As someone who lives not to far from here can I say, this is nuts. Mega-city and Vermont are opposites. It just seems crazy that someone with tons of money and nothing to spend it on can just walk in and try to build a city in the middle of nowhere and where everybody there besides him wants it that way.
Mega-city? It's a city of 20,000 people in a very small area (1 mile square?). 20,000 people is more like a town than a city and certainly not a "mega" city.
“In my crazy mind, two-thirds of Vermont would be wilderness and one-third would be the farms that are occupied, and you’d have 20 million people in Vermont,” he tells the group, slapping the table.
The issue for me isn't him being Mormon or if he wanted to build a little community at a religious site. For me, the issue is that he bought up a community to impose his vision and his will on everyone there. No one there asked for this. It'd be upsetting if anyone of any background tried this same thing. He's not working with the community. He's trying to demolish it to build his own. That's incredibly selfish and arrogant. He tries to justify it saying it will be sustainable and a model for the future. But he is in no way working with the community. I think his ideas are admirable but he's going about it all the wrong way. He should have looked for a community wanting change and worked with them to make it better. It should be a collaborative process with compromise, not imperialistic.
