Chris Barbieri, after over 30 years as president of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, recently gave his resignation, effective November 1.
But far from leaving the Chamber to retire, Barbieri is actually entering a new phase of his career in promoting Vermont business in Asia. His long-time interest in the markets of the Pacific Rim countries – and of Oriental culture itself – is drawing Barbieri full-time to a new position, promoting Vermont from offices in China.
Barbieri has long been respected in Vermont for his expertise on tax policy, regulatory areas and tourism, and during this interview be shares much of what be’s learned in a threedecade long career that has kept him at the center of Vermont business and politics. His experience with the Chamber, and intimate involvement with the legislative and executive branches of the Vermont government since the late 1960s, has given Barbieri a perspective and a level of experience very few people in the state can rival.
Barbieri graduated from Cornell University, and then did graduate work at the University of Vermont. A lifelong relationship with the state, first as a summer visitor from the time he was a toddler and then as a full-time resident, has given him a love for Vermont that is evident in how he speaks of his adopted home.
He lives with his wife in Worcester. Robert Smith interviewed Barbieri in the offices of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce overlooking Barre.
VBM: To begin, maybe you could tell us what brought you to Vermont originally, Chris?
Barbieri: My mother’s brother was in the Navy. He got assigned to Lake Champlain in the 1940s, and he fell in love with Vermont while he was here. He ended up buying an old farmhouse in Cabot, with what he thought at the time was 22 acres. He didn’t live there, just came up once in a while during the summers. My Mom and I started coming up for the summer from when I was about six months old, and my father would take his two weeks vacation at the end of August and he’d drive up. We came up every summer.
Then I worked for a lot of summers on Ted Bothfeld’s farm in Cabot. That was a great learning experience and got me hooked on agriculture as well as on Vermont.
So, I went to Cornell, did graduate work at UVM, and I really wanted to stay in Vermont. At the time the best I could do was a job in Boston. It was a good job, working for HP Hood. It was still dairy connected. But I was still angling to get back to Vermont, to settle down here. They moved me to Portland, ME, and that’s when 1 started looking seriously. A job, with what was then the Greater Vermont Association, which is the Chamber today, came up. The executive director’s position executive vice-president I think it was called at the time. I got the job. We had myself, a full-time assistant and a part-time bookkeeper. That was it. We rented a little space down in Montpelier.
VBM: What year was that?
Barbieri: I started October, 16 of 1969.
VBM: So you were pretty young?
Barbieri: I like to think that I was very young! But I was pretty young, in my late 20s.
It just grew from there. But I’d always had a love affair with Vermont from my earliest remembrance, and I decided I wanted to live here, raise a family here, and I was able to do it. Fortunately.
VBM: Have you always lived here in the Barre area?
Barbieri: When I was working for Hood I was living in Jericho and working in Burlington, and then I was commuting to Montpelier from Jericho for four or five years. Then I thought that was kind of silly and bought a house in Worcester. I live in a different house now, but still in Worcester.
VBM: It can be nice to stay in one area for a long time.
Barbieri: The reason this has worked for me is that, when I took my first job out of college I thought I’d be there four or five years, and that’s about as long as I was with Hood. Then, this job was so challenging over the years, and there was so much opportunity to add and to grow, that I kept getting reenergized. Lobbying came along and that really got me cooked, and I was doing all the lobbying for the Chamber for a while, before we got the money to hire more lobbyists. Then there were things like the Business and Industry Expo, which is now in its 18th year. It’s grown to the largest business trade show in northern New England, and that really got me excited and challenged.
Then we created a business/education non-profit partnership organization, to bring educators and business people together. That was in 1982 or ‘83, and that got me energized, then we started with the international trade stuff and that got me energized – so it’s been a series of things that we should be doing as a legitimate Chamber of Commerce, and as we kept adding them it kept me excited and interested in the job.
VBM: What exactly does a Chamber of Commerce do?
Barbieri: There are basic things that Chambers do, but lets talk about state Chambers, cause there are basically three levels of Chambers in the United States. There are locals or regionals, like the Central Vermont Chamber, the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber, the Rutland Regional Chamber, and so on.
Then there are state Chambers of Commerce, and there are 42 or 43. of them right now. And then there is the US Chamber. The statewide chambers, all of them in the United States, build their organizations on lobbying. Lobbying primarily at the state level. They represent their member’s interests in governmental affairs. They protect their members from legislation that might be harmful for economic growth, and they advocate legislation that will be helpful in creating a better economic climate in the state.
That’s a general statement, but it’s pretty much the baseline issue for every state chamber – lobbying at the state level. We all do some lobbying at the federal level, but it’s at home connecting with our state’s congressional delegation. We don’t lobby the New York State congressional delegation, for example, and we don’t have anybody in Washington that lobbies for us.
From there it varies. A lot of them have business/education type activities, insurance plans or other group programs for members that help them save money. Like we have a health insurance program. Many of them will get involved in tradeshows. In our case, we’re a lot unique in that we’re the only state Chamber in the country that has a strong tourismmarketing program. The reason for that, is that when we were created in 1950 by (future governor) Deane Davis he was one of the leading proponents for the creation of this organization – it was created primarily to represent the travel and tourism industry and marketing programs from the private sector view point. It wasn’t lobbying, it wasn’t doing tradeshows. It mostly produced publications like doing guide books and doing some other marketing programs in conjunction with a group of hotels and inns.
When I came here in 1969, the organization was still primarily doing that. The vast majority of members were in the travel and tourism industry There were other members who were supportive of the mission, notably National Life, IBM, General Electric. So there were other manufacturers and some banks that belonged, but they weren’t in it to get something directly for themselves. It was much more indirectly. They were trying to support a healthy Vermont economy, in this instance, working through the travel and tourism industry.
As we’ve grown, we’ve never diminished that part of-our program. Actually, it’s increased over the years as we’ve added other programs. We’ve got about 1,600 members in Vermont now, and about 950 of them are in the travel and tourism industry, so it’s still a big chunk of our activity.
The lobbying that we do is for all sectors, and then we have the other programs that I mentioned. So the Chambers at the statewide level are really focused at governmental relations, governmental affairs, and being active in that arena. As part of that, most state chambers have Political Action Committees, and we added one in 1997, that focuses strictly on state campaigns. We don’t get involved in any of the federal campaigns at all. By state campaigns I mean the Legislature, and we can play in the statewide races, but we don’t, by choice.
VBM: In your time here with the Chamber, you’ve seen all that’s happened close-up over the past 30-plus years. Would you talk about some of those changes, in the Chamber, but also in the state as far as economic growth, industry, tourism, the Legislature and state government?
Barbieri: There are two areas that stand out for me. One is how Vermont has changed politically.
In 1969, when I started, Deane Davis was governor, and I had the opportunity to get to know him, as I have the subsequent governors. Davis, in my view, was a politically moderate Republican. He was followed by Tom Salmon, who was politically moderate as a Democrat. Vermont had always been labeled the most Republican state in the nation, and it had been Republican in both the Legislature and in its governors virtually forever, until Phil Hoff. But it wasn’t a conservative Republican state, it was a moderate Republican state. George Aiken was a moderate guy. He was the one trying to end the Vietnam War, even though he was a Republican.
Now, Vermont has transformed itself into one of the most politically liberal states in the country, so that’s a big change that I think has occurred since the late ’60s until now.
The other change politically is in the activity at the State House. The Legislature has become much more professional, if you will, in its persona than it was in the ’60s and ’70s and even the early ’80s. It still takes pride in being a citizen Legislature, but the sessions are longer, the lobbying is more intense.
Part of that is the result, I think, of the whole political game shifting, to some extent, from Washington to the states. There’s a lot more legislation that originates at the state level and shifts from state to state, rather than comes down from Washington. So the states have been playing a lot more active role in politics in creating and passing legislation, and model legislation comes from some states. The action has shifted, and there are a lot more lobbyists now at the state level, in all states.
Here in Montpelier, when I started, there was one major association of business lobbyists, and it wasn’t us, it was Jim Mereness for the Associated Industries of Vermont. Some of the other organizations that are pretty well represented at the State House now didn’t even exist then, or were a lot smaller than they are now. So you’ve now got hundreds of registered lobbyists in Vermont, and dozens of very active organizations or hired gun lobbyists who spend a lot of time in the State House.
When we started lobbying, I was our only lobbyist. I virtually lived at the State House during the session. When we were getting a lot more involved, so were a lot of other organizations that represented a group of interests. Maybe they’d represent the automobile industry, or the farmers, or other groups. So you’ve got this kind of duality of organization lobbyists like the Chamber and other trade groups, whether they be environmental or business or human services or whatever, and then you’ve got a lot of organization businesses, with lawyers and others who represent groups of businesses as contract lobbyists. That’s a big difference, and I think politically, those two things are the biggest changes I’ve seen.
As far as growth in the state, Vermont hasn’t grown as fast as many other states have grown, and its growth has been focused in -the northwestern part of the state. For example, this region here, central Vermont and Washington County, really hasn’t grown much in the last 10 years. The population has been pretty stable, the economy has been relatively stable. There are other parts of the state, though, like the Northeast Kingdom, that haven’t grown much. There’s been more activity in the southeastern part of the state, and I think that’s been the result of the Interstate highway and the proximity to some of the major markets down south.
We haven’t seen growth that’s been spread equally or even close to equally throughout the state. It’s been focused in the Chittenden County area. There are reasons for that. They’ve got the lake, the interstate, a legitimately regional airport, the university, a major hospital – all those things that would attract major investors. It’s a big challenge to spread some of that growth around.
So I think those two areas – the political side and the disparity of the growth side – are the two major things I’ve seen.
And the economic growth side is accompanied by a lot of shifts. The agricultural community has shrunk in terms of the number of farms.
VBM: There’s a massive difference in the actual number of farms over the past 30 years.
Barbieri: Although, when I was a kid working on the farm in Cabot, there were a lot of small farms. There was a guy near MY uncle’s place who had 12 cows, and there were a lot of farmers struggling like he was. Since then there’s been a lot of consolidation, and Vermont still produces a heck of a lot of milk, even though the number of farms has really been reduced.
VBM: What changes have you seen in economic development, and what changes do you foresee coming?
Barbieri: The changes, besides the way it’s grown, have been in the decline in the number of farms and the erosion of the manufacturing base, which is probably the single change that has most impacted on the economy. We’ve backfilled that, as has most of the country, with service industry jobs. Thankfully the travel and tourism industry, despite the lack of support it’s had over the years from the state, has continued to fill in that loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector. It’s been a challenge for Vermont, and its only been exacerbated over the last four or five years with the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs all over the state. IBM’s changes over the last few years have hurt, and there have been job losses with larger businesses, smaller businesses, manufacturing businesses, so tha’t’s a change which has affected the makeup of the economy. When we lose those manufacturing jobs, it makes it more difficult to get incomes up in the state.
One of my own personal concerns that has really bugged me over the years is that we’ve never been able to get the average wage in Vermont up to the national average. It seems as though we are getting better in that regard, but losing these manufacturing jobs only makes that tougher. Those tend to be better paying jobs, particularly at the hourly level. There are good paying jobs in the travel and tourism sector, but sometimes we don’t recognize those jobs. Travel and tourism has a lot of variety of jobs. It covers such a broad piece of the economy – attractions, hotels, restaurants, and a lot of other industries in the state depend on it.
Cabot is an example. They are a dairybased manufacturer that depends a lot on travel and tourism. We’ve got an economy that’s interdependent in a lot of ways, a lot more so than many other states.
VBM: One of the issues that consistently comes up in these interviews is Act 250 and the whole permitting process. There seems to be an overwhelming consensus that it needs to be improved. What would you like to see happen with that permitting process? Do you think the Legislature fell short this past session in doing something substantial about it?
Barbieri: There’s really nothing wrong with Act 250 itself and its criteria. The problem is with the implementation and the process.
VBM: That’s exactly what I hear over and over. Everyone seems to like the Act and what it stands for, and want to leave that alone, but actually getting all the permits for a project can be a long drawn out mess.
Barbieri: We hear that, and have heard it for years and years from our members. The delays, the appeals, the unpredictably of it is what drives business people nuts and drives investors nuts. I believe it has been a disincentive to investment in this state. In so many ways perception becomes reality, and the perception that I hear from a lot of people out of state is that we have a process here that is very difficult to get through, very costly and very unpredictable, and we need to fix that.
So what do we do?
The legislation that the governor introduced – and the Chamber and a number of other groups worked hard at putting together a proposed bill that is very close to what the governor introduced – would fix a lot of the process. I’m not a technician on the permitting process, but it really does need to be reformed, to make it more predictable for businesses.
Most of the business people in the state are here because they want to live here and raise their families here. They love Vermont. I’ve known a lot of business people over the years and there are very, very few of them who have any interest in seeing the environment of this state decline or in any way be diminished or be hurt. But they get very frustrated with the process of Act 250 and with some of the other regulatory processes in the state as well.
There are things that can be done to change the perception of Vermont, and I think that Governor Douglas understands that. He’s been passionate about Act 250 reform, and has gone to the mat for it. You asked what I think is going to happen, and that’s a tough question to answer.
There’s a bill sitting in the Senate Natural Resources Committee that I think would be an improvement over what we have now. It’s not as much as the business community and certainly the Chamber wanted, but it’s clearly a step in the right direction. Whether that bill will come out or not, or what form it will take when it does come out is, I think at this stage, a toss up. It’s an election year, and that makes people do strange things.
This is kind of a sidebar, but one of the things that we could do to improve the quality of legislation in Vermont is to have four-year terms for the governor and at least for the Senate. You get elected in Vermont, and you can’t help but get up the day after the election and think about what you’re going to do prepare for reelection, which is a short two years away. There are only two states left in the nation that have two year terms for governor, and that’s Vermont and New Hampshire.
The problem in Vermont is process – it takes a constitutional amendment to change the term, and that’s a very long, difficult process. But it would make things like getting a more focused, nonpartisan, thoughtful consideration of some of these major issues a little less political than they are when you’ve got that looming election looking at you.
VBM: What’s your view on the Vermont sales tax?
Barbieri: We’ve had a policy that we publish each year which says that Vermonters are over-taxed as it is, the business community is overtaxed as it is, and we don’t want to see any new taxes unless they’ve really been proven to be necessary.
For example, when we had those deficits in the early ’90s, we supported some of those temporary tax increases to get us out of that mess. So we’re not always hip-shooting, anti-tax. But Vermont is heavily taxed, and that along with permit reform and along with a few other things, is what leads to this perception, whether it’s fairly imposed on us or not, that Vermont is not always the most business friendly state.
So in this particular legislative session we opposed any new taxes. We did support some tax shifting in reforming Act 60, if, and that if should be underlined, if we could get some cost containment in the education system in this state. So we end up with more sales taxes. We did support the repeal of the sharing pool. That was just a disastrous part of Act 60 from the get go.
VBM: It was very divisive from one town to the next.
Barbieri: Exactly. We opposed it before it was ever passed. That was repealed, but we continue to layer on taxes. A penny here, a buck there, may not seem like much, but incrementally over the years, it’s beginning to add up. We’ve got a fairly high corporate income tax, a fairly high personal income tax, high property taxes, and we’re inching up there on the sales tax, which of course is exacerbated by our neighbors (New Hampshire), who of course don’t have a sales tax.
So it’s tough to point to one specific tax increase that you might say is the straw, but it’s taking a toll. What we’ve advocated for a number of years is to just step back and focus on developing a tax policy for Vermont that, if nothing more, we can use as a guideline for the Legislature and any administration. It doesn’t really matter which one. But we don’t do that. We tend to go where the wheel squeaks the least and add on taxes when we need revenue. Again it goes back partially to the fact that it’s tough to develop any longterm policy when you know that in two years you may be out the door and somebody else will be there. That makes it a lot more difficult, whether it’s tax policy or if it’s environmental policy or anything else.
VBM: You were the main force in developing the Business and Industry Expo. Could you talk about that, how it’s changed over the years and what it does for the state of Vermont?
Barbieri: Let me say that with Expo, and any of the other programs that we have, we have a staff here now of 20, and we have any number of committees that are made up of Chamber members. They’re all volunteers, they don’t get any honorariums, they don’t get mileage and most of them don’t even get a free lunch, and the same is true of the board of directors. All Chambers are still what we call volunteer organizations – the members volunteer a lot of their personal time to help the organization.
With that said, when we created Expo it was with the idea that it would be a manufacturers trade show. And it was for the first few years, and we held it at the University of Vermont’s Patrick Gym. It was the only place we could find that fit the need at the time. It was marginally successful in the early years, but we realized that there were a lot of other businesses that wanted to participate, and there was a need for a more general business trade show for Vermont.
The purpose was to promote Vermont businesses to each other, but also to promote them outside of the state, to attract attendees to the show who could learn more about what Vermont businesses offered and have the opportunity to onestop shop a lot of different businesses instead of having to travel all around the state, and conversely, to give businesses the opportunity to meet with their prospective customers without having to drive all around the region.
A couple of things happened about the same time. We made the decision to expand the show and open it up to other businesses, and the Sheraton Conference Center was developed, and that gave us a venue that was more fitting for trade shows. The University did the best it could to try and present us with a location that fit the show, but it was a business trade show, and Patrick Gym was a basketball court and it wasn’t intended to be set up for trade shows. So we took advantage of Sheraton’s facility and moved the show there.
It was Eke a shot of high test gas into the carburetor. The show just took off from that point and it has grown. We outgrew the Sheraton from the get go and we have a waiting list for this show every year. We fill the Sheraton, and it’s the largest business trade show in northern New England. It has really become a premier business event. It’s more than just a trade show. There are seminars and workshops. It’s networking.-It’s events like dinners and we do an export business of the year award, and we do the Dean C Davis Outstanding Business Award every year. It’s actually a joint award from Vermont Business Magazine and the Chamber. It’s just become a business extravaganza.
There is just so much stuff going on. It attracts business leaders from around the state. We have exhibitors now that come from Canada, Taiwan, Japan, and Russia. The Expo has been a premier product of the Chamber and we’re very proud of it. We have a very hardworking committee that literally starts planning for the next event the week after the Expo is over. It takes us a year to put it together. We’ve been fortunate for the past four or five years now, IBM and Verizon join together to do a technology pavilion at the show. That’s a great attraction.
VBM: You’ve mentioned Taiwan and the Pacific Rim. I understand you’re headed there.
Barbieri: I’ve actually resigned from the Chamber effective November 1st, and I’ll be relocating myself in Shanghai. A lot of things happen coincidentally, but in this case, we created an international trade committee in 1992 or ‘93 out of a group that had come from the Leadership Champlain Program in Chittenden County. The group was working on international trade and had stayed together and were networking informally and we were kind of helping them along. They became the basis for the international trade committee. International trade was becoming more relevant to the Vermont economy at that point.
Coincidentally with that, I got a phone call from Senator Jim Jeffords that said that he had an intern that worked for a staffer of his that had worked in Taiwan and Taipei. When he returned he said, wow, this place is cooking. They’ve got a world trade center, the economy is booming, and it might just be a good place for Vermont to look at.
Well, the state was pretty much focused on Canada, as well it should be. It’s by far our largest trading partner.
But Taiwan was an interesting project for the committee. So we invited the guy who ran Taiwan’s economic development office in New York City to come up. His name is Sam Lee, a real dynamite guy, and he said that you have an economic opportunity in Taiwan, and we really welcome economic investment and trade with America because of the large trade surplus that Taiwan has with the US.
The long and the short of it is that they invited Jim Jeffords to lead a trade delegation in 1993. The Chamber organized it. It was our first trade mission to Taiwan. Subsequently in 1994 and 1996 we participated in a large trade show at the World Trade Center there.
I’ve been to Taiwan 25 times now, and we’ve done probably 23 trade missions, and some have been big ones, like with Jeffords. In 1999 we took Governor Dean over, it was his first trip overseas as governor, and he’d never been to Asia before. We’re taking Lieutenant Governor Dubie with us in October.
Those are general trade missions, where you have a mix of government and business people. They’re more familiarization type missions. But we’ve also done a number of targeted trade missions. Food products, recruiting students and more. We’ve run the gamut. Those tend to not be as big – three to 10 people. Very focused. Match making, where you put the potential customer together with the potential company.
So over the years we’ve evolved into a lot of different venues in Taiwan, and in 1998 we opened an office in Taipei. At the time there were about 13 or 14 different state offices in the World Trade Center in Taipei.
We looked at that, and I studied it carefully, and we realized how multiactive they were. They were recruiting students, they were promoting tourism, they were match making, they were doing market research, they were working to promote individual companies, and so on.
We’re a private, non-profit, as are all Chambers, and we’re funded by our members. The offices there in Taipei were being operated by their state’s commerce department. We’re a private non-profit, and we didn’t have the $150,000 to $175,000 that it costs to run one of those offices.
But I had made a friend on my visits to Taiwan, a man who ran a large trading company in Taipei, with offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bangkok and so forth. We’d become very good friends, and he’d been a mentor from the get go in 1993.
He’s Chinese, and he said, “If you want to be successful in this market, you’ve got to be patient, you’ve got to be focused and you’ve got to build relationships. That’s the culture here. The business culture is a personal culture. Don’t do what we see Americans do, and that’s come over on trade missions from different states. They bring the governor and they bring a lot of business leaders and there’s a lot of glad handing and fancy dinners and all that, and then the Americans go home and we don’t hear from them any more. Meanwhile the Americans are saying, well. we didn’t do any business there, so we guess we’ll try some other place, while the Chinese are saying, what happened, we haven’t heard from them.”
My friend told me you’ve got to invest four or five years before you’re going to see any results.
So I researched the trade offices, because he kept saying to me that we had to get some representation over there. I was at his home and I was looking to him for some guidance on this, and finally he said to me, “Why don’t you let me do it for you,” not meaning personally, but let his office set up a Vermont trade office in his headquarters in Taipei to represent Vermont in Taiwan. Well, we did that, starting in 1998.
Now, everything that he said has worked, and we’re starting to be successful. The window of opportunity has opened up in a number of ways. A lot of the activity is shifting from Taiwan, and from other countries in the region, into China. The Chinese government has identified Shanghai to be the economic capital of Asia, and it’s happening.
Hong Kong has held that title for quite a while, and though Hong Kong is technically part of China, there’s still a lot of competition going on between the two. The Beijing government wants to see Shanghai as the economic capital, so an awful lot of investment is pouring in there. There’s about $45 billion to $50 billion US dollars worth of private Taiwan investment in China, and most of that is in the Shanghai region. A lot of other investment is pouring in, and a lot of American companies are going there.
So I’m going to be moving to Shanghai. I’ve already got my apartment, I’ve already got my bank account opened. I never dreamed I’d be putting my hardearned money in the Bank of China, which is wholly owned by the Communist government of China. I’m going to be operating out of Shanghai, and we’re going to be opening a Vermont office in Shanghai as well. It’ll be in the office of my friend, whose main office is in Shanghai. We’ll also maintain an office in Taipei, and I’ll now be able to utilize his network of offices to represent Vermont and we’ll be stepping up our presence significantly by this move.
VBM: You’re certainly no stranger to the culture there, but this is still a big move.
Barbieri: I’ve fallen in love with the culture. You get a window of opportunity in life to do something you want to do. I’ve been thinking about this for four years, and now’s the right time for me to do it. The kids are out of college, loans are paid off, all that sort of stuff
VBM: Is your wife going with you?
Barbieri: No. My wife is an English teacher, and she’s actually taught a couple of summers in Taipei and really loved it. But for now, I’ll be back every couple of months for a couple of weeks, and she’ll be over to visit for winter vacation. I see her as very possibly teaching there next summer, and she can take some leave of absence without losing her benefits or seniority
I see this at this stage as a two or three or four year thing for me, and I see her coming over and teaching for six months or a year, and then we’ll decide what we do next.
VBM: Well, it sounds very exciting.
Barbieri: You can tell I get excited about it. The culture there is a lot like what America was. People are respectful, people are responsible for their actions, they have a work ethic that would blow our socks off It’s an honor to have a job, and I find that appealing. There’s so much energy right now in southeast China, and in Shanghai in particular. There are a lot of young people coming in from rural areas that are very well educated, which is another thing I like about China. People are very focused on education. Families tend to save up their money for their children’s college education before they spend on other things, and in the US it’s kind of the opposite. Here they wait until their kid is 16 and then say, “Oh my god, what are we going to do?”
There’s a lot of construction going on, new housing, new commercial projects, and it’s a fun place to be right now. And I think there’s a lot of opportunity for Vermont. Taiwan has been Vermont’s fourth largest trading partner for some time now. Much of that is driven by IBM, but not all of it. We export lumber there, we export food products there, we’ve been recruiting students from there.
And in regard to international trade, I think it’s an important area for Vermont to focus on. If we’re going to get quality jobs in Vermont, state policy makers need to make attracting investment to Vermont and creating a strong economic climate in Vermont, as important as environmental protection and social services. It doesn’t have to be more important, but it does have to get equal billing with those other two sectors.
It never has, and I think this current administration is doing a great job of trying to notch it up to be as important. Without a strong economy, we don’t have the resources to protect the environment, nor do we have the resources to take care of our social needs. Focusing on jobs has always taken a back seat to the other two. It’s critically important not only to create the jobs, but to get the wages up in this state. We can do that without compromising anything. Other states are balancing all three. We need to put the resources necessary into attracting that investment and giving the secretary of commerce the resources he needs to go out and do it. You can’t appropriate one-time money to do this. It’s not like travel and tourism marketing where you can blitz New York City with ads on Monday and Tuesday and get a return the following weekend. Attracting manufacturing investment, for example, Is a longterm process. You’re sowing seeds now which may not pay back for five or 10 years. You’ve got to have people out there talking to potential investors. We’ve got to get serious about that.
VBM: Which brings me to another thing I wanted to discuss. IBM has just announced another 500 lay-offs. Is there anything that can be done about that?
Barbieri: IBM has been a wonderful employer in this state, and has contributed enormously to the state as a whole and not just to Chittenden County. At the same time, they are like any other business, vulnerable to the economy and what’s going on globally in the marketplace. Much of what they produce here is exported, and what’s happening is that there is a shift in the market, which is affecting IBM, and not just in Vermont, and is affecting other companies. So a lot of what is going on here is beyond our control.
But, I can’t help think that we could maybe have made fife easier for IBM over the years. They’ve wanted the Circ Highway for forever, and it’s still not there. I don’t think that’s asking too much for a company that did employ 8,000 people. Getting permits has never been easy for them, for their expansion. They’re paying a lot more for power here than they would if they were located elsewhere with the same size facility. That has always been a problem. So it hasn’t just been the international economy that has taken its toll.
Looking back, maybe we could have made this facility a little more important to IBM when the company makes those decisions. A lot of the investment now by the company is going to Fishkill, New York, and not here. So you can draw your own conclusions from all of that. There will -be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking about what went wrong.
It’s certainly not too late for us to be more accommodating. VBM: Any other areas that you’d like to include in the interview that we haven’t touched on?
Barbieri: One of the things that I feel proud that the Chamber has done, is that it has made an effort now for 10 years to bring the business community and the education community a little closer together.
I recall the meeting that took place in the Legislature when the House and Senate Education Committees held a joint hearing in Room 11 and they invited a handful of business people to get an idea of what business people – employers thought was going on in education in Vermont. It was in the late 1980s. I had been married to my wife, who is a teacher, for about three years, and I was getting a real education about education. Id never paid a whole lot of attention to it.
At that hearing I was blown away by the criticism from the other business people that they weren’t getting the product out of the education system that they needed. Kids were coming in who couldn’t read or write or communicate.
The headline in the paper the next day was “Business Community Levels Shotgun at State’s Educators.” That bothered me.
A few years later we created an education committee in the Chamber, and they were looking for a project. Coincidentally, the Department of Education had a grant from the federal DOE to work on schoolto-work programs, with the aim of making the curriculum a little more relevant to what was happening in the workplace. Going into the third year of that four-year grant, the Department of Education came to us and said this really needs to be administered by an organization that is working much more closely with business.
So, the grant came to us, and that really helped us become much more involved in working with educators and with the Department of Education and working to improve the quality of education in Vermont.
Important to me out of all of this was that we started to get business people and educators to sit down and start talking with each other. Business people started going to the classroom, educators started bringing their kids into the workplace. Developing a relationship was the beginning of developing a mutual respect for one another. I think we’ve come a long way in doing that.
Our business education partnership has moved into major mentoring work in the state, we do a lot of workforce training. We’re working with the construction community.
I’m proud of that organization. We have a separate director and a separate staff that does it, and they work with a lot of regional chambers around the state, who are doing a lot of this sort of work on a regional level.
We’re not having a love-fest yet, but the work that has been done between the business community and the education community over the last 10 years has really brought a new level of respect, cooperation and improvement in meeting the educational. needs of employers. They don’t have to do as much remedial training of people who come into their workforce. At the same time it allows them to focus more on utilizing the skills of the young people as best they can. I think there’s been a big improvement there.
