Dear Council Members:
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to spend a little time with our newest Community Council colleague, Barbara Morrow, up in Newport. We had a lunch with several folks from the community seeing how we (Vermont PBS) can solidify our presence in Orleans County. We spoke about our early childhood and Ready to Learn Materials, PBS LearningMedia, our educational contests, and our kids library screenings and adult programming in the community, including the upcoming Ken Burn’s film Cancer: Emperor of all Maladies.
One of the interesting things to come out of our conversation is a unique issue in Newport revolving around the prison facility, Vermont’s largest prison in the state. There are many people incarcerated (mostly drug charges) that have already served their sentences, but have not been released due to the lack of space in Halfway or Dry Houses. At $50,000 to $75,000 to house an inmate, budgetary constraints will lead to large numbers of prisoners being released into to the Newport community, affecting housing, services and schools to name a few.
Can you let me know if there are any specific and unique issues facing your own communities? Or what are a couple of the most pressing problems and/or best successes happening in your neck of the woods.
Additionally, I would love to have the opportunity to spend a little time with each one of you and people actively involved in your communities. Let me know if you’d be willing to set something up with me.
Chuck
Community Engagement Director
Vermont PBS
204 Ethan Allen Avenue
Colchester, VT 05446
802.654.3688 (Office)
802.343.4804 (Cell)
Money?
It seems like the big issue for this part of the state might revolve around the economy, and the unique pressures of having NH and MA nearby, a closing energy facility, national trends in (dying) retail, the gap between rich and poor, and increasing numbers not being able to afford what we consider is a good, basic lifestyle.
…
We’ve been discussing the dying retail among family members. NYC is losing all small interesting stores, and many big not so interesting ones, too. Fewer and fewer, or no, music stores, book stores, hardware stores, necessary item stores, and so on. It’s all expensive coffee, cupcakes, and ATM machines. Neighborhood grocery stores being replaced by apartments.
This is rippling through other communities as well. Our downtown is sliding toward mostly bars, brewers. and restaurants, but is still hanging on to places for some basic needs. If Zephyrs or Sam’s closes, will they be replaced with similar stores? Doubtful.
Rent and operating costs seem to be a major culprit. It is hard to sell small, useful items in enough quantity to cover the monthly expenses.
We aren’t alone in facing these issues, but we do have a unique mix of location and demographics which will lead us to a unique outcome.
Walmart took a big chunk out
Walmart took a big chunk out of our downtown and business rents here are far too high.
The balance between arts and commerce is way out of balance here, so we live off tourists.
Another group of great young people have left in the past year.
Lack of decent housing (price and style), stuck at 12,000 people for decades.
Heroin.
It’s no wonder Bratt is in a bind.
Fix infrastructure, entice businesses to move here or making starting businesses easier (what we’re doing at coworkingplus,net here in Bratt), new housing builds, and maybe something will happen. If not, shudder to think, but then again Bratt is pretty resilient.
As if we care about NYC. Everyone is in the boroughs where small businesses thrive.
The big apples
Tourists have been coming here since the mid 1800’s. Not new at all.
Perhaps the answer is in local rebuilding, at a high quality. It puts people to work. A plan to rebuild every inefficient home would be an interesting project. Part of the problem is that our money has lost so much value over the last few decades that it takes an enormous amount of it to do relatively simple things.
Few businesses get enticed to move anywhere unless you give them free things. We aren’t offering cheap power, or free high speed internet access, or proximity to airports, or much of anything a bigger business would want. They will likely move on to another place when those freebies end, too.
We’ve done well attracting and growing food related business – we have good ingredients, and growing infrastructure for it, and a good location.
Businesses should choose to be here because it is a great place to have a business. (And if that isn’t true, then it should be made that way. (Ahem, cough cough, business tax…))
Back to the other point, though. Small businesses in the boroughs are fading fast, too. That’s what got me thinking about trends, and if the big cities can’t or won’t support small, indie stores, what does that foretell for us in the hinterlands?
How can we get rents to drop so that people can afford to live and do business? Would be better off with a system that was based on something other than money? It seems like a weight dragging many otherwise good things and people down.
When we ask why can’t X, X or Z happen, the answer is often “money.”
Love the food startups. More
Love the food startups. More please, but better pricing.
I watched all the bookstores leave Brooklyn 20 years ago. Then a whole new crop of small businesses started up. They are Internet based and there are millions of them. People seem to forget that sites like Etsy keeps a lot of America’s creative economy going. Just because there isn’t a storefront…
Landlords hold a lot of power around here. I pay less than what I spent in Boston, but not by much. That’s what the market will bear. As Bratt grows, rents will only go up more, sigh.
Short of an economic cataclysm, which will happen at some point, we need a reset to get housing and food prices down.
Energy efficiency, sure, but who pays for it and does that create the kind of sustainable jobs we want? Unless you can swing a hammer or do labor…
Brattleboro Time Trade is what we have to work with in terms of being post-money. Not seeing other viable options at this point. But there are issue with that as well (my $150/hour work for your $25/hour work).
Money vs. time
An hour is an hour is an hour…which is exactly why the Time Trade trades equally your hour or mine, to take the dollar differentials out of the equation.
It’s hard for people to make that shift though, especially if their typical hour draws so many more dollars.
I have the slightly unpopular
I have the slightly unpopular theory that we should be “paid” commensurate to our experience and talent. For mowing lawns and raking leaves and babysitting, sure, we’re all equal. But comparing 20 years of experience with say six months of reading books? Doesn’t make sense.
Do you want a brand-new mechanic working on your car or the person with a decade of experience? How about a surgeon? Want the kid at the bottom of his class or the top dog?
Extreme examples, but if BTT is going really take off they need to address levels of competency. Many freelancing sites already do this because people demanded it and it just makes sense.
BTT also needs better reputation tools.
It's difficult for food start
It’s difficult for food start ups to charge a lower price because it’s exorbitantly expensive to run a business in this town. If a business does make the effort to keep their prices low they are soon forced to close because there aren’t enough customers to make a profit from low prices. I think Milagros recent closing was a good example of this. There are only so many people in Brattleboro and a pretty small percentage of them go out to eat on a regular basis. Tough to run a food business anywhere but especially in a small town where there isn’t a lot of reasons or places for people to go to at night. And, our downtown area certainly comes with it’s own set of problems that affect businesses – lack of parking; high taxes being two of the biggies.
Can you define "exorbitantly
Can you define “exorbitantly expensive”? We have a giant parking garage and two lots right downtown, there is plenty of parking. Milagro’s is a sad case study, I hope the new restaurant that moves in there and the other one in the Brooks House fare better.
I don't know what rents have
I don’t know what rents have been or are being charged for individual retail spaces on Main Street. I do know that I have 2 friends who opened up wonderful small businesses in downtown and were unable to continue their businesses because of the rents – in one case the rent was almost tripled after the first year’s lease was up. I don’t feel that it’s my place to talk financial details of other people. But, for a small town the rents are quite high.Particularly for a one person business. The taxes are high and despite your examples of parking -it has been and remains a huge problem. I don’t know many people who feel comfortable parking in the Flat Street garage at night. Certainly none of my women friends or families who might be coming into town with children are comfortable parking there. Yes, there are a couple of lots but ,if there’s something going on in the downtown area they fill up quickly. And, in stormy or snowy weather some people don’t want to walk 2 blocks; some people can’t.
If you talk to any Main Street business I think you’ll find that parking is an issue. The town, in general, does not make it easy to open a new business. We end up with store that cater to tourists who have discretionary funds to spend and very little that town residents can either afford or need.I don’t know what the long term solution is but our downtown is much less appealing than it was 8 years ago when I moved here.
The services that are offered
The services that are offered on Brattleboro Time Trade tend to be more of the every day needs. It’s unlikely (and possibly unethical) that a surgeon is going to offer their services on Time Trade. Generally people who actually make their living from the services they are also offering usually put a limit to how their services can be traded. For instance, if they are a graphic designer by profession perhaps they’ll offer 2 hours via Time Trade and anything beyond that is their usual rate. It does get tricky with members who offer food based services or – as one member did last year- produce that has been grown and harvested on their farm. To be fair more than just the hourly rate should be taken into account; cost of ingredients for food items and certainly the time and work put into growing food should be considered. Organizations like Time Trades across the country are not a perfect science. They’re an attempt to build a community support system that is less dependent on money. I have used several different services from BTT from help taking some items to the dump to professional knife sharpening to pet feeding; rides to the train station in Western MA; handmade truffles, produce and helping a friend move. I wish there were more services offered like furniture upholstery. carpentry, etc. But, I think those services are probably worth a higher hourly wage than would be equitable via a community trade organization.
I love the services you've
I love the services you’ve taken advantage of on BTT, that what make it so great. I’m doing stuff like Reiki and learning Spanish. I’m seeing more and more people offer 2 or so hours then it’s paid services as usual. I haven’t put any rules in place for my offerings yet (helping people brainstorm, launch and market online businesses).
I hope BTT will continue to evolve over time. A concern is that we’re just using the home office’s software and we’re beholden to whatever they create. I’d love to redesign and simplify it to make it easier to use, and build in simple contracts so people will be more comfortable offering and using services.
Maybe they could offer two levels of services, 1) Professional and 2) everything else. (I was just using the surgeon as an example). Devil is in the details of course, but that could be a way to deal with higher-priced services.
Side note: My friend stared https://www.taskrabbit.com, where you can schedule people to do all sorts of things from errands to help around the house. It costs money but what a great idea.
I was the BTT coordinator a
I was the BTT coordinator a few years ago and have hundreds of hours built up. I wish there were more services I could use but the things I’m really looking for just don’t show up. I’ve donated a couple of hundred hours to local organizations and to a member who was looking for help after her child was born. I would really like services that would use up a chunk of my hours rather than 2 or 3 here and there. But, when it works for people it’s great. And….I did know you weren’t serious about a surgeon putting his skills up for trade…:-)