Lindsay Kurrle is the secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, the office in charge of economic development, housing, and community development. It has a budget of about $37 million and 80 employees.
Kurrle graduated from Montpelier High School and St. Michael’s College and said she’s never declared residency outside of Vermont, although her first career as a government audit specialist for the accounting firm KPMG took her to Massachusetts and New Hampshire, sometimes for months.
She and her husband co-own Kurrle Fuels and Transport, a business based in Montpelier.
Gov. Phil Scott appointed Kurrle as the state labor commissioner in December 2016. Three years later, she became secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, the agency that focuses on business promotion and economic development.
Six months after that, Kurrle and her staff experienced an abrupt about-face in their mission when the rising threat of Covid-19 infection in Vermont prompted the governor to order businesses to close.
Kurrle remembers first hearing about Covid-19 from state Health Commissioner Mark Levine when the virus was still limited to a few cases in the U.S.
“All of a sudden, we had a case here, and we’re sitting in the governor’s conference room and he’s telling us how dire the situation is,” recalled Kurrle about the events of last March. The governor asked her to help businesses suspend operations to minimize the infection rate.
“I was like, wait a second. I’m going to be running the agency responsible for economic vitality and business growth, and now I need to tell them to stop. Wow,” Kurrle said in an interview.
Last year, Kurrle’s agency set up a grant program that sent more than $300 million in federal relief money to the state’s small businesses. Now, 10 months into the pandemic shutdowns, Kurrle gets a lot of questions about how businesses are doing. It’s impossible to generalize, she said. The agency is surveying individual businesses in an effort to find out more.
VTDigger talked with Kurrle about the lessons of the past year, and about expectations for the future. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
VTDigger: How are businesses doing?
Lindsay Kurrle: It’s hard to say long-term how everyone will do. We know some of them were really, really overwhelmed and were ultimately able to access the federal relief and ultimately our recovery grants.
We have been helping people keep the doors open and the lights on. We don’t know yet what is to come. Will we keep all of them, or is this a temporary fix for them? It’s hard to know right now because we just got those grant dollars out. The longer this goes on, the more I worry.
VTD: Do you hear about small businesses closing?
LK: I don’t know that we have had closures. Some of the ones that were showing vulnerability said that because they have the grant money, they can afford to stay closed right now and keep their staff paid. What is hard to say is what will happen a month from now, two months from now. The lodging industry is a really hard one to figure out. How long can they sustain this? And will there be enough federal relief to get them through? There’s no definitive answer right now.
We’ll hear people say their restaurant is closed. We say, ‘Is it closed for good?’ They generally say they intend to reopen.
VTD: What are some ways that the pandemic changed the agency’s work?
LK: We have corresponded with businesses around our state that we never did before. We have a pretty small agency, and this pandemic has required us to work with every size business, every type of business, and in every remote corner of our state.
When we initially made the announcement that we needed folks to stay home, we started asking businesses to sign up for a newsletter so we could communicate with them and we asked them for intel, to share what was happening to them in real time.
We continue to aggregate that information and it’s very fluid. It would be hard to tell you what the impact numbers are at. Just weeks in last spring, we had a $300 million impact already. Businesses were shuttered.
We started a few other things. On Wednesdays we have business outreach, a meeting at 3 p.m. where employers from around the state, and individuals, and membership organizations can interact. We continue to do that, but now it’s more of a webinar. The last couple have been focused on the federal relief packages signed in late December. We bring speakers in to do a small presentation and then we do a large Q&A at the end. It tells us where they are at.
VTD: What is the Agency of Commerce and Community Development working on now?
LK: We want to help the businesses that haven’t received any help so far. Some of those started after March 2020, or maybe they bought an existing business around the time we closed businesses, or were doing the legwork to start a new business in 2020.
The administration is working on something right now to pitch to the Legislature to say there are really great federal programs now, like the Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) and EIDL and the grants for shuttered venue operators. But there are still going to be people who are left out.
The Dec. 27 federal bill is the most lengthy bill we have ever seen. Our team is still trying to digest it to see who is going to fall through the cracks. We’re going to see if we can get a discretionary pot of money to help those businesses. We’re still trying to formalize this. There’s $6 million left from (Coronavirus Relief Funds) that wasn’t spent, and that’s part of it.
I’m completely realistic that it’s going to be an uphill battle to try to get my hands on more state money for businesses. We won’t have other discretionary money to spend unless we get it from the General Fund. With (President-elect Joe) Biden’s proposal for $2 trillion, with $300 billion slated to go to the states, I would caution anybody not to get too excited about that. We don’t know if we’ll get any of it, or if we’ll have the discretion to do with it what we did with the last grant programs.
I just want to make sure businesses are doing anything they can to apply for the PPP. It’s a forgivable loan, and if nothing else comes about, at least people will have that in the pipeline.
VTD: As the pandemic took hold, Vermont had the most comprehensive business closures in the country. Did you hear from businesses about this?
LK: We had some very angry business owners. After taking phone calls and emails — and I can’t tell you how many — I can tell you it was coming from a place of fear, the fear of the unknown.
When people were really angry and even saying some really awful things, I knew, again, as a former business owner, I knew their dreams, their livelihood, their ability to help their employees put food on the table was literally being pulled out from under them. There was no understanding yet that there would be any federal aid.
It was really hard. I have been working for over three decades at this point, and the last 10 months have been the hardest of my entire career. It was an emotional challenge because you are taking on everybody’s pain and anguish and you are realizing that there were some times when we just didn’t have answers, other than to say we need you to do this because the health experts and safety experts are telling us to do this right now.
We asked people to put their trust in us. There were some dark days watching people digest how adversely impacted they were, quickly. With no idea in sight of when the end was.
VTD: Did people mostly comply with the virus-related orders?
LK: It’s interesting; some of the people who were the loudest, ultimately we were able to bring them on board and ask for their expertise and their help. When asked to help, I truly believe that most people were willing to prioritize public health. Even though they were sad and angry, there was a willingness and an understanding that we needed their help. Many drafted the restart documents.
There was a point in time where the volume of incoming stress calls, or stress emails, was enormous. That’s a little smaller now. It tells me people are starting to feel a little better about where things are at. I’m sure part of it is because of the economic relief, whether it’s federal help or state grants.
The other thing I think we have learned from different recessions is that Vermont doesn’t expand or contract as much as the nation does. My hope is that this isn’t going to be any different.
VTD: Do you think jobs will come back when Covid is over?
LK: With the hospitality business, we’ve going to have a lot of work to do to bring people back to our state. For better or for worse, we have spent a lot of time trying to make sure people aren’t transmitting the virus into our state, and it has come at a cost. It’s hard to measure what that cost is right now — but we know we’re going to have to really reach out to the people who have always loved Vermont.
We may have done a game-changer with the grants that allowed a lot of businesses to put technology in place. For example, the ski areas could put in place touchless transactions. So some of those hospitality jobs, they may come back, they may not.
But at the same time, Vermont has a strong tech industry. That’s an area where we have growth potential. So with many of these jobs that won’t come back, folks will take advantage of our amazing employment and training opportunities to put them in some in-demand jobs to keep them employed, but maybe differently.
Before the pandemic, we had a workforce shortage.
VTD: A year ago, there was a lot of focus on programs that reimbursed people thousands in expenses if they moved to Vermont. What’s happening with those programs?
LK: We have a natural energy right now in terms of people considering Vermont.
We’ll again look at the recruitment programs, though we may not be able to pay people to move here. Where we might consider putting money is the new worker program, where we reimburse people for their moving expenses to take a job with a Vermont-based business.
We’re out of money for those programs, so we have to decide what we’re going to do to get people over the finish line. We’ll work with the Legislature on that this year. We want to be very thoughtful about re-employment, to make sure Vermonters are trained up and put back into jobs. But what about the people who have been thinking about Vermont, who just need that nudge?
The budget is not done; that’s an area where we’re very open-minded in trying to diversify a bit, to make sure we’re speaking to a more diverse audience in bringing them to our state.
VTD: Where else would you like to focus this year?
LK: The focus has to be on making sure businesses have access to the financial and technical support they need to survive right now. For example, in the communities there were programs to help downtowns with things like open-air seating for restaurants. For us, that didn’t go away; that’s something we need a lot right now. Those are policy proposals that we will continue to work on right now.
VTD: How is remote work going at the agency?
LK: Our agency, I would say, has been more efficient than we have ever been. I have three teenagers and I work a lot, but because I am home, I feel like I can sit down and keep going because I am at least present if I am needed. Whereas when I worked in an office environment, I tended to feel I had to tie things up at the office before I could leave.
It’s hard to say because we don’t track every hour, but I would argue that people are easily on average putting in 60 hours a week. That means some people are doing double time in a week.
Hopefully our team has figured out that if going out for a run in the middle of the day is what keeps them going, they feel like they can go do that.
I’m not sure how much flexibility I will have in terms of making decisions for everyone to come back, but I believe we have received more than 100% effort from all of our team. When you need people, they are accessible. So personally speaking, in a world where people really want to be part of what is going on with their children, or elderly parents, whatever it might be, to the extent we can continue to permit the remote work, I am all for it. I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute.
VTD: Where have you learned the most from all this?
LK: We have shown that government can be nimble. Our agency, which was responsible for growth and economic vitality, shifted literally to closing the economy overnight. And then we were granted the trust by the Legislature to provide economic recovery grants. We had the federal dollars to build a grants management system; a contractor we hired built it in less than two weeks. Again because we had the money, we were able to bring in experts from other state agencies like the Vermont Economic Development Authority to help us do all the analysis and review the grant applications. The Department of Financial Regulation gave us people to review grants; VTrans gave us contract writers.
We generally manage 20 to 25 grants a year in our agency worth $2 million. We were able to deploy 150 times that amount in six months. We had the federal money to do so.
When we first learned of the $1.25 billion coming to the state, we sort of facetiously said, “Hey, we need $10 million of that.” We thought nobody would ever give us that kind of money. When all was said and done, we deployed over $300 million to businesses of all sizes in every county, in every sector.
I never in a million years thought I would be working shoulder-to-shoulder with an epidemiologist, but as part of the Covid restart team, made up of Commerce, the Health Department, and the Vermont Department of Public Safety, we get together twice a week.
If we only made decisions based on health, we’d never be thinking about the economy. There’s a unique push-pull. I talk with (Dr. Patsy Kelso, the state epidemiologist) probably every day.
