For the past 10 months we’ve heard a lot about health care, housing and affordability from Vermont candidates for elected office. They’ve been mostly mum, however, on a topic that was once front and center in Montpelier: cleaning up Lake Champlain. After a decade of remediation programs, at a price tag approaching $1 billion, the condition of the state’s most precious natural resource has not improved as much as expected, according to water watchdogs, and has gotten worse in some spots.
What happened? And why have state leaders seemingly stopped talking about it? Those are some of the questions Seven Days aims to answer in a yearlong collaboration with ProPublica. Back in June, the national nonprofit news outlet selected our newsroom — with that sprawling story pitch — for inclusion in its Local Reporting Network. The program pairs ProPublica editors with local ones to pursue ambitious reporting projects. The org pays for almost everything and brings expertise we could never find or afford.
By 2029, it will have worked with one lucky local media outlet in all 50 states. This year ProPublica and the Connecticut Mirror jointly won a Pulitzer Prize in local reporting for a series showing how the state’s towing laws allowed dishonest companies to overcharge customers with impunity. The Mirror’s work led to almost immediate corrective legislative action.
Given all the varied sources of pollution upstream, it might be harder to find a lone bad guy in the “Troubled Waters” of Lake Champlain, as our series is called. But the two reporters on the investigation are well equipped to plumb its murky depths. Lead writer Jonathan Mingle is an environmental journalist based in Lincoln whose work has taken him all over the world. His first book, Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World, is about black carbon pollution in the Himalayas. His second, Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future, won the 2025 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Book Award. On March 5 of that year, Mingle wrote an award-winning cover story for Seven Days about the decline of local logging and sawmills in which he explained why that’s actually bad for Vermont forests.
He so enjoyed reporting that piece for us, and hearing from neighbors who read it, that he was open to taking on another “fascinating, thorny, important issue in my own backyard,” Mingle said. “I live in the Champlain Valley. I have a stream that goes right here by my house that winds up in Lake Champlain. I was ripe for that pitch. And as a freelancer, I’m often hungry for collaboration.”
His partner on the project, veteran journalist and outdoorsman John Dillon, has been writing about Vermont’s wild and working lands for more than 40 years. He was the first staff reporter at Vermont Public, where he worked for 20 years, including as news director. He retired in 2021 but has continued to cover Vermont agriculture and the environment as a freelancer, including for Seven Days.
He’s generously guided Mingle through the bureaucracy and shared sources that he has accumulated over decades. “Tapping into his encyclopedic knowledge of state government and the lake and this issue has been obviously enormously helpful, but also, it’s fun to kind of tag team with him,” Mingle said, calling Dillon a “reporter’s reporter.”
Want to support more in-depth investigations like this one?
Make a contribution and become a Seven Days Super Reader.
“Borderline obsessed” is how Seven Days news editor Matthew Roy describes Dillon, noting that the Middlesex resident has been unearthing 25-year-old notes and documents from boxes in his garage that prove how little cleanup progress has been made. Last week Dillon called in from Germany, where he was visiting grandchildren, to help Mingle put some probing questions to Vermont Secretary of Agriculture Anson Tebbetts.
“It’s hard to overstate Dillon’s contributions here,” said Roy, who is the lead local editor on the project. “He is genuinely excited that this story is being told.” Candace Page, who wrote extensively about Lake Champlain when she was a reporter for the Burlington Free Press and now edits for Seven Days, also contributed personal archives and helped craft the ProPublica application earlier this year.
We hope their enthusiasm is contagious. On the same day Seven Days publishes the first installment of “Troubled Waters,” ProPublica will, too, exposing our work to a wider, national audience. We’re grateful to their talented editors for believing in this project and for investing their time and skills to make each story in the series worthy of your attention. Look for part two in 2027.
This article appears in November 4 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
