Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Will Patten, former executive director of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility.
It happened again.
With increasing frequency, national articles about Vermont are published within weeks of each other. One will attest to the resiliency of Vermont’s economy and the other will acknowledge our great quality of life.
On Dec. 6, the United Health Foundation ranked Vermont as the healthiest state in the union for the third year in a row. We ranked first in 15 of 23 measures of public health (http://www.americashealthrankings.org/Rankings). One week later, on the 13th, Bullhorn, a national recruiting software company, issued its annual report on new job openings. Vermont leads the nation in creating jobs with a 62 percent increase over last year (http://www.bullhorn.com/news-event/job-opportunity-index). (Coincidently, Alabama, which United Health Foundation ranked the 46th healthiest state, was the only state in the Bullhorn ranking to post a negative job openings number.)
Earlier this year, CNN Money ranked Vermont as the fifth smartest state in the country while the Wall Street Journal reported that Vermont might be the best place to secure an SBA loan due to the state’s lowest-in-the-nation default rate.
We are regularly ranked the greenest state, the best state in which to raise a family and the safest state. And, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Vermont ranked 10th among the 50 states in real GDP growth in 2010 and the Federal Reserve reports that over the previous eight years, Vermont’s GDP grew at 2.5 percent, outpacing the federal growth rate of 2.1 percent.
By conventional measures, Vermont is not “friendly” to business. Our high taxes and tough regulations are supposed to make us unattractive to business investment. But the data in many recent articles and reports indicate that our quality of life is a real engine of economic development, as first evidenced in 1956 when Thomas Watson Jr. decided to build an IBM plant close to the ski areas he so enjoyed.
But quality of life is an elusive concept and unless we can monetize it, it won’t factor into our economic strategies and formulae. It’s common to believe the Vermont we all love is built upon some old-fashioned values such as a sense of community, an aversion to debt and a strong work ethic. But Vermont is also the result of bold financial choices that can surely be monetized. Here are some examples:
•Vermont’s decision to ban billboards in 1968 had measurable economic impact. Ad agencies lost revenues. Businesses lost customer traffic. Farmers lost lease payments for billboards placed on their land. Despite this financial impact, Vermont invested in its quality of life. As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (Berman v Parker, 1954), “It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy.”
•Two years later, Vermont adopted Act 250 to ensure that real estate development does not compromise state assets such as natural resources, civic capacity, public infrastructure and scenic beauty. The law’s provisions have withstood four decades of complaints that it discourages businesses from moving to or remaining in Vermont and has scared away millions of dollars of investment capital. The cost appears to have the support of Vermonters as the law has remained essentially unchanged for 40 years.
•Vermont passed the first “bottle bill” in 1953 banning non-refillable bottles. It was overturned in 1957 due to intense lobbying by the beer industry. But in 1972 we became the second state to regulate bottle redemption to reduce litter and promote recycling. A 2007 report by DSM Environmental, reported net costs of the bottle bill to distributors and bottlers in excess of $5 million.
•The current commitment to health care reform is a long-term investment in the well-being of all Vermonters. The costs and savings are still to be distributed but universal access to health care will be a major boost to Vermont’s quality of life.
By these and many other initiatives, Vermont has made real investments in its quality of life. Now the relative strength and resiliency of our economy suggest that those investments are paying handsome dividends.
Maybe the old-fashioned value that most effectively nourishes the Vermont economy is the realization that there’s more to life than money.
