Their public question is provocative: “What do Vermonters need to do in the next three years to be successful for the next generation?”
That’s why the people behind the “Vermont Proposition” initiative are casting their net wide to come up with an answer.
“We believe we’re at a transformative moment in Vermont history, and it’s fitting that we look toward the future together,” Paul Costello, executive director of the sponsoring Vermont Council on Rural Development, said at a recent program to unveil the proposal.
The nonpartisan nonprofit council has led policy efforts for three decades on agricultural development, energy generation, the creative and digital economies, democratic engagement, and, a dozen years ago, the Council on the Future of Vermont. The latter study inspired the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative that has granted more than $7 million to farm and forestry projects.
The council was exploring another study about the state’s future upon the arrival of Covid-19, only to see the need expand in the year since.
“Even before the pandemic hit, rural communities were facing tough realities — aging populations, loss of youth, longstanding challenges in the farm and forest sector, a global digital economy that provides tremendous opportunities but also drains our downtowns,” Costello said.
Organizers, tapping hundreds of personal interviews and more than a thousand written contributions, unveiled a draft set of priorities at a recent online Summit on the Future of Vermont attended by nearly 700 people.
The proposal, detailed in a 26-page report, calls for the state to:
1. Ensure affordable high-speed broadband and cellular access for all to promote community connection and commerce.
2. Combat racism and celebrate diversity.
3. Advance creative solutions to climate change.
4. Reduce poverty and promote opportunities for prosperity for all.
5. Ensure all children have access to affordable, quality care and education.
6. Strengthen local business and entrepreneurship through investment and innovation.
7. Boost state planning and regional coordination to promote efficiency and foresight.
8. Conserve land and water while cultivating a working landscape.
9. Renew civic engagement and strengthen trust, civility and democratic decision-making.
For individual commentaries on each proposition, click here.
“We recognize upfront the audacity of trying to do this,” Costello said.
Then again, it’s not the first time Vermonters have attempted such an effort.
The Vermont Commission on Country Life, formed after the disastrous flood of 1927, funneled similar discussions into a report that called for creation of the state police and enlargement of the state Board of Education.
In 1968, the state’s first modern Democratic governor, Philip Hoff, chaired the Vermont Planning Council whose “Vision and Choice — Vermont’s Future” study helped spur the pioneering Act 250 land-use law.
In 1988, the state’s first female governor, Madeleine Kunin, created the Governor’s Commission on Vermont’s Future that sparked the Act 200 growth management law.
The council first took its own turn from 2007 to 2009 when it surveyed almost 4,000 experts and everyday folk for its report “Imagining Vermont: Values and Vision for the Future.”
“We’re not interested in presenting a report and stepping away,” Costello said at the time. “When Vermonters have expressed their values, someone needs to say, ‘How do you build a plan that’s really going to change things?’”
The council will finalize the proposition’s priorities in the coming weeks before asking all interested individuals, organizations and businesses to help implement them as part of a new Partnership for the Future of Vermont detailed on the proposition’s website.
“Rather than try to take a political position on one side or another, our job is to be a center point that looks at what common ground we may have and what are some of the starting points we could work on together,” Costello said. “We’re here to listen and learn.”
