Photo: Quechee and the Balloon Festival. Photo courtesy Hartford Chamber of Commerce.

The county’s economy is OK, but issues like workforce and housing remain bigger than what one small community can solve

by Olga Peters, Vermont Business Magazine Given all the givens accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic, Windsor County’s economy is doing OK.

And OK is pretty good, given all the givens. It’s just still feeling a little unstable.

Many of the challenges facing businesses in Windsor County, like staffing shortages and a lack of affordable housing, are true statewide, said Bob Flint from the Springfield Regional Development Corporation (SRDC). Local businesses and the local economy have limited sway over these external pressures.

“Usually, manufacturers are on the leading edge of the trends,” said Flint. “So I think like everybody, we are going to be watching the various machinations of the world and the country and everything, and while things are good, we're looking over our shoulder.”

As noted by Erika Hoffman-Kiess, executive director of Green Mountain Economic Development Corporation (GMEDC), the challenges also bring opportunities.

“We've always had a housing problem in the state, and we always had compensation irregularities in terms of not measuring up to national standards,” she said. “But now, more people see them, and more people know about them, and that's helpful when you're trying to come up with solutions.”

Seeking to reconnect

PJ Skehan, executive director of the Hartford Area Chamber of Commerce, described the local economy as a mixed bag.

Some businesses are doing well, he said, but many smaller companies that didn’t receive stimulus funding this year are hurting.

Staffing and supply chain problems affect the entire business community. Many businesses' supply chains remain disrupted. Owners have reported to Skehan that some product orders have a three-month wait time.

“Well, it's a bit like a broken record. Everybody's got the same challenges,” Skehan said.

The weather and poor snow conditions have not helped local businesses dependent on tourism.

For example, Skehan said that fewer people stopped by the chamber’s visitor center this winter compared to previous winters.

“The year of 2021 ended off on a high,” he said. “Everybody was getting out, spending, and then started the new year with the Omicron variant being prevalent, and things slowed down a wee bit.”

Skehan worries about the local housing market.

Photo: Quechee and the Balloon Festival. Photo courtesy Hartford Chamber of Commerce.

In conversations with fellow chamber leaders, a lack of housing that is affordable is fueling the workforce shortage.

In his experience, Skehan has witnessed several young couples and families lose in the bidding for a new home.

“I don't want to sound like a Debbie Downer, but it's a tough go right now for a lot of folks,” he said. “But the overarching thing is housing, child care, and unless you solve those, you can't get people to move into Vermont.”

The chamber has 200 members and serves the five villages of Hartford: Quechee, White River Junction, Hartford, West Hartford, and Wilder.

Skehan said the chamber held its annual meeting online but hoped to hold in-person events this summer.

“It's an old-fashioned way of doing things, but it's fun and energetic, and it's good for the mind and soul,” he said.

The chamber’s annual signature event is its balloon and music festival. This year, the festival is scheduled for Father’s Day weekend.

While this year’s event is still in the planning stages, Skehan said previous years had attracted approximately 10,000 people.

“It never gets old. It's a very colorful event that brings a lot of people back into the area,” he said. “2020 was the first-year we didn't have it in 42 years.”

Relentless incrementalism

“Knock on wood; things are good,” Flint said. “More than not, businesses are stable or successful. Hospitality is probably the area we're nervous about.”

He added that the local tourism sector has yet to bounce back from the upheaval caused by the COVID pandemic.

“I think that's the sector that really needs a lot of TLC,” he said.

In terms of commercial/industrial businesses, Flint has his fingers crossed.

Repeating a recent conversation with a business owner, Flint said, “We're doing well, but I don't know exactly why we're doing well, and I'm nervous we're not going to be doing well at any point.”

In Flint’s opinion, the Windsor economy is subject to multiple external factors — COVID, supply chain, workforce, inflation — with no apparent or instant fixes.

Early in the pandemic, federal and state funding programs such as the Paycheck Protection Program provided lifelines for businesses.

In his opinion, however, businesses need more financial relief.

Business owners have had difficulty accessing some of the state’s current relief programs.

He said strict criteria and complicated applications steered business owners away in some cases.

With a sense of excitement and relief, demolition continues at the former Jones & Lamson Machine Company building.

“We’re excited about shifting the conversation from when is that coming down to now we have a chance to do something on the property that's beneficial to the community,” Flint said.

On paper, the property, called the J&L Plant 1 by Flint, is a developer’s dream: 12 acres on a flat piece of land, on a four-lane highway, near the interstate, with full utilities.

Yet, the property has remained mostly unused for 35 years.

Along with its attributes, the site is also a complicated mix of industrial pollutants and economic challenges.

Last September, the project received a significant financial boost.

Governor Phil Scott announced that the J&L site was one of several properties to receive a total of $14 million under Vermont’s Brownfield Economic Revitalization Alliance (BERA) program.

Photo: Demolition continues at the former Jones & Lamson Machine Machine Co site. Photo courtesy Springfield Regional Development Corporation.

“We can't be thankful enough to Governor Scott and to the Legislature for making this happen,” Flint said. “If not for this kind of incredible influx of funding with the flexibility that it had, we would still be talking about someday it's going to come down.”

According to a website dedicated to the project, a portion of the site will be saved.

This includes approximately 18,000 square feet at the north end of the building.

A separate parcel at the south side of the property built in the 1970s, occupied by LBL Fabrications, is not part of the J&L project.

To learn more about the project, visit springfielddevelopment.org/jandldemo/j-l-faq/.(link is external)

Flint said the J&L’s progress is also a result of support from the US Department of Environmental Conservation, Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development, and the Town of Springfield.

Undertaking large redevelopment projects like J&L are extremely important to local economies like Springfield, Flint explained. They can also be economically impossible.

Photo: Demolition continues at the former Jones & Lamson Machine Machine Co site. Photo courtesy Springfield Regional Development Corporation.

Basically, it costs more to rehabilitate these former commercial sites than the market will pay in either property values or lease rates. Many of these projects are underwater before they start.

“And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because investors aren't jumping to buy commercial properties that don't have a strong return on investment,” he said.

“One has to be creative in how they tackle this and to get it to a point where you can entice a developer to take it on and to move it forward,” Flint said. “That was never going to happen while the building stood and while the pollution was still there.”

Flint said he hoped that through sheer “relentless incrementalism,” he’ll be talking about a new building where the J&L Plant stood in five years.

He also hopes to discuss an increase in the property’s value, how the community removed a significant health hazard, and returned high-quality jobs.

The SRDC and its partner organizations involved with the three-year Working Communities Challenge grant continue to make progress.

Sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Working Communities Challenge is designed to revamp the world of work for employees and their employers.

The Boston Fed chose Springfield, Winooski, Barre, and Lamoille in the fall of 2020 for the $300,000, three-year implementation grant.

Earlier this year, four more communities joined the program.

“So I mean, everybody's going at it a little bit differently,” Flint said. “Our focus has been on workforce participation, which was a thing even before COVID.”

According to statistics from Flint, workforce participation in the state has dropped dramatically since COVID.

In Vermont, that drop represents the loss of approximately 24,000 workers.

Flint said the Springfield area lost a little over 10 percent of its workforce.

“It’s not like there's a magic answer - and boom, it's fixed,” he said. “[The work is] incremental. It's looking at systems, even beyond COVID.”

Child care, transportation, housing, and substance use are a few of the challenges facing workers, he said.

As part of their work, the Springfield Working Communities partners have launched a longitudinal study with the help of a former Springfield resident and data analyst now living in Boston.

“I think an odd blessing of the pandemic has been that more employers have become self-aware about their employees and the challenges they face in their lives,” Flint said.

Finding humanity

“In many ways, COVID has really started to manifest the political will to address some of these issues that have been around,” said Hoffman-Kiess, who took over as executive director of the Green Mountain Economic Development Corporation last April.

Hoffman-Kiess has a background in workforce and economic development.

While most of her career has been overseas, COVID has shaped most of her economic development experience in Vermont.

Before that, she worked with RDCs from across the state on various projects, specifically the statewide Workforce Summit program launched in 2019.

When COVID hit in 2020, she became involved in recovery programs, first with Vital Communities and then with GMDC on the state’s Restart Vermont Technical Assistance Program.

GMEDC serves Orange County and a portion of Windsor County.

Hoffman-Kiess also works closely with counterparts in New Hampshire.

COVID illuminated for her the differences in each state’s pandemic response. These different responses were a big deal because the economies don’t stop at the state border, especially in the Upper Valley.

The themes that emerged from this experience for Hoffman-Kiess were coordination, collaboration, and communication.

Take workforce efforts, for example. Multiple people and organizations across Vermont are tackling the issue, yet nobody communicates with each other. This lack of communication can derail jobseekers, she said.

However, it seems to Hoffman-Kiess that the necessities of the pandemic fostered more collaboration and coordination between sectors.

To her, this represents an opportunity to tackle the state’s more significant issues more effectively, like housing and child care.

Approximately 15 percent of Windsor County’s population is considered housing burdened and pays more than 50 percent of its income on housing-related expenses. This is according to HousingData.org(link is external), a site maintained by the Vermont Housing Finance Agency.

According to data from the multi-year housing study Keys to the Valley, the Upper Valley will need an estimated 10,000 more housing units — of all kinds and serving all income levels — by 2030 to keep up with demand.

The Upper Valley includes Windsor County and Grafton County in New Hampshire.

The mutual aid model is one collaborative approach Hoffman-Kiess believes would serve communities well. In her opinion, this structure expands the capacity of small municipalities by sharing resources.

“For example, if you're talking about a housing issue, how does West Fairlee address the housing issue — which is part of the entire region — with their small budget and lack of professional staff?” she said.

A potential collaboration between GMEDC and municipalities is to serve as a manager of certain public funds.

Hoffman-Kiess said many municipalities have monies sitting fallow in trusts or revolving loan funds because they lack the staffing capacity to manage them.

These towns have expressed interest in using these monies for hyper-local economic development projects. They have asked if GMEDC could take over managing these resources.

Hoffman-Kiess said that her organization is not a credit agency but is exploring the idea.

Another example is the work of the White River Valley Consortium, which was formed to help towns tackle regional issues. The 14-town collaboration includes towns near the White River in Central-Eastern Vermont.

She said this group is looking at creating more housing for entry-level workers and new entrepreneurs.

According to Hoffman-Kiess, several businesses in the region have employees with good-paying jobs who are homeless. She said they are stuck in benefits trough: earning too much to qualify for benefits but not enough to afford housing.

For its part, GMEDC took advantage of stimulus funding to redesign its website working with Vermont-based design and web development professionals.

The effort served more than making the site look nice. It also improved visitors’ access to information.

Hoffman-Kiess said she spends most of her day connecting people to resources. Having a website that can supplement conversations makes accessing resources easier for community members.

And making the challenge of COVID easier through communication, collaboration, and coordination is a small silver lining for Hoffman-Kiess.

“Even with all the lack of actual, physical connection, I feel there's more humanity in the work that we do now,” Hoffman-Kiess said.

She is unsure why we are more patient with each other.

Maybe it's because pets are stomping on our keyboards during online meetings. Or because we're worried about a friend with COVID. Or perhaps it is because we’ve gone months without visiting an elderly parent, she said.

“All of those stories are real stories that people are living, and it just seems like that has enhanced the feeling that we're all in this together and let's help each other with the resources we have,” she said.

Olga Peters is a writer and reporter from Windham County.