The big question is, how do we slow the flow? How do we, as landowners and towns, give some room for that water storage to occur? If we leave streams alone they eventually heal themselves over time. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of stepping back, not re-trenching the stream, and being okay with how the stream and the land around it may change. – Mike Kline
The featured speaker at WEC’s 2025 Annual Meeting on May 1 is Mike Kline, retired State Rivers Program Manager, and a WEC member from Middlesex. Over his long career at the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (VT DEC), and on the Vermont River Conservancy (which he helped start, and whose board he just happily rejoined), Kline reads rivers and streams and works to help both the waterways and the people and natural communities coexisting with them.
When moving water damages human infrastructure, there’s a reason that water is so powerful. 30 years ago, Kline noted, water management conversations in the community tended to be more about dredging and armoring streams. But after several major flooding events, community members are learning more about how, and why, water moves the way it does, and are asking new questions: “Now people are also talking about, how do we restore floodplains? How do we take out the dam that’s making flooding worse instead of better? How do we upgrade our culverts?”
Putting together his talk, Kline said, “it really struck home to me how the WEC area is the headwaters. The Co-op is not in Montpelier or Barre, or along the major state highways. It’s upstream, in the headwaters of the Winooski and Lamoille and Passumpsic: all these major rivers are fed by tributaries in the WEC area.” Co-op territory is higher, steeper country than the larger communities downstream. Hundreds of years of land and water management practices designed to drain ancient wetlands for settlements, millworks, and farming have created conditions for water to move, instead of stay put—and to move with speed and power down the mountains. “The loss of all that flood storage has led to erosion, and that’s where most of Vermont’s damages are,” observed Kline.
Many WEC members have the same names as those early settlers, and live on properties and farms carved from the hills by their ancestors. There are land management traditions that run almost as deep as the water. A strength of Kline’s is his understated, openminded approach to different conditions. He blends his understanding of streams and rivers with his understanding of human priorities—the family house under threat, the cost of road repair, the farmer losing pasture to an eroding riverbank. “It’s taking that time to have those conversations out on the riverbank or streambank with the property owner, with the road foreman, and explaining why a river or stream is doing what it’s doing, and what are alternatives we can do with it in a cost effective manner,” explained Kline. “The big question is, how do we slow the flow? How do we, as landowners and towns, give some room for that water storage to occur? If we leave streams alone they eventually heal themselves over time. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of stepping back, not re-trenching the stream, and being okay with how the stream and the land around it may change.”
Through partnerships with organizations like the Vermont River Conservancy, landowners may have alternatives. If the land along the river is a good candidate for flood storage, they can inquire about placing a river corridor easement on their land, and be compensated while allowing rivers to reclaim floodplains and reduce downstream damage. Kline estimates that these partnerships have conserved about 125 river corridors. Kline points to one of those corridors, along Pekin Brook in Calais, as an example of how wetlands and floodplains upstream can help reduce flood inundation downstream. And in addition to flood storage, wetlands support tremendous biodiversity.
In retirement, Kline looks forward to more time volunteering with watershed organizations. Years ago, he said, he was happy to be “the state person sent to help start all of these wonderful watershed associations we have now,” like Friends of the Winooski River and Friends of the Mad River. “I ate a lot of cookies and drank a lot of cider,” he remembered. And he’s also benefited from these groups as a landowner: when he was dealing with an erosion problem on his Middlesex property, two dozen volunteers with Friends of the Winooski River arrived with 150 saplings to plant along the stream. “They do this all over the watershed. The conversations they’re having with property owners who’ve asked for their help is part of the re-education we see happening.”
Kline has given presentations throughout the state and country, and while he noted that in retirement he’s planning to phase out his speaking schedule, he couldn’t resist the Co-op’s request. The best part of giving a presentation, he said, is a rich question-and-answer period. Land history? Changes to your backyard stream? Dam physics? Impacts to road budgets? Whatever your questions are, bring them to the Annual Meeting.