This story was originally published by the News & Citizen on September 4, 2025
The town of Johnson gets stuff done — at least that was the message from town officials to U.S. Rep. Becca Balint last week.
After the library had been inundated by floods year after year, the town literally picked it up and moved it across town this past spring in a midnight maneuver that defied the odds; when the town needed software to monitor water levels of the Gihon River — the real source of flooding for Johnson — a local business owner offered the funds; and when a scheme to move town infrastructure to higher ground surfaced, the Vermont State University Johnson campus stepped in with a potential solution.
“Planning has the power to kill progress,” Johnson’s town manager, Tom Galinat, said, while touring town with Balint. “We’ve become so focused on doing the right thing that we sometimes miss a good thing because of red tape and bureaucracy.
Balint’s visit to Johnson last week began at the library’s new location on Pearl Street, where she and town officials reveled in a successful operation. But it wasn’t always a sure thing, particularly on the night of the maneuver.
“Nobody wanted to say, yes to this,” Galinat said, adding that, even after the town finally secured the permits, there were more obstacles to overcome. Crews inched the library through town, but it clipped an electric wire on the way and got stuck on another building at the turn to Pearl Street.
There was a moment of reckoning for Galinat in the dead of night with the window to move the library quickly closing, but a handy Johnson resident sourced a ladder and saws all and freed the library for passage — no permission, just a desire to get the job done, Galinat said, and the crowd erupted in applause for that effort.
“That’s something you don’t see in a big city,” Galinat said, “We’re actually celebrating this person, not sending him to jail for trespassing or something like that.”
That theme of town autonomy over community issues continued at a roundtable discussion with Balint, which centered around the impact of major floods in Johnson and how the town can build back stronger from those events. Thirty-one units of housing were lost to flooding in 2023, and town infrastructure has only been partially rebuilt two years later.
The discussion looked different than ones in other towns — this wasn’t big government talking behind closed doors to little government. Anyone who’s felt the impact of floods in Johnson had a seat at the table, including residents, town officials and local business owners.
“I’m passionate about Johnson coming back and being strong,” Gene Richards, the owner of Johnson Woolen Mills, said. “I choose to celebrate what Johnson is and not talk about the floods. A flood is just something that happens, it’s a fact of life. The rest of my days in Johnson are amazing.”
Richards is the business owner who purchased the software for monitoring the Gihon River. Now, community organizations can monitor the river’s water levels and prepare if they rise to flood levels.
He echoed town officials in his desire to talk solutions at last week’s roundtable, but it was hard to ignore another major problem: a several-month lag with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
One of the hardest hit pieces of infrastructure for the town was the wastewater plant. Erik Bailey, the Johnson village manager, is a tall man, and even he had to reach to point out a marker on the inside wall of the plant, which indicates where water levels were in 2023.
The village shored up the plant the best they could, but they need a long-term solution, according to Bailey. Like with the library, one scheme is to move the plant to higher ground, but Bailey has been waiting for months for figures from FEMA to begin that process.
FEMA offers funds to restore infrastructure to pre-flood conditions, but the current footprint of Johnson’s plant doesn’t work, and rebuilding elsewhere is far more expensive than renovating in place.
To build on higher ground, Johnson Village must pair FEMA funds with state and federal grants, but Bailey can’t pursue grants until he knows how much FEMA will give the village. He explained the conundrum to Balint during a tour of the plant last week.
“We need to look at where we’ve created impenetrable systems that get people to quit before they even start,” Balint said. “People in government right now cannot be seen defending an institution, an agency, a department that’s not actually working for people.
She added, “If you’re trying to navigate a FEMA project and you’ve had three, four, five different case managers, than that system is clearly broken.”
Balint said it would be better to “grease the skid plates” and get money into towns quicker.
“How do we as Americans make government work better for people, so they do feel that sense of agency, so they do feel that sense that they can make decisions at the local level, and there aren’t going to be all of these barriers and challenges?” Balint said.
During the roundtable, participants also celebrated a potential partnership between the Town of Johnson and Vermont State University Johnson Campus. The college has extra space, and a recent grant could lead to campus renovations that incorporate town and community endeavors. For example, if the wastewater plant moves uphill to the town offices, those offices could move further uphill to the campus.
