BURLINGTON — Middlebury’s Downtown Park was recently among one of the nine Vermont projects selected to receive Public Places Awards.
The recipients will be honored at a special ceremony and reception, March 13, from 4-6 p.m. in the Cedar Creek Room at the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier. The public is invited to attend.
The biennial awards program is co-sponsored by the Vermont Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Vermont Planners Association and the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program, a partnership of University of Vermont Extension and the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. This year’s recipients were selected by a five-member jury comprised of representatives from these sponsors who work in public, private or academic practice and have diverse backgrounds in community planning, landscape architecture and research.
Awards are given to projects, either completed or in the conceptual stage, which create, preserve or enhance interior or exterior public space or link open spaces through connective corridors in the state. Projects may involve components such as community or transportation planning, historic preservation, public recreation, wildlife management, green infrastructure planning or urban and community forestry, among others.
The jury awarded two levels of awards, Honor and Merit, to projects that demonstrated excellence in planning, design or regulations that promote positive, public uses and benefits. They recognized those that included a particularly significant feature or that stood out as being exceptional overall with the Honor Award.
Middlebury Downtown Park was one of two projects to receive the Honor award, sharing the honor with the Vermont Town Forest Project in the works in various towns statewide.
Merit awards were given to projects in Chester, Newport, Lyndon, St. Albans and South Burlington and range from a cemetery entrance to waterfront projects, to livability studies and park master plans. 
More information about the Public Places Awards Program is available at go.uvm.edu/vtucf-awards.