The announcement represents a day live-music fans have dreamed of since the COVID-19 pandemic wiped out the vast majority of concerts in March 2020. The Tedeschi Trucks show – even with its restrictions of social distancing and limited capacity – welcomes the beginning of a summer of musical fun that never really got off the ground last year.
Higher Ground, Vermont’s highest-profile music club, is starting to ramp up its 2021 schedule after offering only a few drive-in-styled concerts last summer and fall at the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction. Concerts Higher Ground has scheduled for later this year at various venues include:
Road work and utility maintenance is ramping up throughout the state, and Essex will experience some of it this week.
Starting Monday, May 3, Vermont Electric Power Company will be replacing an electric transmission utility pole next to VT Route 15 â Pearl Street â as part of its ongoing Essex-Milton transmission line maintenance work. Work will last through May and create traffic pattern changes in the stretch between Susie Wilson Road and the Champlain Valley Exposition fairgrounds.
A section of the exiting Route 15 median will be removed to create a temporary eastbound lane of travel around the work site. After completion of the pole replacement, the median will be restored so the normal traffic pattern can resume. For more information, visit velco.com/pearlstreet.
A little less than six months from now, organizers of the Champlain Valley Fair hope to welcome tens of thousands of visitors to the exposition grounds in Essex Junction. Yet the fair can’t plunge into planning for summer without the state of Vermont telling organizers what to expect.
“We need some guidelines, some road marks along the way to reopen,” said Tim Shea, executive director of the Champlain Valley Exposition, which oversees the state’s largest fair. “The big issue for us is what capacity will look like and what social-distancing measures will look like for the end of August.”
The Vermont Department of Health reported Thursday that 110,661 Vermonters have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. That represents 20.0 percent of all Vermonters over the age