Marc Gendron relies on the Lake Champlain ferry to get from his home in Plattsburgh, N.Y., to medical appointments and shopping in Burlington.

Without the service between Cumberland Head and Grand Isle, Gendron would have to drive 26 miles north to cross at the Rouses Point Bridge, adding an hour to the trip.

So he was annoyed last week when he realized the Lake Champlain Transportation Company had raised the cost of a one-way ferry ticket for the second time in four months — to $12.45.



He fired off a curt email to customer service at the company — which is owned by the Pecor family of Burlington — to vent his frustration.

“I like how you sneak increases to the ferry by 40 cents overnight. Now $12.45! We need a bridge, you evil Pecore [sic] family!” the September 21 email reads.

Gendron admits the email wasn’t his finest hour.

“I’m usually much more polite,” said Gendron, 67, who worked for years in retail in New York and for a short time at the Burlington International Airport before leaving for health reasons. "But the ferry prices are just ridiculous!”

A few days later, on September 25, he returned home from a medical appointment at the University of Vermont Medical Center to find a sticker on the door to his apartment. It was from the Clinton County Sheriff’s Office, asking him to contact them.

Baffled and a bit nervous, he immediately drove to the office that evening, but it was closed. After a restless night, he returned at 7 a.m. sharp and was handed an envelope. It was from the ferry company, notifying him that he was banned from riding its Lake Champlain ferries until further notice.

The reason? His "disrespectful and accusatory" email, the ferry company's operations manager, Heather Stewart, wrote in a letter dated September 25.

"While we welcome constructive criticism and comments, we do not tolerate abusive and hostile communication," Stewart wrote.

She added that the email was "unacceptable" and "puts into question your ability to be a customer on the ferries."

She gave him a choice of coming into the ferry company’s Burlington office to “discuss how you are going to move forward as a customer at L.C.T.” or finding an "alternative route across Lake Champlain.”

He never got the chance to plead his case.

In a second letter in the envelope, also dated September 25, Stewart informed Gendron that he was not "invited, licensed or privileged" to enter the company's property. If he did, he could be arrested for trespassing.

“Please conduct yourself accordingly,” she wrote in closing.



Gendron couldn’t believe his eyes. “I was floored,” he said.

He expressed confusion and outrage to a sheriff’s deputy. The officer informed him that “it’s a private company, and they can do what they want, and they can ban who they want,” Gendron recalled.

The Clinton County Sheriff’s Department is not involved in the dispute, Major Nicholas Leon told Seven Days. Deputies merely served Gendron with the letters, a service the company paid for, Leon said.

Deputies deliver such “civil service” notices all the time in a variety of situations, from evictions to businesses looking to put problem customers on notice, he said. The office makes no determination on the legality of such requests, though he added that the ferry company is “hypervigilant” about passenger conduct.

Involving deputies can be confusing for people who assume the matter is criminal.

“I was, like, freaking out,” Gendron said. “I didn’t know if they were going to arrest me or what.”

His email, while it may have been disrespectful, didn’t threaten anyone, Gendron noted. It merely expressed his anger at the Pecor family, which he sees as exploiting and profiting from its monopoly on ferry service in the region.


The company has long run the largest ferry service on Lake Champlain, with crossings at Grand Isle and Charlotte. The service between Burlington and Port Kent, N.Y., ceased in 2019. A small seasonal ferry run by another company also crosses the lake between Shoreham, Vt., and Fort Ticonderoga, N.Y.

The service is a vital link in the region's transportation network. The company's ferries make 22,000 landings and departures every year and take more than a million passengers between Grand Isle and Cumberland Head.

The UVM Health Network has previously estimated that, each day, 130 patients travel by ferry to medical appointments across the lake.

One-way ferry rides for a car and driver are $11.75. That hasn't changed much over the years. But the company’s website notes that fares are "subject to fuel surcharge.”

Gendron noticed that while the fare may not have changed, the cost of a ride jumped from $11.95 in May to $12.10 in June to $12.45 last week.

The increases are likely due to hikes in the fuel surcharge. Stewart did not return a call for comment on Friday.

Average gas prices in Vermont have been rising all year, from $3.39 in January to $3.79 in late September. Ferries use diesel, but trends in that market are similar.

Tacking on an unpublished, variable fuel surcharge strikes Gendron as unfairly burdening people who have few other transportation choices. He thinks a bridge makes more sense and would be cheaper for drivers, though there are no serious plans for such a structure.

Gendron said he won't be taking the company up on its offer to visit its headquarters, saying he doesn’t trust it anymore. He hasn't ridden the ferry since he was banned.

"I’m not going to apologize for what I said," he said. "I am going to speak up for all the other people who are afraid to speak up."

The First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting people's freedom of speech, explained Jared Carter, a professor at Vermont Law School. But private companies generally have far more flexibility to restrict speech.

Airlines remove people from flights all the time, such as for being rude to flight attendants, Carter noted. And private social media companies have banned prominent people from their platforms for speech considered offensive.

An exception would be if the private company were performing a traditionally public function, Carter noted. Amtrak, for example, is a private company, but it was formed by the government and is heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

While the ferry company is "obviously carrying out a very public service" as a transportation provider, its private ownership likely gives it broad discretion to restrict access for customers whose comments it finds offensive, Carter said.

"It sounds like fairly thin skin on behalf of the company, but I don't think there is a First Amendment issue there," Carter said.

Green Mountain Transit, the largest public bus service in Vermont, would never consider banning someone for a nonthreatening email, general manager Clayton Clark said. The agency does ban troublemakers from its buses all the time but only for conduct that is violent or intimidating, Clark said.

"If it’s just 'Hey, I think you suck because you raised fares,' we’d say, 'Welcome aboard,'" Clark said.