Editor’s note: This commentary is by Caleb Magoon, who owns Power Play Sports in Morrisville, and Waterbury Sports. He also is vice chair of the Lamoille County Planning Commission, president of the Morrisville Alliance for Culture and Commerce, on the board of the Vermont chapter of the Main Street Alliance and a partner of Campaign for Vermont.
[M]uch has been made of our economic woes in Vermont and our inability to break beyond the slow growth we’ve seen over the last several years. We constantly hear about the cost of living, the lack of jobs here, health care costs and of course our perennially short budgets.
But when you get right down to it, addressing our falling population numbers and demographic challenges is as important as addressing the problems themselves. Our leaders have finally begun to realize and acknowledge the weight of this challenge, but have stopped short of action to address the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Any leader seeking to balance the budget or enact any kind of health care or education reform would be foolish not to address the population problem first.
Just like the issues facing our state college system, a big part of our money problems is a lack of customers. For the state, those “customers” are tax-paying adults whose declining numbers have caused the burden of funding the state to be spread over a smaller working population, driving up the cost for all of us. Those same working adults also frequently have school-age kids, whose numbers are also falling in the state. The loss of those customers and our inability to adjust school budgets to mirror student population has lead to an escalating property tax burden on fewer people.
Our population imbalance is affecting our budgeting far beyond the school system. A higher proportion of elderly and low-income citizens have led to an increasing Medicare/Medicaid burden on fewer taxpayers. When Obamacare was enacted by Congress, the insurance mandate was an essential part of the law to bring healthy, young taxpayers into the system to help pay for the older population. Unfortunately for Vermont, we lack sufficient numbers in the youngest adult group and this imbalance is only increasing and driving up the health care cost burden for everyone.
As a kid who left the state for a few of my young adult years, I can tell you that whether a teen stays or goes has little to do with anything Montpelier might do.
If you talk to business owners in Vermont, the population problem ranks high on their list of concerns for reasons of their own. Many are worried about what will happen when their baby-boomer staff starts (rather continues) retiring and the hunt for qualified employees becomes very difficult. Employers are already having trouble getting good employees for certain jobs. At our current unemployment rate, the “help wanted” section of any paper is considerably bigger than what the rhetoric about the need for economic development would suggest.
I’m by no means saying that we don’t need more jobs in Vermont. What we actually need is more, better jobs — fewer low-paying jobs tied to the service sector and improved diversity of employment sources. But we do have lots of jobs available and many of them very good. The larger companies in Vermont often have to recruit out of state to fill major positions. If our lawmakers were miraculously successful in recruiting a bunch more employers, the newly recruited businesses would be screaming about their recruiting challenge. What we should be doing is recruiting people. Our economic development challenge, (getting more customers) should be focused on getting more good workers and not just more jobs.
This situation is only going to get worse without action. As our cost of living rises, the challenge of attracting good people to live here will only get more difficult. Catch-22. We can’t legislate lower rents or higher wages without running into unintended consequences. We need to stop spreading doom and gloom about our economy and understand that if we just filled the good positions we have open, we would see a big boost in tax revenue.
Despite their inaction, lawmakers do seem to understand the problem on some level, frequently referencing the “brain drain.” But the only answer Montpelier has for the problem is a vain attempt to keep kids here. As a kid who left the state for a few of my young adult years, I can tell you that whether a teen stays or goes has little to do with anything Montpelier might do.
So what can we do? One of our best options is working to attract people like myself who moved away and would like to return to the homeland. Most of them cherish their upbringing as I do and would move back if they thought they could. They already understand the values we hold dear and have an appreciation for our quality of life. My schoolmates are the right age and many would love to come back to raise their families here. But they’ve been falsely told that there are not good opportunities here. So where is the marketing campaign to turn around this false rhetoric and woo them back?
In addition to Vermont’s many available jobs, there are a TON of retirement age business owners who would prefer to see their businesses live on rather than just folding up their tents. These businesses are an integral part of the fabric of our small towns. This is the last, possibly scariest consequence of a declining population: no young people to take over our many small businesses. Boom age business owners are actively looking for the next young entrepreneur, but many simply don’t know where to look. How can we help those business owners make these connections? What can we do to pair young ex-pats with the many opportunities in Vermont? How can we get them over the hump, turning thinking about making the move into actually making the move?
The population problem is the root of many of our challenges and one of the greatest problems we face in Vermont today. It’s a challenge that is intrinsically tied to our budget issues, property taxes, education funding, health care woes and the health of our business community. Our leaders need to lighten up on the negative rhetoric and take action to address the issue — we have the resources to do so. By changing the message about our economy and empowering our current business support serves to address the problem, they could make a big impact. Action must be taken soon — it won’t be long before inaction leads to a downward spiral that hurts our economy much more than it already has.
