Vermont's problems aren't new. Housing, the cost of living, high taxes, job opportunities, school costs and results, the cost of insurance: these issues have plagued our state for years, and they've only gotten worse.
In 2015, Art Woolf, a UVM economist who once served as state economist to Gov. Madeleine Kunin (D), warned that within fifteen years one in four Vermonters would be over 65 and employers would struggle to find workers. Today, four years ahead of his deadline, the Census Bureau puts it at 24%. Vermont records more deaths than births, and there are more job openings than unemployed Vermonters to fill them. The Legislature had a decade of warning.
This year, Woolf laid out what it would take to turn things around: make it easier to build housing and to open grocery stores, avoid costly environmental mandates that drive up energy bills, go carefully on taxes and mandates on businesses, and improve the quality of our schools. None of that is radical.
But fixing problems takes focus, and focus is a choice. Every hour the Legislature spends on one thing is an hour it doesn't spend on another. If you're not working on a problem, you'll never find the solution. Look at what Montpelier chose instead. Each choice either made life more expensive for Vermonters, or pulled attention from the problems hurting them today. Often both.
Housing and Act 181. Vermont needs 24,000 to 36,000 new homes by 2029, roughly 5,000 to 7,000 a year, according to the state's own housing needs assessment. Last year, Vermont permitted 2,294. The tools that work are well known: accessory apartments, no parking minimums, form-based codes, faster permits. Instead, the Legislature passed Act 181, a sweeping land-use overhaul, and overrode the Governor's veto to do it. Its new road rule and Tier 3 rules would have pulled more private projects into Act 250, making building in rural Vermont more difficult and more expensive, two things no Vermonter needs, especially in a housing crisis. Two years later, the Legislature repealed those rules itself.
That was a choice.
Clean Heat. In 2023, the Legislature overrode the Governor's veto to pass the Clean Heat Standard. It would have required companies that bring heating fuel into Vermont to buy "clean heat credits," with the cost passed on to customers. It was built like an excise tax on staying warm. The Legislature gave the state's Public Utility Commission $825,000 and three new positions to design it. After about 18 months of work, the commission estimated it would add 8 cents a gallon in 2026, rising to 58 cents by 2035: roughly $300 to $400 a year for an average oil-heated home by then, before the cost of the heat pump conversion it was meant to push families toward. The commission concluded the program was not well suited to Vermont. It never took effect, yet when Republicans tried to repeal it in 2025, the Senate majority blocked them. It's still on the books. If the goal is cleaner heat, incentives would have gotten us there without punishing the families least able to switch.
That was a choice.
Health care. Vermont has been down this road. In 2014, Gov. Peter Shumlin abandoned single-payer health care when the financing came back at an 11.5% payroll tax plus income-based premiums. In 2016, the Legislature's own Joint Fiscal Office reviewed the cost of universal primary care alone at $121 million to $209 million a year in new public money. This election, universal primary care is being promised again. What the Legislature hasn't focused on: the actual drivers of our premiums, what care costs and insurance pools that keep getting smaller and older.
That was a choice.
Schools and taxes. Instead of growing our tax base with more businesses and more working families, the Legislature keeps reaching for one-time money. This year it spent $100.9 million in one-time money to hold down school property taxes. That doesn't fix anything; it pushes the bill into future years, and the bill only gets bigger. Vermont's own Tax Commissioner reported last December that the Education Fund now costs taxpayers $924 million more than it did 20 years ago, while educating 15,650 fewer kids. Vermont spends $28,818 per student, third highest in the country, for results no better than average. Mississippi spends less than half as much per student, and its fourth graders now outscore ours in both reading and math.
That was a choice.
These policy choices have a real cost, both economic and human. I recently spoke with an early childhood educator who has a master's degree and works incredibly hard. She is food insecure and thinking about leaving the state. I hear versions of that story every day: parents whose children can't afford to stay and build their lives here, loggers and farmers being driven out of business, companies moving to other states. These are self-inflicted wounds, driven by policy choices.
Time is a finite resource. Solving problems means choosing to work on them. Passing bad policy, or focusing on anything other than the problems hurting Vermonters, means choosing not to find solutions. That is a choice. It's a choice Vermonters can't afford right now, and it has to stop.
We've known about the issues facing our state for years, and our elected representatives chose not to fix them. It's time to hold our elected representatives responsible. It's time to bring balance to Montpelier: legislators who will put solving these problems ahead of party and ideology. It's time to bring opportunity and prosperity back to Vermont.