Let the wealthy help keep Vermont rural

Dear Editor,

I very much appreciate Megan Durling’s recent commentary advocating for Vermont’s education policies to better include rural areas. Local schools are the heartbeat of small communities. They wither when they lose their schools. Though they need tax relief, most rural residents still resist school consolidation. 

Much of the current debate about Vermont’s future turns on whether we choose to remain a mostly rural state or become more urbanized. Most of us who choose to be here love our culture of neighborliness, our natural beauty, our relative freedom from industrial pollution and the sense of spaciousness and ease that contrasts so strongly with the crowded, tense, anonymous atmosphere of cities. Few want to lose what makes Vermont so special. Those who work the land have longstanding cultural traditions they wish to preserve and hand down to their children. And the wealthy who make their homes here value the beauty and peace that the land-based occupations have created and maintained over generations. 

Vermont attracts urban tourists precisely because those qualities embody a longed-for human scale. But the high cost of that character — a luxury in the modern world — creates pressure to lower property taxes. Competing visions for how to do so are to either broaden the tax base by urbanizing — attracting more people and employers — or strengthen existing small communities by asking the wealthiest among us to pay their fair share, so all can thrive. 

The fear that raising taxes on the wealthy few would drive them to leave the state seems baseless. My sense is that the wealthiest Vermonters, who could afford to live anywhere, choose Vermont out of love for the qualities I’ve listed, and most would willingly pay to preserve what they cherish. The same fear of flight accompanied New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, yet since he won, not only have the city’s elite stayed put, but it’s my understanding that many more very wealthy people have moved there. What New York City offers is what they value, and they’re willing to pay for their chosen amenities. I believe the same is true for most wealthy Vermonters. They value what Vermont offers and want to preserve it. 

I fully agree with Durling’s quote from the late Wendell Berry that teaching children to abandon their authentic local culture leaves rural communities and lands “open to exploitation, and ultimately destruction, from the center.” She goes on to connect the dots between local issues and the bigger picture: “The industrial habits and priorities of a modernized educational model exacerbate our modern social and ecological crises. We need a radically different understanding of what educational equity looks like for rural people; our communities have been sacrificed at an urban-mandated altar for too long. The gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills.”

Amen to that. 

Barbara McKay 

North Ferrisburgh, Vt.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Let the wealthy help keep Vermont rural.