[I]f you want to know what Phil Scott plans to focus on as governor, keep this three-digit mantra in mind:
6-3-1.
Those are the three numbers Scott uses to evaluate whether he’ll support any particular program or idea. It is the rubric used to decide what are priorities and what is unnecessary or has to wait. The three numbers set the key baseline figures that will be used to measure if progress is made on some of the state’s biggest problems.
The catchphrase represents the first-term governor’s numeric equivalent to the Hippocratic Oath for doctors or the Prime Directive for Star Trek’s Captain Kirk — a guiding hard-and-fast principle to filter through every decision and proposal he’s presented.
“How will it affect 6-3-1?” the governor will ask his cabinet and staff.
The message is so important you might see Scott and his administration soon sporting T-shirts or baseball caps emblazoned with 6-3-1.
What does it mean?
The figures are a way for the administration to boil down and translate into policy what Scott talked about on the campaign trail — growing the economy, making Vermont more affordable, protecting the most vulnerable.
Jobs. Property taxes. Opioid addiction.
Chief of Staff Jason Gibbs said 6-3-1 is designed to help the public understand Scott’s priorities.
“It’s about providing context that folks like my mom and dad, working Vermonters, can easily understand the why behind the what we’re proposing,” Gibbs said.
Here’s what the numbers represent.
The “6” represents six fewer Vermonters in the workforce every day, highlighting Scott’s concern during the campaign with the need to grow the economy, increase the population and get more Vermonters paying income taxes. Between 2010 and 2016, Scott notes, the state lost an average of 2,300 workers per year, whether through the elimination of their job, retirement or people giving up looking. In his state budget address, Scott said that represents 16,000 fewer people paying taxes.
The “3” represents three fewer children every day in the public school system. Declining enrollment highlights the issue of high property taxes and what Scott sees as a demographic “crisis” — a state with an aging population that needs to keep and attract younger workers with children. Since 1997, the school population has dropped by 21,000 students.
The “1” refers to the number of babies born every day to a mother addicted to drugs, a stark punch-in-the-face reminder of the depth of the state’s opioid epidemic and its potential cancerous effect on the state’s budget, not to mention its soul. (The actual rate is .76 per day, but Gibbs said officials believe it’s higher and underreported.)
“The governor has defined these as key markers, key context, key perspective to have when we approach everything,” Gibbs said. “We know we have to move the needle in each of these areas.”
The idea of “6-3-1” was developed during the transition period after Scott won in November and before he took office in January. Transition team members sorted through all sorts of social and economic indicators to find the statistics they felt highlighted some of the state’s biggest challenges.
Reducing the focus to a phrase like 6-3-1 will help keep the administration from getting pulled in so many directions that nothing gets done. And help the public understand his priorities.
The real hope, according to Gibbs, is to get legislative leaders, opinion leaders and Vermonters to buy into 6-3-1 and develop policies looking through its prism. Jointly. Together. Previous efforts to make structural change, like the government-efficiency program Challenges for Change, failed in part, Gibbs said, because one party came up with the idea and the other naturally opposed it. Scott, he said, knows he needs Democratic support, not just because of the political numbers, but because the problems are so significant.
One positive sign of future collaboration was last week’s House passage of a budget that doesn’t require any new taxes, a line in the sand Scott has said would result in a veto. Gibbs said holding the line on the budget this year was part of a two-part strategy: stop digging the financial hole any deeper, and then next year, build ladders to climb out.
Any mantra or slogan runs the danger of oversimplifying the breadth and complexity of some of the state’s challenges — Gibbs said additional metrics will be developed within each of the three numbers, but 6-3-1 will serve as the core.
The rubric helps explain many of Scott’s proposals: his push to have local communities hold the line on K-12 spending and to try to funnel more money into early education program and higher ed too. That proposal touches all three metrics: job creation, retention and workforce development; holding the line on property tax increases, developing more programs to help kids born addicted.
All three numbers, too, are interconnected in the administration’s eyes: More jobs might lead fewer people to slide into addiction, realigning the education system could make it better and lower costs, freeing up, for example, more money for drug treatment.
“Everything is tied together and that’s the other thing that 6-3-1 is meant to represent,” Gibbs said. “The social service challenge is not independent of our demographic challenge. They’re tied directly together. The cost of our education system, or paying for it, is tied to both of these other variables.”
The focus on specific data points is similar to the approach taken by Cornelius Hogan when he ran the Agency of Human Services during the 1990s under Gov. Howard Dean and emphasized reducing the number of teen pregnancies. That program was called Benchmarks for a Better Vermont.
Focusing on 6-3-1 also allows policy makers to easily measure what approaches are working. Quantifying results has been a long-standing goal of government, most recently encouraged through the adoption of “results-based accountability” throughout state government.
Getting the message to all 8,000 state employees and legislative leaders and other lawmakers is the next challenge. And, perhaps wishful thinking, to change the political culture of us vs. them, which Gibbs acknowledges may be too big a hurdle.
“The goal is to get things done,” Gibbs said. “If we’re committed to helping him to address 6-3-1, then we have to follow that lead because working with people regardless of the political balance is more important to the outcome than changing the political balance.
“And there are partisans in this building on my own side of the fence, who’d be offended by the notion that we shouldn’t be putting changing the political balance first,” Gibbs said. “We will never get to a point where we’ll be able to address 6-3-1 if we’re always putting the balance, the political control ahead of the outcomes we know we need to achieve.”