RutlandHerald.com - We Are Vermont

Preserving the 'golden egg' of tourism

David Donath's wood- and brass-furnished office at the Billings Farm is an ideal spot from which to contemplate the history and future of Vermont tourism.

The fields of the farm where cows graze until milking time are laid out in front of his windows, and the library of books on Vermont's farming heritage is down the hall, on the same shelves where they have been since the Billings family lived on the site.

The Billings Farm was always a gentleman's operation – from the time when the farm began in 1871 with a herd of milk cows imported from the island of Jersey off the coast of France. There were Jerseys there when Laurance Rockefeller opened the farm in Woodstock as a museum in 1983 as a cornerstone of efforts to shore up the economy and landscape in the area.

Now the Billings Farm and Museum has about 50,000 people a year come through its gates to visit the stone and wood barns and the newly rebuilt wooden silo.

And Donath, who has been overseeing the place since the death last year of Rockefeller, his friend and mentor, has been thinking a lot about the future of tourism in Vermont, and how money from outside the state can be used to chink the walls of the state's economy.

But he also has some notions about the limitations of tourism: "If getting those folks into Vermont means carving up the hillsides, it (will mean) destroying the very thing that is bringing them," Donath said. "We don't want to be a big theme park. We want to be what we are, a real place, but we also want to invite people in to look and explore."

In part Donath's thinking about the issue has been spurred by a National Geographic Traveler article from a year ago. A panel of about 200 experts on tourism named Vermont sixth among the world's great destinations — the only spot in the United States among the 32 top spots.

The state, one panelist noted, is "one of the few places where a large percentage of the population is committed to conservation (and) preservation over injudicious development."

"Part of the reason that Vermont scored so well is that it is relatively unspoiled," Donath said.

At the same time Vermont's future as a tourist destination is not guaranteed. "Growth and sprawl are huge issues for us," he said.
And Donath is not alone with his concerns. Plenty of government officials, business owners and other residents in the state are trying to figure out how to boost tax revenue and other income from tourism, while not risking the very things that bring people to the Green Mountains on vacation.

"The goose that laid the golden egg" is a phrase they often use in discussing the state's tourism future.

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This may all seem like a new issue for Vermont, but tourism itself certainly is not new. It has been a significant part of the Vermont landscape and economy for well over 100 years.

Efforts to promote the state to outside visitors began in the mid- to late 19th century with "medicinal tourism" as the catchword and visitors from afar coming to bathe in its healing springs. Hunting and fishing, then as now, were also big draws.

In the early years, state government itself became involved, under the auspices of the Vermont Board of Agriculture, which began promotional efforts in the late 1800s. By the turn of the century there were some 650 hotels and farmhouses that rented rooms to more than 50,000 tourists a year.

With the arrival of the automobile and the paving of major roadways in Vermont, visitors were free to travel where and when they wanted, which contributed to local tax bases across the state, said Jan Albers, a former college professor who wrote "Hands on the Land: A History of the Vermont Landscape."

"For good or for ill this is a place that is best seen by car," said Albers, who this summer became executive director of the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury. In part Vermont was attractive for tourism because it remained mostly rural – but also poor – as other states in New England and the East developed during the Industrial Revolution. Instead of burgeoning mill towns Vermont kept much of its agricultural landscape.

But back then people used to say "you can't eat scenery" as they described how the state was rich in views but poor in cash, Albers said. But Vermonters eventually did find a way to "eat" the scenery, or at least have people pay to look at it.

In 1934, with the first ski lift operating in Woodstock, Vermont was well on its way to becoming a three-season tourist escape.

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But even in that era some people worried about unbridled tourism.

Back in 1929 Vermont-born writer Vrest Orton, who founded the Vermont Country Store in Weston, was already urging caution.
Orton wrote about some facets of Vermont's character "which ought obviously to be stamped out" including, but not limited to, "the wrong kind of tourists who rush through the state, scattering refuse, pulling up flowers, tearing down fences, and poking their noses into one's privacy."

He then mentioned "all the others, in and out of Vermont, who keep on trying their level best to promote Vermont as Florida was promoted, so that in a few years there will be nothing but Jerry-built roadside shacks, summer camps, hot dog stands, sub-divisions of towns never to be completed, crazy realtor offices, a crowd of widows and orphans fleeced by promoters, inflated banks whose paper is worthless and whose money is invested in Missouri, amusement parks, cable railways to mountain tops, wide, horribly straight cement trunk high-ways."

It never got quite that tacky, most Vermonters would say, but the kind of reservations Orton voiced are still expressed today.

One with such concerns is writer Joe Sherman, author of the Vermont history book "Fast Lane on a Dirt Road," who grew up in Quechee when the community was still a mill town. He moved up to Montgomery on the Quebec border a few years ago in part to put some distance between himself and tourism development which overtook his hometown in the 1970s and 1980s.

"Basically tourism at a certain point sort of becomes the state whoring itself," he said recently, pointing to Cape Cod as an example of tourism run amok.

"My own gut feeling is that tourism should never be your main draw for a way to bring money to the state," he said. "It saps the soul of a place," as the local workforce becomes more of a servant class.
That service mentality runs counter to one of the state's best assets, the native Yankee self-reliance and independence, Sherman said. "Psychologically it is a whole different state of being."

Sherman worries about local economies that rely too much on tourism or second home owners.

"You need a critical mass of people who are deep rooted to keep a place going," he said. Otherwise, he said, it becomes just "a pretty shell" with locals working low-paying part-time jobs in towns in which they can't afford to live.

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Vermont tourism has grown as the number of manufacturing workers has slipped. And that has kept employment high.
"Manufacturing gets by with a lot fewer people, but tourism is a labor-intensive industry," said Lawrence Copp of Economic and Policy Resources Inc., an economic consulting company that completed a comprehensive report on the industry for the state this year.

And there are still tourist markets in Vermont to tap, according to the consultant's report and other studies by the state tourism office.
In 2003 travelers made 12.8 million trips in Vermont, according to the study, and spent nearly $1.5 billion. That includes just under 4 million trips by Vermonters traveling inside the state but outside their regular routines.

The tourism business generated about $182 million in tax revenue for the state in 2003 as well, about 10 percent of the total, according to the study.

Tourism in Vermont is a "mature industry," but still with ample potential for growth, said Jason Aldous, director of communications for the state's Tourism and Marketing Department, which will spend about $4.2 million this year on promotion. And the money visitors spend now accounts for 36,470 jobs in the state.

Manufacturing jobs, meanwhile, went from 42,800 in 1990 to 37,000 in 2004.

In part the Economic and Policy Resources study, the first attempt at a comprehensive benchmark report on the impact of tourism in
Vermont, was undertaken to try to answer the question of whom the state wants as visitors and how to market the state to them, Copp said.

"This is as much a marketing problem as it is an environmental problem," he said.

In other words, one good way Vermont can preserve the good things about its landscape is to market itself to anglers and bicyclists but not to people looking for a Las Vegas-style getaway complete with casinos, he said.

The state's reputation, which he called its "mystique," is a public asset and needs to be protected as it is used, Copp said.
But both Copp and Aldous see room for growth.

"I don't think (the impact of tourism) is felt as intensively in Vermont as it is (for example) on the seacoast of Maine or (in) Atlantic City," he said, and that is partly because – apart from leaf-peeping season – tourists are fairly well spread out throughout the year.

So that means Vermont's tourism infrastructure actually could be more highly utilized, Copp said. "You have many, many periods of time when we have more rooms than we have people for."

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In a way, it is becoming harder these days to separate tourism from the other sectors of the economy, and some say that's one big justification for the state's promotional efforts.

For instance, many of the second-home buyers, who represent a large portion of the state's housing boom, first came to Vermont as tourists.

And the state's colleges and universities have been successfully using the Vermont mystique as a selling point in attracting students.
In addition various Vermont manufacturers, among them Ben & Jerry's, Cabot Creamery and King Arthur Flour, work symbiotically with the business of tourism. Tourists visit the manufacturing plants, then buy the products back home.

The Vermont "brand" is integral to virtually all parts of the economy, said Bill Stenger, president and chief operating officer of Jay Peak, a ski area in the Northeast Kingdom.

Maintaining that brand is so important "it needs to be at the top of our minds almost all the time," in every policy, promotion and business decision, he said. "It is not assured by any means that this brand will survive."

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Paul Bruhn, the executive director of the Preservation Trust of Vermont, a nonprofit organization dedicated mainly to historic preservation, said that whether the brand is to survive may depend on what the state looks like and whether its small cities and villages can retain their appeal and vibrancy. While Vermont considers how to promote tourism, it must also consider how its towns are developing.

Sprawl is one of his major concerns.

He said, for instance, that for large retailers, like Wal-Mart, to benefit towns and cities, their stores must be built in the downtowns rather than on the outskirts of communities.

Such commercial sprawl, he said, "undermines the character of Vermont. … And in the end we are going to pay a big economic price if we are not good stewards of the state."

Vermonters should not forget that the things that make a place a good place to visit make it a good place to live, including an active downtown with locally owned businesses.

"Virtually all of our downtowns are very fragile," Bruhn said. "If we lose the vitality in those downtowns we are losing an important piece of Vermont's sense of place."

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Gov. James Douglas, at least while in office, is perhaps the person most responsible for making sure the assets of the state are preserved. He follows Gov. Howard Dean, who did much to preserve open spaces but was also wary of zoning and other regulations that some business leaders considered too restrictive.

"The leaves turn golden orange and crimson in the fall in other places," Douglas said, "but there is no other place with the natural beauty of Vermont."

"We are going to grow," Douglas said. "We need to determine how and where. We have to be sure that our economic development strategies ... don't adversely affect the principal reason that people come here."

Like Dean, Douglas has a foot on both sides of the land-use issue. He says he recognizes the importance of efforts to control some forms of growth, such as that proscribed under Act 250, Vermont's major land use law; but he also admits to being wary of statewide regulation in general.

And some of the ideas Douglas supports – controversial ones such as allowing development around highway interchanges – starkly conflict with positions taken by his predecessor and environmentalists. Dean, for example, opposed such development because he thought it would be unsightly and further contribute to urban sprawl.

Douglas, a Republican, said local government, not the state, should take the lead in planning for orderly development. "I think we have the right balance between municipal planning and zoning with some state oversight and some regional planning," he said.

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The question of how to promote tourism in the state while protecting the landscape has been so important to Donath that earlier this summer he helped convene a summit on the issue at Billings Farm and Museum. About 40 people – legislators, state officials and business owners – met for several days there for study of the topic. The group is putting together a report on its findings, and an even larger gathering is scheduled this fall in Montpelier.

Donath, in framing the discussion for the group, asked the conferees to consider how to foster a relationship "with reciprocal benefits" that both protects the state's landscape and continues the economic rewards of tourism.

"It is increasingly clear that the potential of the Vermont destination as an economic engine is tightly linked to the stewardship of Vermont's natural, cultural and historical distinctiveness," Donath said as the conference opened in the modern auditorium just below the old barns.

In a recent conversation in his office Donath, asked about the future of the state, added:

"We here in Vermont are doing things that other people in the country wish they were doing. … We are doing a lot of things right. … This all has to hang together if we want Vermont to thrive; the total really can be greater than the sum of its parts."

Louis Porter is a member of the Vermont Press Bureau, the statehouse bureau for the Rutland Herald and Times Argus.