Chip Carter, a retired television anchor, moved in 2016 to Guilford, where he volunteers with a number of community organizations and serves on the Selectboard.
GUILFORD-Most of us live in Vermont on purpose. We chose the hills and villages, Town Meeting, and neighbors who show up with a chainsaw after an ice storm. We stay because this place is worth it.
That’s why the latest University of New Hampshire Green Mountain State Poll should concern every Vermonter.
In the poll, 86% of respondents say Vermont is not very or not at all affordable, and 42% say they are likely to leave within five years. Among Vermonters ages 18 to 34, nearly two-thirds say they are likely to leave.
Those numbers didn’t happen overnight.
They weren’t caused by one tax increase or one budget.
They happened one well-intentioned decision after another.
* * *
For much of the past decade, Vermont politics too often became Legislature versus governor, when it should have been Legislature and governor working together for Vermont.
Democratic and Progressive lawmakers held commanding majorities for much of that time. They had every right to advance their agenda, and when they gained a veto-proof supermajority, they had every constitutional right to override Gov. Phil Scott’s vetoes.
They did exactly that.
But during the years of the Democratic-Progressive supermajority, a governor’s veto too often marked the end of negotiations rather than the beginning of compromise.
The question isn’t whether every override was wrong.
The question is: Did legislators lose sight of what all of those decisions would cost when added together?
* * *
Good intentions are easy.
Prioritizing among them is the hard part.
For much of the past decade, Vermont’s Democratic and Progressive majorities tried to tackle nearly every important problem facing the state.
Child care.
Education.
Housing.
Climate policy.
Paid leave.
Healthcare.
Most of those goals deserved attention. Most had sincere supporters.
But governing isn’t just about saying yes to worthwhile ideas. It’s also about deciding which ones can be afforded today, which ones should wait, and which ones require compromise.
Government cannot be all things to everyone, especially in a small state with a limited tax base, an aging population, and relatively slow economic growth.
Every family understands this. You can have a list full of worthwhile expenses. Eventually, you have to decide which ones come first and which ones have to wait.
Government faces the same reality.
Again and again, Gov. Scott maintained that Vermont was taking on more taxes, mandates, and spending than taxpayers could reasonably support. Sometimes he was right. Sometimes reasonable people disagreed.
But during the years of a veto-proof Legislature, those disagreements rarely ended in compromise.
Instead, lawmakers repeatedly overrode him.
In 2020, they overrode his vetoes of the minimum-wage increase and the Global Warming Solutions Act. In 2023, they overrode his veto of the childcare bill and its new payroll tax. In 2024, they overrode six vetoes in a single day, including the education property-tax bill that resulted in an average projected 13.8% increase in school property taxes and legislation expanding Vermont’s renewable-energy requirements.
Viewed one at a time, each decision can be debated on its own merits.
Viewed together, they tell a different story.
Taxpayers don’t experience government one bill at a time.
They experience the cumulative cost of all of them.
* * *
Looking back, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Vermont’s affordability crisis wasn’t created by any single policy. It was created by years of adding one more commitment, one more mandate, one more tax, and one more program without giving equal weight to what all of those decisions would mean when the bill finally came due.
There’s an old lesson every Vermont sugarmaker understands.
One tap won’t hurt a healthy maple tree.
Keep drilling more taps into the same tree, and eventually you weaken it.
For years, Montpelier kept tapping the same taxpayers.
One more tax.
One more mandate.
One more fee.
One more program.
Eventually, even generous Vermonters begin asking whether the tree can support another tap.
The latest UNH poll suggests many of them have reached that point.
* * *
The encouraging news is that this isn’t permanent.
Affordability doesn’t require abandoning Vermont’s values. It requires something the Legislature has too-often lacked over the past decade: the discipline to set priorities, the willingness to compromise, and the recognition that Vermont works best when the governor and Legislature work together instead of around one another.
That’s where rebuilding affordability should begin.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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