By Curt Peterson
Killington selectmen have made Daryl Arminius’s appointment as town planner official.
Arminius was most recently town planner in Charlotte for four years. “It was simply the job that drew me to Killington,” he told the Mountain Times. “The advertised job description looked far more interesting than the many other planning and zoning prospects that I was looking at.”
A native of Vermont, Arminius worked as a laborer on a hemp farm, dishwasher, waiter and “working shifts as a roadie,” before earning his degree in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and a master’s degree from the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, England.
“Becoming a planner wasn’t a career goal for me,” he said. “After specializing in GIS for some years in Boston, Los Angeles and Vermont, I moved on to work as a transportation planner for a few regional planning commissions, and, finally, on to land use planning for municipalities.”
He appreciates Killington’s “large unfragmented mountainous forests,” but cites the characteristic as a challenge for planning the town’s future, creating “enormous development pressures.”
“In addition to the upcoming [proposed Tax Incentive Financed] district, the unprecedented influx of year-round residents, the town’s efforts to regulate the booming short-term rental housing stock [and] attempts to meet demand for affordable housing for workers,” present challenges, Arminius said. “There are other prospective phenomena to consider, such as the necessity for local energy independence and environmental migration … concomitant with sea level rise and other factors.”
People are often drawn to Killington because they have recreational interest in skiing, biking, golf or fishing. Arminius reports he honed his skiing skills as a youth, but “fell out of the habit” some years ago.
“Perhaps now, with the new office so close to the mountain, a renaissance may await,” he said.
