On a bitterly cold day in December, weatherization technician Trent Larsen was standing on the roof of a mobile home in Barre with a big, plastic hose.
He and the rest of his Capstone Community Action crew were there to pump cellulose insulation into the air space between the ceiling and the roof, and then the crawl space under the structure.
“The cellulose is recycled newspaper or cardboard, depending on where we get it,” he said. “And then it’s chopped up into almost like a powder, or little cardboard chunks.”
Those chunks are treated with boric acid to make them resistant to fire. In a stick-built house, they’d get blown into the walls, too. The idea is to stuff the air space with fluffy material that traps heat, a little like the stuffing in a down parka.
The goal is to trap more heat inside the mobile home to save the owner money on heating fuel, and reduce climate warming greenhouse gas emissions.
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Capstone is one of five agencies across the state that do this work for free for households who qualify as low income.
“Weatherization … at the most basic level, is insulating your attics and your 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 used to tell me: We want to stop heating the outdoors.”
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 sub-zero temperatures even arrive.
“Every year, more and more people are not able to either make rent, food, health care and, in the winter, heat,” Minter said. “And this problem has been accelerating at an alarming rate over the last four years.”
The state usually dips into other funding sources to help people in dangerous situations stay warm, but those resources come from the same funding that supports weatherizing homes.
Minter said her staff regularly hear about people sleeping in front of their ovens to stay warm, or skipping meals to keep their pipes thawed, or forgoing essential prescriptions to pay their heating bills.
State data show weatherization can cut a household’s heating expenses by nearly a third, and saves the average family upwards of $1,000 every year.
Vermont has weatherized homes, for people whose income qualifies them, for free since the 1980s, but the program really took off in the 1990s. The work is funded largely through a 2-cent surcharge on fossil heating fuels, with some limited annual funding from the Department of Energy.
For the Vermonters it does reach, it can be life changing. It also yields health benefits — especially for older people and young kids.
But the projects are expensive.
The average cost of weatherizing a home through the program was $11,000 last year. Really complicated projects can cost closer to $40,000.
Additionally, many parts of the state have almost a year-long waitlist full of people who are eligible, and wait times can be years-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, a lot of people would get off the waitlist only to be turned away because their homes needed big repairs and upgrades before their walls and attic could be packed with insulation.
“There's a subset of the homes we weatherize that have obstacles to weatherization, that our weatherization funds — our traditional weatherization funds — can't be used on, like fixing a leaky roof … or fixing a wet foundation,” said Geoff Wilcox, who leads the weatherization program for the state Office of Economic Opportunity. They provide the funding to agencies like Capstone that do the work on the ground.
Wilcox said vermiculite insulation, which contains toxic asbestos, is another major obstacle. It was installed widely in homes in the earlier part of the 20th century, and he estimates they discover it in about one in 10 houses the program encounters.
For most of the program’s history, there wasn’t funding to help people with home repairs.
Then, during the pandemic, a historic influx of federal money allowed the state to double the yearly funding for low income weatherization — to roughly $25 million.
And that money — specifically funds from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA — was more flexible than the prior federal and state resources the program relied on. It meant that for the first time, Vermont didn’t have to turn most people with holes in their roofs or dirt floor basements away.
Wilcox said these are the households that were often most struggling to afford to stay warm, who were most vulnerable to needing assistance through the LIHEAP program.
“We don't want to leave those folks behind, because they typically have the biggest need for weatherization and the biggest need to get their home watertight or addressing those other structural issues,” he said.
However, Wilcox said the ARPA funds the program relied on in recent years for these kinds 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 Law and Inflation Reduction Act to keep its funding level through the end of the decade — provided IRA funds aren’t clawed back by the new Trump administration.
But this funding doesn’t cover home repairs or asbestos cleanup.
Wilcox said they’ll be able to weatherize the same number of homes — just not the ones the program views as having some of the highest need.
If nothing changes, he said they’ll have to start turning people away again.
A stopgap?
Jane Lazorchak leads the state climate office. She called the revenue cliff for this program very real, and said her office has been in conversation with other state agencies about this looming revenue gap.
“There have been significant conversations happening to talk about funding that can be redirected to low income weatherization — [but] that would be a stopgap measure,” she said.
Lazorchak expects to see a proposed short-term fix in Gov. Phil Scott’s budget proposal later this week, and emphasized that the administration will be looking to redirect funding from existing programs towards this work.
Weatherization is a critical part of Vermont’s plan to comply with its landmark climate law — the Global Warming Solutions Act, which requires Vermont to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the state with big deadlines in 2026, 2030 and 2050.
Modeling from the climate office shows to meet the emissions reduction deadline for 2030, Vermont needs to weatherize 120,000 homes this decade. The same modeling finds we’re only about a third of the way there.
Lazorchak said weatherization has two major immediate benefits — it reduces climate-warming air pollution, but it also makes a non-negotiable monthly bill — for heat — more affordable.
But if homes need significant repairs before they can be insulated, that drives the cost up, which makes weatherizing these buildings one of the most expensive ways to cut carbon emissions, even if it helps make living more affordable for vulnerable households.
As pandemic-era federal funding runs its course in the coming years, Vermont will have to decide how much of that work it’s willing to fund — versus investing in less costly ways of curbing emissions.
We don't want to leave those folks behind, because they typically have the biggest need for weatherization and the biggest need to get their home watertight or addressing those other structural issues.Geoff Wilcox, Weatherization Program Administrator
That comes as many lawmakers made commitments to their constituents to curb taxes as part of their election bids this year.
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Sen. Andrew Perchlik, a Democrat from Washington County who chairs the Senate Committee on Appropriations, said he sees common ground for Republicans and Democrats on this climate issue even as they’ve disagreed in recent years over energy policy.
“I didn't ever hear anybody that was against it say, ‘There's not a problem about … low income folks affording their heating bill,'” Perchlik said. “It was just kind of what you do about it.”
“I don’t know that there’s any magic answers at this point in time,” said Rep. Jim Harrison, a Republican who’s vice chair of the House Committee on Appropriations. “I think if we want to spend more on a program, and as important as weatherization is, you know, it probably does beg the question: Is there something else that we’re doing that maybe is not as important today?”
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