An 11,597-home deficit for its poorest renters, 8 of its 13 rural hospitals screening at risk of closing, a thousand aging dams — and, unusually, road and bridge numbers that are among the best in this series.
How to read this page: the class chip on every measure is the honesty label. Counted = an inspection or enumeration record. Modeled = a study's projection or risk score — printed with the modeler's name. Assessed = a structured survey of required investment — needs as documented, not measurements of decay. Figures keep the form their source gave them; years are printed on every measure.
Click any category to expand it — every measure with its figure, what it means in plain language, and its source.
Every measure carries its value, class, geography, year, definition, context and source. Three Vermont-specific cautions are printed rather than smoothed over. Traffic: no TTI figure for Vermont's only metro could be verified from the published tables reviewed, so the category prints no measure at all — the only empty category on this page, and it is empty on purpose. Hospitals: Vermont's at-risk SHARE (8 of 13, CHQPR) is among the nation's highest because its fleet is almost entirely rural — the same screen finds 0 Vermont hospitals at immediate risk, and both facts are printed together. Dams: the national-inventory high-hazard count (62) and the state dam-safety programme's own regulatory cut (44 high-hazard of ~992 regulated dams) use different boundaries and are printed with their bases labelled, never reconciled by guesswork.
Instruments are never blended: CHQPR's closure-risk screen (8 of 13 at risk) and Chartis's operating-margin screen (42% in the red) sit side by side unmerged; ASCE's drinking-water and wastewater needs are printed separately as ASCE publishes them; the ISO New England power figures are labelled regional on every measure, because Vermont has no separately published in-state capacity figure; and broadband prints both the original $229M BEAD allocation (as context) and the $100M approved deployment proposal (as the measure), because NTIA's 2025 restructuring made them different numbers. News-flagged: three measures rest on news reporting of official figures — the Chartis margin screen (via HFMA), the broadband location count (via Broadband Breakfast, VCBB figures) and the ISO energy forecast (via Utility Dive, ISO-NE CELT figures) — each flagged on its record.
Severity scores are editorial (0–100 band), calibrated against the other states in this series — Vermont's range (30–78) reflects a mostly rural state whose worst problems are worst-case housing availability, an old small-dam fleet and a fragile rural hospital map, and whose road, bridge and congestion numbers are genuinely among the better ones in the series.