It was a cold February morning in 2013 and I was headed to Vermont. When an opportunity for an all-expenses paid trip to New England arose, I immediately jumped on it. Strong Towns was kind enough to send me to help with a community engagement project with some amazing partner organizations. I couldn't pass it up.

Our objectives were simple: engage the community, present the Strong Towns message, and cross our fingers the community would make the right decision. Big plans were brewing, and we wanted to be part of it.

The town of Newport, Vermont is settled amidst the forests and farms of the northern Vermont countryside, not far from the Canadian border. It's a stunning town of 4,600 people nestled on the beautiful shores of Lake Memphremagog. It is the economic and cultural capital of a region known as the Northeast Kingdom.

The big, new, exciting, silver bullet renaissance plan was going to take many forms: demolish blocks of historic buildings and replace them with new mixed-use buildings, a new conference center, marina, and, of course, attract a bio-tech research firm from South Korea. It was a big gamble with a huge upside. It would create over 10,000 direct and indirect jobs! Plus, a Walmart would be coming to town and they needed a strong downtown to combat it.

Tourism would boom, jobs would be had, and the town would be forever changed. And it would all be funded through an obscure Federal program called EB-5. Or, as locals referred to it: free money.

This was the dream, but reality had something else in mind.

I didn't know much about the EB-5 program or what it meant. Money was money, regardless of the source. Free money, all the better. I assumed everything was above board. This was Vermont after all, not New Jersey.

All I cared about was that a town was going to tear down its historic Main Street. This struck me as an irresponsible thing to do. Residents and civic boosters insisted Main Street was unsatisfactory, unsafe, and unusable. It looked fine to me. In fact, in the small Midwestern town of my childhood, this block would have been the town's pride and joy.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but I do vaguely remember conversations about whether the historic core should be redone. The proposed replacement had a healthy mix of uses, good architecture, and respected the surrounding urban form. What's not to like? It was responsible urban development.