This commentary is by Loralee Tester, the executive director of the Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce.
A few weeks ago, my 17-year-old son published a commentary in VTDigger. His high school assignment was to write about something overrated. He chose Vermont.
He wrote about the beauty, and then about everything behind it: the cost, the lack of opportunity, the missing infrastructure. He is a straight-A student, a competitive swimmer, a Poetry Out Loud finalist — exactly the kind of young person Vermont says it wants to keep. And he wrote, for the whole state to read, that he’s not sure why he’d stay.
A week earlier, at the final legislative breakfast I hosted for the Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce, a 28-year-old woman, Kayla Veilleux — the chair of our Young Professionals Network — asked legislators a simple question: “What is Vermont doing to retain young people?”
One legislator told her to “get involved.” Kayla was sitting in the room. She had driven there and asked a serious policy question. She is already involved.
These are not anecdotes. They are the human face of a crisis the data has been screaming about for years.
Vermont posted the largest population decline by percentage in the nation last year — the only state losing people to both natural change and net migration. Our labor force has dropped below 350,000. According to the Vermont Futures Project, we rank last for working-age residents and last in retention of college-bound students, and carry the highest effective business tax rate in the country — 51st out of 51. We’re 49th in economic outlook. These are trend lines, and they are all heading the same direction: out.
The 2026 legislative session ended the way too many sessions end: late, exhausted, inconclusive. Both House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, and Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, are leaving. Three dozen lawmakers are not seeking reelection. Over 1,200 bills were introduced, and as one legislator noted at a recent NEK Chamber of Commerce breakfast, each bill costs approximately $1,000 in drafting and processing costs alone, and in a typical session, fewer than one in eight ever become law.
The session was consumed by education reform that satisfies almost nobody. A bipartisan road salt bill was vetoed. H.585, which would have let association health plans give small businesses more affordable coverage, was reviewed by the Senate Finance Committee and died without action, two weeks before adjournment.
And yet this session also proved what is possible when the system works. S.325 — which repeals Act 181‘s road rule and Tier 3 provisions after thousands of rural Vermonters organized, testified and refused to be ignored — passed the Senate 28-2. Another bill, S.327, advanced apprenticeship programs, Rural Industry Development Grants and removal of the sunset clause on the Vermont Employment Growth Incentive. These bills passed because they were grounded in need, not ideology.
That contrast is the story. Not just of this session, but of this moment.
I have spent this year writing about what I see as a deepening divide — what Paul Searls, in “Two Vermonts: Geography and Identity, 1865-1910,” called the tension between “uphill” and “downhill” Vermonters. When I wrote about a senator’s “cave dweller” remark, I was told I was elevating a cultural complaint over an economic one. When 15,000 people organized and the Act 181 repeal became inevitable, legislative leadership issued a statement about “hateful rhetoric,” timed to the moment the movement was breaking through.
I want to be direct: The cultural argument is the economic argument. Who gets heard and who gets dismissed, whose frustration counts as data and whose as grievance — these are not abstract questions. They determine which bills get hearings and which die in committee. They determine whether a 28-year-old’s question gets a real answer or a pat on the head.
But I am not interested in relitigating those fights. I am interested in what comes next.
In the Northeast Kingdom, we are not waiting. The NEK Manufacturing Consortium we helped launch — connecting employers, schools and workforce agencies — grew from a conviction that the bridge between education and industry wouldn’t be built from Montpelier. As Gov. Phil Scott said when he visited Caledonia County in 2024, Montpelier won’t solve it for us, but they’ll support us if we come up with our own solutions. The Department of Labor now has a dedicated employee helping see it through, and here we have a model: local initiative, state partnership, real results.
This approach is replicable. Build housing by removing barriers. Confront the tax crisis; when New Hampshire eliminates its income tax while Vermont proposes the highest rate in the nation, we are conceding, not competing. And listen to the people who are closest to the problems, because they usually understand them best.
I love Vermont. Its beauty, its stubbornness, its deep ethic of care. I love that my neighbors show up with a chainsaw after a storm and never send a bill. The Northeast Kingdom produces people who are independent, resourceful and real in a way the rest of the country has largely forgotten.
But love without honesty is just nostalgia. And nostalgia will not save us. Both chamber leaders are gone. Dozens of seats are turning over. This is a genuine inflection point and a chance to ask whether we want a Legislature that introduces 1,200 bills and lets a health insurance reform die in silence, or one that listens to a 28-year-old woman and a 17-year-old boy and builds a state worth staying for.
Data isn’t destiny, as the Vermont Futures Project reminds us. But data is a mirror, and right now it is telling us something we cannot afford to ignore.
