysis, because I know the $15 million in ecosystem restoration benefits has raised eyebrows. These aren’t soft numbers invented to pad a grant application. They represent the very real costs of degrading a floodplain such as the loss of phosphorus storage which can lead to algae blooms in Lake Champlain, the inability to store carbon in the form of vegetation both above and below ground that helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the loss of natural river function that allows a river to move and change as it will naturally — costs that don’t disappear just because we don’t put them on a ledger. The flooding we’ve experienced is, in part, the bill coming due for decades of externalizing those costs. FEMA counts them because they’re real. For every dollar spent to create a resilient floodplain on Randall Meadow it will return over $4 in benefits. When this result from the FEMA Benefit/Cost Analysis methodology was initially submitted to FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, it was the highest benefit to cost ratio of any project submitted for the state of Vermont in that round - and that reflects something worth taking seriously.
I also want to address the claim that the $3 million in avoided damages is fabricated. It isn't. Are there modeling uncertainties? Yes.
Are the estimates based on a sample of structures rather than every building in the flood zone? Also yes.
But these aren't numbers invented to satisfy a grant reviewer — they are engineering estimates grounded in the best data we currently have, data that will be refined as the design process moves forward. If anything, these figures may be conservative: Community Resilience for Waterbury (CReW) has estimated total damages from the July 2023 flood alone at anywhere from $2.8 to $12 million within Waterbury’s town boundaries. The benefits from Randall Meadow won't reach every structure in that area — but they will reach many of them.
But more than any of this, I keep coming back to what it has actually cost us to wait. After Irene, we tried to find and fund a meaningful flood mitigation project. We couldn’t get it done. And then July 2023 happened, resulting in more negative impacts to the town. December 2023 brought round two that year, with a repeat in July 2024. Every year we don’t act, the next flood finds us in the same place. The Randall Meadow project won’t eliminate flooding — nothing will. But it is the most significant step toward protecting downtown Waterbury that we’ve had in front of us in decades.
I respect that thoughtful people have raised questions about this project. Some of those questions are legitimate and deserve ongoing scrutiny as the design process moves forward. But the choice before us on Town Meeting Day is not between this project and a perfect project. It is between this project and nothing — and we all know what nothing costs.
A Waterbury resident since 2013, Dana Allen is the town’s Flood Grants Management contractor. He is the principal of FluidState Consulting, a water-quality and mapping consulting service, and serves on the town Planning Commission.
Find more information about the Randall Meadow proposal and bond vote on the Waterbury town website here. Watch a slide presentation video about the project from the Select Board’s Feb. 17 public hearing on the bond vote here.