This commentary is by Matt Wormser of Shelburne. He serves on the Shelburne Selectboard.
We’re well into budget season for selectboards around the state, including here in Shelburne, where I serve as a board member. And so begins the annual balancing act of trying to disappoint as few constituents as possible by not funding some essential needs, while keeping our taxes as close as possible to the rate of inflation and thus not further burdening tight household budgets.
While pandemic-related funding has helped in recent years, each year the budget process gets a bit trickier — health insurance costs continue to outpace inflation, workforce shortages mean we need to significantly increase salaries to attract and retain staff, and inflation has otherwise driven up the cost of other capital and operating expenditures. Statewide, we have some of the oldest infrastructure in the country, with a large portion of our municipal workforce nearing retirement, and not enough workers in the pipeline to replace them.
By most measures, Vermont’s state and local taxes are among the highest in the nation. For that we do realize significant benefits — good schools, relatively generous public services and a commitment to quality of life that drew many of us who were not born here to the state. With that said, those of us who recognize the value of a healthy public sector need to be acutely focused on the efficient delivery of those services — making the best possible use of our finite tax revenues.
My day job involves advising large health care organizations as to how to reduce the administrative burden in delivering patient care. For the most part this means better leveraging technology, implementing more efficient workflows and creating economies of scale to ensure that they can deliver both higher quality and lower cost in their operations.
Currently there are too many examples of where our very small state — our 650,000 residents is roughly the same as a mid-sized U.S. city — is simply not able to realize those goals of providing lower cost and higher quality services. Our 250 or so municipalities are effectively a series of very small organizations delivering more or less identical services to their constituents, and yet there is precious little coordination to enable us to achieve scale, efficiency and purchasing power.
In 2015, Vermont passed Act 46, designed to address escalating school costs and close service gaps primarily at small, rural schools. This led to consolidation of 206 school districts prior to the act’s passage to the 50 or so we have today. It more importantly drove substantial savings in administrative costs statewide, while broadening educational opportunities for most students.
We need an Act 46 for municipal government in Vermont. In Shelburne, as is the case with peer communities, there is a need for core human resources, finance, information technology, legal and administrative support for our individual departments, but we often find we’re not large enough to justify dedicated staff, nor could we necessarily find resources in our current hiring environment. The same service gaps and efficiency needs that drove passage of Act 46 for schools exist with increasing urgency at the municipal level.
What might a new model look like? The simplest way might be to encourage municipal service consolidation aligned with the school district realignment from Act 46. In Shelburne that would mean the towns of Charlotte, Hinesburg, Shelburne, St. George and Williston would look for opportunities to share services across the five communities, building upon the coordination and consolidation that the school-related initiative drove. County-based services, a rare form of government in New England but common elsewhere, might be preferable in more rural parts of the state and drive further gains in quality and cost. In some instances, having common services being provided at the state level — for example implementing a statewide IT platform to streamline municipal government operations and services — may well make the most sense.
As we prepare for the opening of the next legislative session, selectboards and voters across the state would welcome a broader discussion around how we can deliver higher quality and lower cost services to meet Vermonter’s needs. Financially strapped Vermont households deserve nothing less.
