[S]enate leader Tim Ashe sought to move on from a tit-for-tat with Gov. Phil Scott over Vermont’s workforce woes on Wednesday, but said he remained unconvinced by the administration’s plans to address the issue.
Scott has driven home his commitment to growing the state’s workforce through a “6-3-1” slogan — even making it the number on his official car’s license plate. The six represents the number of workers he says the state has lost every day since he took office in January 2017.
Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, told reporters last week that the figure was misleading, citing research showing that Vermont is actually adding two workers a day in the last year and half. But following a scathing response from Scott, who said the comments were a D.C.-style attack that undermined urgent work, Ashe said the dispute was overblown, and was now a thing of the past.
“It was actually a non-issue made a political issue by the administration and I’m happy that it’s over,” Ashe told reporters at his Statehouse office. “There’s no disagreement. We had a labor force decline over the years and we still have these demographic pressures.”
However, when it came to specific proposals to add workers, Ashe said he had seen nothing from the administration that he was prepared to support, including the Motivated Out-of-state Visitors and Entrepreneurs, or MOVE, initiative, which centers around an online portal that will theoretically target those professionals most likely to make the move to Vermont.
The governor has put a $3.2 million price tag on the initiative, though it remains unclear where exactly that money will come from.
“There’s a proposal to spend $3 million on a website/reconfiguration of the state employees and we need to better understand what that looks like,” Ashe said on Wednesday, adding that he was unsure that a web-based strategy was the way to go.
“That’s not to disparage attempts to better link people who want to work in Vermont with jobs that are here,” he said. “But the shiny new object often gets lots of attention here. We want to make sure our primary focus is where the best payoff is, and thousands of Vermonters who are falling through the cracks might be the single best place to make sure we are working on it.”
In a press release responding to Ashe’s initial critique of the 6-3-1 slogan, Scott said that Ashe was cherry-picking data and ultimately distracting from a crucial conversation about how to address what he describes as a demographic crisis.
“We don’t have time for their political games because we have an immediate need to address this crisis,” he said. “Frankly, it’s this type of partisanship that has allowed this problem to fester and, as a result, we’re just 3-4 years from having only one worker for every child, retiree and dependent of the state, when you exclude the Burlington area.”
“This isn’t Washington, D.C.,” the governor added. “It’s Vermont and I believe Vermonters want their legislators — regardless of party — to get serious about working with me to grow the economy and make Vermont more affordable.”
Ashe said he was prepared to do just that.
“I hope that the work we have done working with the administration last year on workforce development strategies is something that will help turn the tide on that group of Vermonters who are just kind of disappearing from our workforce,” he said.
“So there’s a lot of places we are going to work together on workforce development for sure. We meet regularly so there’s no bad blood or anything like that. You know, it’s politics.”
