Q&A
Peter D Van Oot is an attorney with the northern New England law firm of Downs Rachlin Martin PLLC specializing in land use, environmental and corporate law, primarily from the firm’s Lebanon office.
A graduate of Williams College and Georgetown University Law School, and a former legislative aide to US Senator Patrick J Leahy, Van Oot has been with DRM since 1987. At DRM, he established and helped to build the firm’s Brattleboro office. He chairs the firm’s Regulated Entities Group, which includes lawyers and legal professionals working in energy law, telecommunications, public utilities, health care, land use/environmental law and government and public affairs.
Van Oot has served as lead permitting counsel for projects ranging from the High Points Estates residential project, the Grafton Village Cheese manufacturing and retail store and the recently permitted Commonwealth Dairy yogurt manufacturing facility in Brattleboro to the 1,000-unit Ginn Company development in Burke and the 24-lot Rocking Stone Farm residential project in Manchester, VT. He has served as lead counsel in most of Vermont’s Superfund Sites and advises a wide range of environmental and land use clients throughout Vermont and New Hampshire.
Van Oot serves as outside general counsel for a number of entities, including Sonnax Industries in Rockingham; Marlboro College; the Vermont Center of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (the Austine School in Brattleboro); the Brattleboro Retreat in Brattleboro; Harpoon Brewery in West Windsor and Boston and the Windham Foundation in Grafton.
He has served on Governor Howard Dean’s Council of Environmental Affairs and Governor James Douglas’s Jobs Cabinet. Most recently he was named by Governor Douglas to the Brownfields Advisory Council, a group created by the 2008 Legislature to promote the remediation of contaminated sites. In 2009 he chaired the judicial nominating committee that led to the nomination of Federal District Court Judge Christina Reiss by Senator Leahy and her subsequent appointment by President Barack Obama. He also served on the judicial nominating commissions that vetted the nominations of Vermont Federal District Court Judges Garvin Murtha (Retired) and William Sessions. He serves on the Vermont Law School Environmental Law Center and Land Use Institute Advisory Committees.
Van Oot is a founding regent of the American College of Environmental Lawyers. He was selected for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America 2010 and New England Superlawyers. He has an AV Preeminent Peer Rating from Martindale-Hubbell as an environmental lawyer and is active in community affairs and the Vermont and American Bar Associations.
Van Oot has been actively involved in the Brattleboro civic community, where he served as a board member and chair of United Way of Windham County. He presently serves on the board of the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation and served as board president from 2007 to 2009. He also serves on the executive committee and board of Southern Vermont Business Leadership Council.
He has four children and lives in Woodstock.
Robert Smith interviewed Van Oot at his office in Lebanon, NH.
VBM: The office here in Lebanon isn’t a new office is it? How long have you been here?
Van Oot: We opened our Lebanon office about two years ago. We merged with an existing law firm. We now have five offices. Our main and historical office is in St Johnsbury. Then we opened one in Burlington, which is now our largest office. We also have offices in Montpelier, which primarily serves our Public Service Board, utility practice and our government and public affairs practice. I opened an office for our firm in Brattleboro 17 years ago, which has now grown to eight lawyers. I have now moved to the Lebanon office where I primarily work, but I do spend a day or two each week in Brattleboro.
VBM: How many attorneys altogether in the firm?
Van Oot: The present count is approximately 55 attorneys in five offices. Downs Rachlin Martin is a different firm than many firms in Vermont in that we are organized by different business units and each director and even senior associates in the firm have focuses of their practices. We do not have general practitioners. So we have a business law group, we have an intellectual properties law group which is a very, very active group, we have a labor and employment group. We have a litigation group, and we have a group called Regulated Entities, and I chair that group. That group includes our environmental and real estate law practice, our government and public affairs practice, our healthcare practice and our energy and telecommunications practice.
VBM: Now, it turns out that you and I were in grade school together in the little town of Westminster, Vermont.
Van Oot: We were both happily under Jack Porter’s very able guidance. A wonderful, wonderful man. One of the great educators of my life at Westminster Center School. When both of us started there, there were two grades in each classroom. Four classrooms and eight grades.
VBM: That’s right. And I remember Mr Porter very well. Your dad ran the culvert company in Westminster Station, as I remember, and it was your brother Christopher that was in my class. You are a few years younger.
Van Oot: Right. Several years ago I was in a contested matter with a person who was very proud of the fact that they had lived in Putney since the 1970s. Seeing me in my jacket and tie, they said, “You’re not from here are you?” I said, “No, I’m not.” They asked, “So when did you move here?” And I said 1957. I grew up in Westminster. My dad moved my family there in 1957 and he ran Northeastern Culvert Company until he died in 1976. We later sold the company.
VBM: I remember you and your brother in school with us through eighth grade, then you went on to other schools.
Van Oot: My brother went to Vermont Academy (Saxtons River), and I went to Vermont Academy for a year and then I went to Deerfield Academy for three years. I graduated from Deerfield, then went to Stanford University, then transferred to Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and graduated from Williams in 1978. I worked for Country Journal Magazine in Brattleboro for a year or two, then I worked on Senator Patrick Leahy’s 1980 reelection campaign that he narrowly prevailed in against Stewart Ledbetter. Then I was invited by the senator to work in Washington, and I was a legislative assistant to Senator Leahy from 1980 to 1985. While I was there, I went to law school at Georgetown and graduated.
VBM: What made you decide you wanted to get into the law?
Van Oot: Primarily, I was interested even then in environmental law, which I continue to pursue. It also was an opportunity to practice a profession that would allow me to come back to Vermont to work and be engaged in Vermont both from a legal perspective and from a civic and political perspective.
VBM: Your specialty is environmental law?
Van Oot: My focus, probably 70 percent of my work, is environmental law. In Vermont that covers the gauntlet from hazardous waste law to compliance to enforcement, permitting, particularly Act 250, local land-use, permitting and counseling clients on a wide range of environmental matters both in Vermont and New Hampshire, sometimes regionally and in some cases nationally. If there is a transaction that our firm is handling and it has environmental issues I would be involved in counseling the client on those issues. That may take place in Brattleboro or it may take place in Des Moines.
The rest of my practice is I serve as outside general counsel to a number of institutions, primarily in Vermont. I’m outside counsel to the Brattleboro Retreat, Marlboro College, Sonnax Industries, the Windham Foundation and its subsidiary the Grafton Village Cheese Company and Harpoon Brewery.
VBM: Do you do that as part of your work with the firm or as an outside practice?
Van Oot: It’s work that I do with the firm. Because our firm has broad capabilities we are well-suited to be outside general counsel for clients like Sonnax or Marlboro. I serve as the counsel to the board and counsel to the CEO and management on a wide range of issues including my area of expertise in environmental law. Then I also work with other attorneys in our firm to help the client deal with issues that are outside my area of expertise. If the client has a labor and employment matter I’ll refer to and work with my labor and employment partners. If it’s an intellectual property matter I will work with my intellectual property partners.
VBM: As you look back, are you happy with your choice to go to law? You seem to have done well with it.
Van Oot: Vermont is a wonderful place to practice law, as is New Hampshire. In both cases the Bar is very collegial. I enjoy very much working with other members of the Bar. I enjoy very much working with my clients. One of the real benefits of working in the firm that I work with is that we are able to practice a pretty sophisticated level of law with the real focus on what we do and what we do well with very interesting clients that have interesting legal issues. I don’t do general law and I can focus on what I like to focus on, I can work with my partners and help them in their areas of expertise.
VBM: I’d like to pick your brain a little bit on environmental law here in Vermont. What do you see about the good aspects of it and what could be improved? The main issue that I tend to hear about is that the permitting process in Vermont can take up too much time. Most developers say they would really like to know if a project is going forward or not within a few months of application.
Van Oot: First, I’ll give you some background. I’ve been involved with Act 250 both as a former Act 250 Commission chair - I chaired the District 7 environmental commission for St Johnsbury in the 1990s - and since then I’ve represented primarily developers in the process. I don’t do adversarial work, period. I think the real advantage of Vermont, both with Act 250 and environmentally across the board, is that we’ve been doing it longer than most. Act 250 became effective July 1, 1970, so we now have 40 years of working the system. Many other states have come to more sophisticated land-use planning and zoning recently and do not have the wealth of experience that we have. What I see in my private practice representing primarily development clients is that the system is quite sophisticated now. The District coordinators are experienced, the case law is pretty well developed and if you know what you’re doing in representing a party before a district commission, the system works quite well.
We recently had a case for a significant project in Brattleboro, Commonwealth Yogurt, a 37,000-square-foot yogurt manufacturing facility. We were able to handle the matter as a minor amendment. Once we got the full application in, including a water line extension, the minor permit was noticed for public comment within two days of the day we filed our application. That’s unusual but it reflects the application that we provided and also the experience and the work of not only the District Commission, but also the fact that we work very, very closely on significant projects with the Agency of Natural Resources.
What is becoming increasingly true with Act 250 is that it really is the umbrella permit for a range of permits that you need, primarily from the Agency of Natural Resources and also with local zoning approvals. The real key to working with Act 250 is to work both with the district coordinator and the commission, but also to work closely with the ANR so that you could have all the other ancillary ANR permits that you need to support your Act 250 application. If you could do that in a coordinated and collaborative way, then Act 250 is a wonderful process to consolidate all those permits, all those approvals, into one permit.
Increasingly in recent years, as storm water and other regulations have become more controversial and difficult in some cases, there has been more of an issue of working with ANR or with other groups who may be opposed to a storm water permit, then there has been an issue with Act 250. I find increasingly the focus is working with ANR, working with their staff and working with their management on the ancillary permits, which you can do if you work very closely and if you know what you are doing. More often that is more of an issue rather than Act 250. You’ll find Act 250 is ready to go, they’re just waiting for an ANR permit, or they are waiting for that storm water construction permit or that storm water operational permit.
VBM: Do you see any way that this process can be improved, or do you think that we are as close to a well functioning environmental permitting process as possible?
Van Oot: Again, I’m not sure that there is much that needs to be improved with Act 250. I know that ANR continues to work on having a more coordinated and consolidated permitting process at ANR. If I’m doing a significant project like the Commonwealth Yogurt project or a major ski area, I might have 10 or 12 ANR permits that I will need. Coordinating that through the ANR process while you’re coordinating the Act 250 permitting is really the challenge. I know ANR, even though they’ve been subject to some pretty significant budget cuts, is working hard to have more umbrella and consolidated permitting. That’s the area that both the ANR and the regulated community would agree could use more work.
Once you get a full permit application in to Act 250, increasingly I find the preference in a number of the commissions is to treat the permits as minors, which subjects the permit to reduced time delays and also avoids even having hearings, which is a real benefit. The trade-off, for the regulated community, is that you have to prepare a really outstanding application that answers all the questions. Then, increasingly, the commissions are willing to treat them as minor applications, and that’s great. In that minor application process they really rely on having the ANR permits in place, so you need to have those all lined up. But Act 250, I have no complaints whatsoever.
VBM: As you look back over your work here in Vermont, are there any outstanding events that you were involved with that you look back on understanding now how important a case or a project it was? Projects that you feel were especially significant in your career?
Van Oot: I would single out a couple of recent projects, and that may simply be because I can remember them. A lot of my civic work in recent years and going forward is in economic development. One of the things in having grown up and lived over 50 years now in southern Vermont, is the change in the economy. You and I grew up in the Bellows Falls area and we’ve seen what that town has gone through, the challenges they have. They’ve tried with some success to rebound from a very, very difficult economic situation. It’s somewhat of a secret but Brattleboro has had real economic challenges. I think the free and reduced lunch program, which is a pretty good indicator of poverty, is 55 percent or so in Brattleboro and Windham County. There are some real economic issues and real poverty that are putting a strain on our educational system. While downtown Brattleboro looks great, if you look closely, there are some real cracks in the infrastructure.
I have gotten the greatest satisfaction in my recent work in promoting positive economic development projects, whether that’s working with Mount Snow on some of their projects or working with the Brattleboro Retreat. The Grafton Village Cheese retail and manufacturing facility has been a tremendous shot in the arm to Brattleboro. I was delighted to work with the Windham Foundation and Grafton Village Cheese on that. It has provided about 25 or 30 jobs. It’s a fantastic facility at a gateway to Brattleboro. Similarly, the Commonwealth Yogurt project, which is being constructed as we speak in Brattleboro, will provide not only 30 or more jobs and significant local and state tax revenues, they are also going to be a huge consumer of premium priced Vermont milk. It will be a tremendous incentive to our agricultural community.
Those are the projects that I get the greatest satisfaction out of because they are challenging legally and they provide real and lasting benefits to our community. Anyone associated with those projects feels really good about them.
VBM: There has been some talk about using that retail manufacturing facility as a potential business incubator for small food manufacturing businesses, similar to the one in northern Vermont. Is there anymore talk about that?
Van Oot: Let me give you a little bit of background. The area in which the facility is located is on the northern side of the Brattleboro Retreat Farm, and much of that land has now been conveyed to the Windham Foundation. I could go into more detail, but it’s essentially that those lands are subject to conservation easements held by the Vermont Land Trust, so they can only be used for agricultural purposes. Similarly, the buildings on the former Retreat farmstead, which are now owned by the Windham Foundation, are subject to easements held by the Preservation Trust of Vermont, so they will be preserved as historical buildings forever. They can only be used for limited purposes, agriculturally related.
Through the course of those conveyances and issues, all of which I’ve been involved with, either as counsel for the Brattleboro Retreat or the Windham Foundation, there has developed a very, very strong collaboration between the Foundation and the Retreat. What I can say is that they continue to talk about ways that they can leverage those assets in a way that supports the local economy, supports the growth and sustainability of the Retreat, and supports the Windham Foundation’s mission of supporting local agriculture and historical buildings. There will be ongoing discussions about ways that those lands can be best used to serve the missions of both organizations. It is a very collaborative and very cooperative relationship.
VBM: I’ve done a lot of writing on the whole value-added agriculture movement as a way to preserve and sustain local farming and business.
Van Oot: This Commonwealth Yogurt project was a real eye opener for us on that. In my background, I serve on the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation, and I was president of it from 2008 to 2010. We also created a kind of ad hoc group called the Southern Vermont Business Leadership Council, a collection of Southern Vermont CEOs and me. Using Commonwealth Yogurt as an example, they were looking all over the Northeast if not the US for a factory site, because they saw a growing demand for yogurt nationally and they saw the need for greater manufacturing capabilities. So they were looking for the right place to site a large manufacturing facility - 37,000-square-foot with significant production.
While they were doing that, the largest dairy company in Germany, Ehrmann Ag, was doing the same thing. Europeans consume about five times as much yogurt as we do per capita. The European market is sort of saturated because there is a lot of demand and a lot of production. So they were looking to expand into the US market. They were looking for the right place as well. They talked with economic development people all over New England, and they kind of stumbled onto Vermont and Brattleboro. When they really looked at Brattleboro they decided it was the best place in, at least, the Northeast to site this kind of agricultural processing facility because it has great access to transportation. Interestingly, having C&S and United Foods in the area is a real asset because you have distribution capability right here very close to your production, so you don’t have the cost of having to ship your product to a warehouse or distribution facility in New Jersey. The agricultural resource, in this case an almost endless supply of high-quality milk, was a huge benefit.
Southern Vermont and Vermont as a whole is not only a great place for localvores where local producers are providing food for local restaurants and schools, that phenomenon, but on an industrial and manufacturing basis, Vermont is really well-suited to have the value-added aspect of local agricultural products. Because now, you’re not only passing that product from a farm to a restaurant, you’re adding value to it through process of manufacturing the yogurt or the cheese and bringing people into stores to buy the product. In Commonwealth Yogurts case, because they are legally required, due to the type of processing facility they have, they pay premium prices for milk. So now you are creating a real strong economy.
In Brattleboro, in addition to Commonwealth and Grafton Village Cheese, operations like McNeill’s Brewery at the Brattleboro Development Corporation’s business park at the former Book Press facility is another great example. The Food Bank, again at the business park, is another example of a food-related Vermont processing and distribution business. C&S is a facility that started in Brattleboro and provides a great resource for distribution of food products. If there is one really shining light at least in southeastern Vermont’s economic forecast, it is food processing and value added through that process. It doesn’t hurt to have the name Vermont on these products, that’s a big plus too.
VBM: I’ve heard in many an interview the power that the Vermont brand has to help sell a product.
Van Oot: Again, and why I think the Commonwealth project was so instructive, is that the Vermont name was an afterthought for them. They really came here because of the transportation, distribution and resources available. The Vermont name cachet was really low on their list, though they are happy to take advantage of it. I think that Southeastern Vermont and in the Upper Valley as well that we have a strong future in high end agricultural processing operations. Those are real jobs, well-paying solid jobs.
VBM: Anything else that we haven’t touched on that you would like to include in this discussion?
Van Oot: The other perspective that I have gained in part of the reason that I moved my practice to some extent to the Upper Valley, is that our economy is getting much more regionalized. Increasingly we have people who live in Brattleboro but work in the Upper Valley, perhaps at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center or at one of the new growing businesses up here. And there are people who live in the Upper Valley and who work in southeastern Vermont or southwestern New Hampshire. I see it statewide but more so regionally that we are getting a larger economy that is focused on Brattleboro, Keene, New Hampshire and the Upper Valley. What I’m interested in doing going forward is developing and working in the Upper Valley in both Vermont and New Hampshire with the same types of businesses that want to grow and expand and have environmental or corporate counseling issues that they need assistance with. We’ve had success doing this in the Brattleboro area.
About 20 years ago I worked with the partners of my firm to open a new office someplace. We were looking hard at whether that would be in the Upper Valley or in Brattleboro. We decided, and I think rightly at the time, to open the office in Brattleboro. This seems to be the right time to expand into the Upper Valley.
VBM: What do you see coming out of the British Petroleum oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico?
Van Oot: Our firm represents a number of the producers of energy regionally, and I get involved in those matters from an environmental perspective. For instance, our firm just received a certificate of public good for a new wind project in Vermont. So what I see coming out of the Gulf in the BP disaster is an increasing look at how we can reduce reliance on fossil fuels. I think President Obama is going to address that tomorrow night. In Vermont that means giving greater priority than we’ve given so far to promoting renewable energy projects.
What Vermont has done, because there is some concern about large-scale wind farms and large-scale biomass, is that they have only supported smaller scale projects. So there is legislation that gives incentive contracts for 2.2 megawatts and smaller for hydro, biomass, solar and wind projects. Those projects do provide some level of new energy for Vermont, though at pretty expensive prices, but what they don’t produce is jobs.
I’m presently working with a couple of projects, one in particular that would be a significant biomass project in southern Vermont. One of the real benefits of that project is that it would provide a base load source of alternate energy, mostly non-primary wood stock from Vermont forests. It is strongly supported by the Department of Forests and Parks in Vermont along with landowners and suppliers of wood products. It would also provide huge numbers of jobs, jobs in the forest, in transportation and so on. What I think will come out of the British Petroleum incident, fossil fuels and climate change is more incentives and more work to promote alternative energy products here. The more energy we can produce locally and responsibly the better off we’ll be.
VBM: Do you think the state of Vermont missed an opportunity when it didn’t buy the hydro-electric dams in the Connecticut Valley watershed?
Van Oot: I think I’m going to have to defer on that one because we represent some of the parties involved.
VBM: What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working?
Van Oot: I’ve always been and will continue to be involved in any number of civic opportunities. I’ve been on the Vermont Land Trust Board, Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation, United Way and others. Now that I’ve moved to the Upper Valley, I’ll get involved in more organizations up here. In my personal life I love spending time with my kids. I have four wonderful kids. My oldest daughter, Tori, is the main political blogger for the Sacramento Bee in California. My second daughter, Jamie, is working this summer for the Architect of the Capitol in Washington DC. She finished her junior year at Penn where she is studying architecture. I have a son, Pete, who finished his freshman year at Trinity College where he is a football player and doing great. Then I have my other son Jeffrey who will be a junior next year at Deerfield Academy.
I’m quite athletic and I’ll play any game for pride or money. I enjoy rowing and skiing and almost anything that’s athletic.
Robert Smith is a writer and photographer living in Westminster, VT. He is the editor of The Green Mountain Outlook, a weekly newspaper published out of Bellows Falls, VT.