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| B- | Vermont |
• Population (rank): 623,908 (49)
• Average per capita income (rank): $25,016 (19)
• Total state spending (rank): $4,647,719,000 (47)
• Spending per capita (rank): $7,449 (4)
• Governor: James Douglas (R)
• First elected: 11/2002
• Senate: 30 members: 23 D, 7 R
• Term limits: None
• House: 150 members: 93 D, 49 R, 8 I
• Term limits: None
Vermont is a national leader in handling small discrete issues and huge global ones. It's one of a handful of states, for example, that takes enough interest in foster children to deal with the problems they have getting driver's licenses (they often move too frequently to complete driver's ed). While it is coping humanely with this and similar small-scale challenges, the state government is focused intensely on the mega-issue of climate change and what to do about it.
It's in that in-between territory that the state tends to fall short. The present health-coverage crunch is typical. Vermont's aggressive Catamount health plan uses Medicaid dollars to cover people with incomes three times higher than the poverty rate — well above the federal reimbursement limit. A laudable goal? Perhaps. But without federal dollars covering that gap, Vermont's budget has a $22 million Medicaid shortfall to deal with next year.
Medicaid is competing with a host of other outstretched hands. In order to fund benefit obligations to its retired employees, for instance, the state will have to double the $25 million it currently puts into pensions. And expenditures for education and corrections are growing faster than revenues. Can taxes be raised? Unlikely. Vermont already has one of the highest per capita tax structures in the nation.
Solutions aren't going to appear overnight. Unfortunately, the state is short on formal long-range strategic thinking. "Vermont is handicapped because it doesn't have a planning tool," says Lisa Ventriss, president of the Vermont Business Roundtable. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that biennial elections tend to push leaders to a short-term horizon. This plight used to be compounded by union negotiations that coincided with election years. But at least that problem has been eased this year by alternating the two cycles.
A state that's well-enough managed to consider the problems of its foster children ought to be able to develop a strategic plan focusing on five- to 10-year outcomes. A couple of years back, it looked like progress was being made on this front when Vermont leaders kicked off their so-called Strategic Enterprise Initiative. But even though each agency drew up goals, these were never compiled into a state plan, and most of the agency goals have been tabled or delayed. The original initiative has been pared down to the smaller goal of reducing the state workforce by 400 employees over the next two years. But the state shows little evidence that it has a plan even for accomplishing this.
Vermont maintains its buildings, roads and bridges as well as any state, but even the infrastructure management is tainted by an inability to plan. Most years, agency budget requests are simply rolled into a capital-plan master list. This year, the manager who usually compiles the list was temporarily reassigned to a different department and no master list was compiled at all. The dearth of talent at the top means that planning in one area requires a game of musical chairs in another.
The rub is that Vermont's poor planning puts kinks in the things it does well — especially when it comes to information technology. The "Screen Door" online service-eligibility portal is a one-stop shop for citizens trying to determine what form of state assistance best suits them. It looks elegant to outsiders, but old mainframes support the back end. And for all the good things Vermont does in child welfare, it does them without the benefit of 21st-century technology. The old information system for youth services is obsolete. When a parent has children with more than one partner, for example, the system requires a workaround to connect the children to the parents, making it that much harder for case workers to craft solutions for those who need the help.
For additional data and analysis, go to pewcenteronthestates.org/gpp.