Editor’s note: This story by Andrew McKeever, the editor of The Manchester Journal, was first published in the Journal on June 30.
MANCHESTER — A special economic zone. Affordable housing. Better coordination among interested groups and parties. The role of the arts in economic growth.
These perspectives and others will be part of the discussion at a community forum set for 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, July 9, at the Manchester Community Library. The forum, a moderated panel discussion with a question-and-answer period to follow, will be hosted by VTDigger, an online news resource based in Montpelier which is bringing its “Digger Dialogue” series to the Northshire.
Register for the event here.
The four-member panel, moderated by Wayne Granquist, a retired business executive from Weston, will offer perspectives on how to bolster economic growth in southern Vermont, with a focus on Bennington and Windham counties. The Journal and the Bennington Banner are media partners and sponsors of the event in conjunction with VTDigger.org. A social networking gathering will conclude the forum.
“We want to get beyond handwringing and really focus on what people are doing and thinking about how we can move forward,” said Anne Galloway, the editor and executive director of VTDigger. “It’s about bringing people together to talk about ideas.”
The forum comes against a background where the economy of the state’s southern tier is recovering more slowly from the recession of 2008-09 compared to Chittenden County and other parts of the state. Partially in response, legislators enacted a bill towards the end of the recently adjourned legislative session that called for the creation of a special economic zone for southern Vermont to hopefully stimulate more growth. However, there is no funding attached to the bill, and specific goals were left unstated.
But that’s a hopeful start, said Wayne Granquist, the forum’s moderator.
A committee is being formed to determine some approaches to sparking more economic activity throughout the region in the wake of that, and “I think that will be an interesting exercise,” he said.
There are about 20 different organizations working separately at the issue of lagging economic indicators, and better coordination between them would be helpful, he said.
Another step would be to come up with a unified marketing program, he added.
“We have fragmented messages coming out and we need to have some place where people can learn about southern Vermont and be attracted here,” he said, pointing to similar efforts in the Berkshires and in Stowe, Vermont, as examples of integrated, attractive regional promotion that have yielded strong results.
Granquist plans to get the forum rolling with a series of slides depicting how the economy of the southern part of the state compares with Chittenden County and the state as a whole. Several key indicators will reveal the problem, he said.
Rooms and meals tax receipts are one such data point. In 2001, Bennington County reeled in a total of $77 million from such tax sources. In 2009, at the height of the recession, that had remained essentially flat, at $79 million. In 2014, the last year for which statistics are available, that number had grown to $95 million, or roughly a 13 percent increase.
Chittenden County, meanwhile, saw its rooms and meals tax receipts jump from $233 million in 2001, to $314 million in 2009, and on to $414 million in 2014, about a 78 percent increase, Granquist said.
Other indicators present a more nuanced picture. The number of taxpayers from Manchester and Dorset who are filling returns that report income of more than $150,000 has grown, from 234 in 2001 across both towns, to 356 in 2013. Real estate sales and retail sales tax receipts, however, show slumping numbers that haven’t recovered to their 2001 levels.
“The picture that emerges is kind of interesting,” he said. “A flat economy characterized by increasing numbers of affluent people.”
After Granquist’s initial presentation, the four members of the panel — Trevor Mance, the owner and founder of TAM Waste Management Inc., Dina Janis, the artistic director of the Dorset Theatre Festival, Chris Morrow, the president of the Northshire Bookstore, and Amy Chamberlain, the chef and owner of the Perfect Wife Restaurant — will each make a five minute-long presentation, followed by a question-and-answer session.
Morrow echoed the need for a more unified approach to marketing and partnerships as part of the solution in an email sent to The Journal.
“Economic development in the Northshire needs to be a more unified, focused effort,” he stated in his email. “I would like to see a plan to foster local entrepreneurship, including access to capital. Also of import is recruiting people and companies to do business here based on selling our location, our lifestyle, our schools. I do not believe in shelling out public money for tax incentives to lure companies who frequently leave a few years later. We need a strong home-grown economy supplemented by outside companies moving here. But to do this we need the area towns to partner with the business community in new ways that benefit all and increase the tax base. I think we can do this over the coming years.”
Dina Janis, the artistic director of the Dorset Theatre Festival, said she planned to highlight the important role the arts and the “creative economy” can play in leveraging the economics of a particular region like Bennington and Windham counties. But she also stressed another issue — the need for affordable housing if members of the “Millennial Generation” — those born between 1980 and 2000 and the younger demographic population whose outward emigration and under-representation is often pointed to as a ticking time bomb in the state’s economy — are to be lured here.
“When you look at other communities that cracked the code on affordable housing and public transportation, they just boomed after that,” she said.
She also hoped that not only would local leaders and groups with a vested interest in the same goal of lifting up the region’s economy would coordinate more closely, but that state political leaders would as well, she said.
“They have to support what we’re doing down here,” she said. “Chittenden County isn’t the only place in Vermont.”
The forum is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.
