Editor’s note: This commentary is by Sen. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden, who is currently chair of the Senate Education Committee. He is also an English professor at the University of Vermont.
Even as you read this op-ed, we have three Vermont communities holding their breath, three towns, three faculties, three student bodies. Johnson, Lyndon, and Randolph Center have all been put on notice that their campuses – their job engines – may be shuttered. Even though ex-Chancellor Jeb Spaulding withdrew his proposal to do just that, he did so with the warning that “the current configuration of state colleges is not sustainable” and that “it cannot continue for long.”
And it’s a funny thing: Given the choice, prospective students will generally choose not to hold their breath.
Which means that the Legislature must act now, in advance of the wholesale reckoning with statewide higher education that the governor, the Senate president pro tem, the House speaker and others have rightly demanded. That reckoning – as anyone familiar with large committees and the public input process knows – will take a year or more, even if we rush it along. And at the end of that process, implementation of any useful recommendations will take still longer.
But how can we act before we’ve done the spadework to know precisely how we should reorganize the system? By taking steps in the proper order, and knowing our place as a Legislature.
The first thing that must be done: publicly designate a permanent funding stream to the Vermont State Colleges. A stream of funding that will act as a public endowment, never to be diverted, to be counted on in perpetuity. A source that will finally bear out Title 16, chapter 72 of the Vermont statutes, which promises that the Vermont State Colleges will be “supported in whole or in substantial part with State funds.”
For years now, we have talked as a Legislature and a state about what might be accomplished with the tax proceeds from an adult-use cannabis industry in Vermont. The bill to create such a system is currently in conference between the House and the Senate; the governor has come tantalizingly close to saying he would sign such a bill, with a few safeguards. In the event that such a bill goes through, in two years’ time we might reasonably expect tax receipts on the order of our well-run, heavy-control liquor operation – about $24 million per year.
And if the past is any guide, we might also expect that sum to be split 15 different ways, rendering it somewhat helpful to many, but life-saving for none.
I would argue that nowhere on the Legislature’s very full plate is there a need more outstanding than the existential threat facing the VSC. Nowhere is there a more pressing threat to the state’s economy, its workforce, and its young people in desperate need of higher education in a ferociously competitive information age. For that reason, we should pass tax-and-regulate this session, and as we do, we can and should designate the bulk of tax-and-regulate proceeds to the Vermont State Colleges. By that, I mean two-thirds, and no less. Call it $16 million-20 million.
The second thing that must be done: speed up the revenue stream from tax-and-regulate by an additional year. When Senate Judiciary worked on its own version of the cannabis bill last year, medical marijuana dispensaries came to us with a proposal to jumpstart funds from tax-and-regulate by allowing their operations – which have been smoothly run and already have secure distribution and product in pipeline – to lead off the roll-out a year early. Other licenses and operations would follow at a more measured pace.
I opposed that proposal at the time because I wanted to make sure that when licenses became available, everyone in the state would have an equal start off the line.
But with the state’s pandemic-related economic troubles, and the VSC’s own dire financial situation staring us in the face, I now believe that rolling out adult-use via qualified and currently licensed dispensary operations would be an economic lifesaver. That’s a provision that could be agreed to in conference, and if the governor signed the bill or at least allowed it to become law, we could then expect revenues not long after the Legislature completes the year of bridge funding it has committed to the VSC.
A public endowment. Tax. Regulate. Educate.
And to be clear, this would be an infusion over and above the VSC’s current appropriation in the mid-$30 million range. That would bring us somewhere north of $50 million per year, almost exactly to the 30% support rate that is the going average in New England.
Most states use vice taxes to fund education, as does Vermont currently. Liquor and lottery money now flows to the education fund, as it should. The governor has already called for some tax-and-regulate proceeds to support substance abuse prevention, and afterschool programs as a subset of that funding. Those uses would sit very comfortably beside the primary use I’ve described above.
The third thing that must be done: let the restructuring conversation proceed with the existential threat taken off the table. Prospective students will know for a fact that the state is committed to the long-term welfare of the system they’re considering.
And the last thing that must be done: we must know our place as a Legislature. It is not our place to step in at the last minute and push the trustees, the acting chancellor and the collaborative working groups that have now formed at all of the affected campuses aside.
Our role is to ensure the financial stability of the system long term as they work, to aid them in that work, to amplify the voice of the public, and to fight like hell to save every campus, every job on every campus, and every student who is no longer sure if Vermont is the place to seek their fortune. If that can’t be managed – if online competition and demographic trends force a closure or a consolidation eventually – we cannot let it be for lack of trying, for lack of pursuing the one highly realistic option that is in our hands, right now, even as we speak.
