A Rat’s Long Tale: How a distribution facility proposal upended Middlebury

A Rat’s Long Tale: How a distribution facility proposal upended Middlebury

In the 2023 rush to pass a new state budget, a “rat” was inserted into the budget implementer, one of those political favors that occupy a few lines of a bill nearly 1,000 pages long, often inserted without public notice or hearing in the last minute behind-the-scenes horse trading that eventually produces the budget. This particular budget rat, however, has a long tale: it concerned a proposed distribution center in the small, wealthy town of M…