Newport’s long-vacant downtown block known as the pit is edging toward a new chapter, with an upcoming land sale that could bring fresh development to a place that has come to symbolize the city’s decline. Mayor Rick Ufford-Chase says the goal is to rebuild without asking taxpayers to shoulder more of the cost.
That matters now because Newport, a city of about 4,400 people, is trying to turn a corner at the same time it is dealing with housing shortages, labor shortages and a downtown that has seen one hopeful business after another close on Main Street. For Ufford-Chase, the question is blunt: how do you bring a city back to life?
The lot at the center of that effort was once supposed to hold a hotel, but the project collapsed after developers were caught in the EB-5 scandal, described as the biggest case of fraud in Vermont history. The empty, fenced-in block has sat as a reminder of what never got built while Newport keeps searching for a path that can revive its center without repeating the failures that left it there.
Ufford-Chase has tried to ground that effort in memory as much as planning. He said Newport was a thriving place when he was a kid, when people from around the area came downtown to shop and the city supported two lively dance halls, diverse stores and restaurants in the 1960s and 1970s. He and his wife moved to the Northeast Kingdom from Rockland County, New York in 2020 after losing their jobs when the pandemic hit, but he said the pull was familiar: they came home to a place they had always visited for family and vacation.
His path also helps explain why he talks about Newport the way he does. After attending Colorado College, he worked in Tucson, Ariz., as an immigration advocate and said he expected to stay there only a year before remaining for 20 years and helping start BorderLinks. He was later arrested in 2007 while protesting the Iraq war, and that mix of activism and public service now shapes a mayoral approach focused on rebuilding civic trust as much as buildings.
But Newport’s problems are not only about one abandoned lot. The city also needs to heal relationships with its Canadian neighbors, add far more affordable housing and cope with labor shortages in the dairy and construction industries, all while avoiding a bigger burden on taxpayers. That is where the friction lies: the city wants growth, but it also wants the revival to pay for itself as much as possible.
There is also a less comfortable backdrop. Galvion Inc. recently drew controversy for supplying helmets to ICE operations, a reminder that the city’s name keeps surfacing in disputes well beyond downtown redevelopment. Newport’s next step is the land sale, and the unresolved question is whether the buyer will bring a workable plan for the pit or just another promise to a city that has heard plenty of those before.
