O’Brien Brothers asks South Burlington to use a state program to move Old Farm Road
South Burlington City Hall at 180 Market Street, where the City Council discussed a CHIP application for Old Farm Road. Photo: SBVT Communications, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
South Burlington’s City Council spent part of its Oct. 19 meeting on a proposal to use the state’s new Community and Housing Infrastructure Program to help pay for moving Old Farm Road, a public park, a sidewalk and a recreation path tied to the last phase of the O’Brien Brothers development between Kennedy Drive and Potash Road.
Deputy City Manager Nicholas Storellicastro told the council the purpose was to walk through the existing development agreement, explain CHIP and hear from the developer, according to draft minutes of the meeting. In August 2025, he said, the council approved an agreement to relocate Old Farm Road for traffic flow and safety. Under that agreement, a strip of land would go to the O’Briens, the road would be rebuilt and turned over to the city, and the rest of the old road alignment would go to the company.
CHIP, he said, works like tax-increment financing but only on a single contiguous site and cannot be used inside a TIF district. The municipality has to file the application. Debt must be incurred within five years, and increment can be retained for up to 20 years.
Evan Langfeldt, the O’Brien Brothers chief executive, and a colleague, Mr. Gill, told the council the program would cover reorienting Old Farm Road, a public park near the historic barn, a sidewalk to Hinesburg Road and a recreation path from Kennedy Drive to the Potash Bridge on Route 116. There would be 43 homes, Langfeldt said, and the increment would be tied to those homes, which he said would lower their cost and also open a further stretch of residential and commercial development. He said the cost of building a home has risen 45 percent since 2021 and that materials have risen 6.7 percent in the past 12 months, on top of tightness in the trades and higher interest rates.
Gill told the council the company is required to move the existing city road 150 feet through ledge and that the development itself did not require that move. He also said the 43 homes could be built without relocating the road, and that moving it is what opens the commercial potential. Minutes record him describing the new homes as ranging from 1,500 to 3,200 square feet, and then giving prices from a high of $600,000 for an 1,800-square-foot home to $1.3 million for a 3,500-square-foot home.
The Other Paper reported Nov. 5 that the company is asking the city to apply for up to $5 million through CHIP, that moving the northern section of Old Farm Road has been in plans for the 155-home development since at least 2020, that 115 homes have already been built, and that the development agreement requires the northern section of the road to be relocated before the 125th home can be permitted. Those project-wide figures were not recorded in the same form in the Oct. 19 minutes, which also quote Langfeldt as saying there are 105 units in this phase.
Council members did not take a vote. Langfeldt said the developer, not taxpayers, would carry the debt, and that if the homes did not sell, “O’Brien is on the hook.” Several councilors asked for more modeling, including how quickly commercial development might help repay the loan. Langfeldt asked to be put on a later agenda. Councilor Barbara Zigmund said she did not favor starting the application that night.
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