By Rob Gurwitt

I’m sure you’ve heard all about the piece of legislation Vermont has enacted. The one that will change the state in fundamental ways. The one that, at some point in the near future, will cause residents to wonder whether representative democracy is really all it’s cracked up to be. I’m referring, of course, to the big-truck bill.

This is not, admittedly, what this year’s legislative session will best be remembered for. The debate over gay marriage and civil unions has split Vermont and stamped the careers of state legislators in ways that will take years to sort out. It has gripped residents — to say nothing of the rest of the country — with the force of its moral dimensions and the drama of its passage through Montpelier. Above all, it has demonstrated that nothing captivates the voting public like an issue that is, for the overwhelming majority, entirely symbolic.

Sure, there will be some gay residents who take advantage of the new law to form a “civil union.” Yes, there may be gay men or women who determine to move to Vermont because of the measure, though they’re likely to be a drop in the bucket compared to the heterosexual Bostonians, New Yorkers and others who move there because they’re tired of not seeing the Milky Way at night. But the fact is, civil unions will have almost no measurable impact on the daily lives of Vermonters.

Not so the big-truck bill. As have other states, Vermont has been grappling with the fact that it somehow neglected to design its communities, and the roads linking them, to meet the needs of the trucking industry. Vermont has only two interstate highways, and in order to get to them, trucks have to pass through a lot of small towns over narrow, twisty roads. Trucks have been growing larger and larger in recent years, and a while ago some of those towns managed to ban trucks over 48 feet long from their roads. This has been inconvenient for truckers and the industrial communities those trucks serve, and so the legislature came up with a solution: It has created a network of roads for trucks of up to 72 feet in length where they can operate without a permit; the permits to get from the network to a particular factory or store will be issued by the business in question. A policy affecting the basic quality of life in a lot of towns, in other words, has pretty much been driven by the bigger-is-better dictates of trucking economics.

So did Vermonters turn out in droves to register their opinions on this? Of course not. Other than trucking lobbyists, business leaders and activists in a few of the towns most affected by the issue, legislators barely heard from their constituents. They will eventually, but only when townspeople suddenly find themselves confronting the need for a bypass in order to restore some calm to Main Street, and wonder how they lost control of their roads in the first place. They’ll reflexively blame the trucking lobby and the majority of legislators who voted for the big-truck measure. And they’ll never stop to think that the true test of a civic culture is not how involved people get in the hot-button issues that carry great emotional weight, but whether they also care enough to study and weigh in on the quieter, day-to-day matters that actually shape the communities in which they live.

Rob Gurwitt, a Vermont resident, is a staff correspondent for Governing magazine.

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