It's been almost a year since Utah developer David Hall announced that he would be giving up on his plan to build a 5,000-acre "sustainable community," designed for up to 20,000 people, in the Upper Valley.

Now people from the four towns that pushed back on the development are trying to figure out what's next, working together to come up with regional solutions to many of the same issues other rural communities around Vermont face.

The Burlington area is a hub for refugees and immigrants in Vermont, but area officials and businesses are concerned about this population shrinking. Recent federal restrictions have limited the number of refugees coming to the state and there's another problem too: some New Americans are choosing to leave Vermont.

This past Town Meeting Day, voters in South Burlington backed a plan to tax rental cars. However in a case like this, where local residents vote to make a change to their town charter, it still needs to be approved by the Vermont Legislature before it can go into effect. So why is that? And might that process change? 

They were everything from tanneries to landfills to copper mines. They are Vermont's 14 Superfund sites; locations that were so polluted they required a long-term cleanup plan of the hazardous material contaminations. We'll "visit" some of them at a time when the Environmental Protection Agency is doing five-year reviews of six of the sites.

Author Katherine Paterson, who lives in Montpelier, is being recognized for “an exceptional lifetime body of work" by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Paterson is known for books for kids and young adults like Bridge to Terabithia, The Great Gilly Hopkins, Jacob Have I Loved, and many others. She took home this year’s E.B. White Award—a prize she says has personal significance.

It’s been a rough winter for owls—and the Vermont Institute of Natural Science says it’s mostly affecting young owls experiencing their first winter.

Lindsey Stoddard has something in common with Rain, the narrator of her new young adult novel Right As Rain. Like the young girl whose life is uprooted when she abruptly moves from Vermont to New York City's Spanish Harlem neighborhood, Stoddard has experienced a similar locale change as well.