In 2022, Raj Bhakta stood in front of a room full of my neighbors and told us that if the town did not support his tax stabilization initiative, he might be forced to sell the former Green Mountain College campus to a tax-exempt religious group. The implication was clear: stable taxes with him would be better than zero taxes from a church.
Three years later, Mr. Bhakta has announced he will donate the campus to a Christian organization “aligned with the revival of the United States and Western Civilization.”
He’s calling it “The Gift.”
I’d like to talk about what’s actually happening.
The Threat, Fulfilled
Mr. Bhakta purchased the former campus of Green Mountain College in 2020 for $5 million. The campus had been appraised at roughly $20 million. Over the next several years, he developed his spirits company, moved his family onto the property, opened a small private school, revoked the townspeople’s access to the swimming hole, converted the library into a tasting room, and turned the gym into a garage. All of which, as I’ve noted before, was his right as the property owner.
He also asked the town for a tax stabilization deal. And when the town’s Selectboard didn’t finalize that deal fast enough for his liking, he sent a letter to my neighbors that lied about what we’d actually voted for. We voted to give the Selectboard “limited authority to explore the possibility” of a deal. Mr. Bhakta told us we’d voted “OVERWHELMINGLY” in favor of one.
I wrote about that lie a year ago. It still bothers me. Not because it was a particularly sophisticated deception, but because it revealed what Mr. Bhakta thinks of us: that we wouldn’t remember what we voted for, or that we wouldn’t bother to check.
Now his $100 million development plan, the one with the 100-room hotel and the helipad and the equestrian center, has evaporated. His family is leaving Vermont. And the campus he bought for $5 million is being offered, with conditions, to a religious organization whose mission must be “aligned with the revival of the United States and Western Civilization” and must “begin with the spiritual revival of our Christian faith.”
Let’s not pretend this is philanthropy. This is a man executing the threat he made in 2022, only now he’s dressed it in the language of charity.
What Those Words Mean
I want to spend a moment on that phrase: “the revival of the United States and Western Civilization.”
“Revival of Western Civilization” is doing political work. It signals allegiance to a particular vision of what America should be and who belongs in it. The phrase tells you, before a single proposal has been submitted, which organizations will be welcome and which will not. And the man deploying it has decided that a campus that spent twenty-five years teaching students about environmental responsibility, public service, and international understanding should be returned to its “original Christian calling,” as if the environmental mission were a deviation in the college’s mission rather than an evolution.
The quarter-century of environmental education that made Green Mountain College what it was to thousands of students and to this community barely registers. That erasure is not accidental. The “revival” Mr. Bhakta envisions requires forgetting what the college actually stood for.
And the deed restriction ensures his forgetting becomes permanent. Whoever receives “The Gift” will be legally bound to use the property only for causes that support a mission Mr. Bhakta has defined. Not a mission the town discussed. Not a mission we voted on. Not a mission that two hundred of my neighbors showed up to imagine together seven years ago. His mission. Chosen unilaterally. By a man on his way out of town.
Seven Years
In March of 2019, roughly two hundred residents of Poultney gathered to discuss the future of our town in the wake of the college’s closing. The youngest attendee was in diapers. The oldest were great-grandparents. We had radically polyamorous twenty-somethings and hardworking middle-aged tradesmen, powerful women of color and a man whose first thought was to create a safe haven for refugees. We had a working mother, tasked with cleaning the room after we’d gone, standing with us, listening and having her say, because she too was one of us.
We brainstormed thirty ideas. We voted on them. The overwhelming desire was for a hands-on educational institution centered on sustainability, agriculture, and the trades. I proposed a residential mental-health facility for teenagers, because I’d spent years watching the kids in our community struggle with anxiety, depression, addiction, and trauma, and because the closest public facility had what people darkly called “the Poultney Wing” due to how many of our kids ended up there.
Others proposed a veteran’s care facility. A federally funded nursing school. A multi-use community center with rooms for rent, a dining hall, a public pool. A maker space. An incubator for small businesses.
Every one of those ideas came from people who live here, who pay taxes here, who send their children to school here, who will still be here long after Mr. Bhakta has relocated his spirits company to another state.
None of those ideas will be considered. The deed restriction ensures it.
Nearly seven years have passed since those meetings. Seven years of waiting while a millionaire from out of state figured out what to do with a campus he bought at a discount. Seven years during which the mental health crisis among our teenagers got worse, not better. Seven years during which the economic wound of losing the college’s payroll went unhealed. Seven years during which a man who promised a $100 million development delivered a tasting room and a “Dear Neighbor” letter full of lies.
The president of the Poultney Area Chamber of Commerce told reporters that Mr. Bhakta’s departure is a “huge, discouraging blow,” and that “basically, we’re starting all over from square one.”
She’s partially right. We are back at square one. And that is exactly where Mr. Bhakta has left us, seven years older, with nothing to show for the wait but a lesson in what happens when a community’s largest asset belongs to a millionaire who does not share the community’s values.
What Now
Mr. Bhakta’s RFP has a timeline: proposals are due March 31st, a winner will be announced April 20th. He is under no obligation to select anyone. He retains all the power. He has had it for seven years.
Here is what I think we should do with what little power we have.
The town of Poultney should make a public statement. Not a petition or a protest, but a statement of who we are and what we believe, addressed to any organization considering Mr. Bhakta’s RFP.
The statement should make clear that Poultney is a community of faith diversity. We have churchgoers and atheists, Buddhists and lapsed Catholics, spiritual seekers and people who simply don’t think about it much. This is Vermont. Our most celebrated founding figure, Ethan Allen, wrote Reason, the Only Oracle of Man, an entire book arguing against organized religion, against the authority of scripture, and in favor of deism and natural reason. Allen was not some fringe figure, but the leader of the Green Mountain Boys, a man whose intellectual tradition runs as deep in this rocky soil as any church’s.
When Mr. Bhakta restricts his “Gift” to Christian organizations aligned with the “spiritual revival of our Christian faith” and the “revival of Western Civilization,” he excludes the majority of the people who actually live in our state. He imposes, through a deed restriction, a religious and political test on the future of a property that sits at the geographic and civic heart of our town.
The town should say so we want something more. Publicly. On the record.
And the statement should call for what the community has called for since 2019: a wider net.
If Mr. Bhakta wants to give the campus away, he has the right to give it away. But the people of Poultney have a right to state, clearly and for the public record, that we encourage proposals from secular organizations, from educational institutions, from mental health providers, from community development groups, from anyone whose mission serves the people who live in this town rather than the ideological preferences of a man who is leaving it.
Will this change Mr. Bhakta’s mind? Probably not. The property is his, and he will do what he will do.
But the townfolks’ ideas from 2019 have not expired and the needs those ideas addressed have only intensified. Our teenagers still need mental health services. Our tradespeople still need training pipelines. Our Main Street still needs the economic activity that a living, functioning campus provides. And any future buyer, any future developer, any future partner should know that the people of Poultney have been thinking about this for seven years, that we know what we need, and that we said so, on the record, when it mattered.
Let the record show that we are not silent.