[MRVphotog]

Originally Posted by arctichomesteader

"Only 50 million" yet they have to bring in foreign wage slaves to work for them? That's just greed and the taxpayers of this state are subsidizing their profits with a cheap lease of public lands. They're paying less than the average individual in taxes as a percent of their income, not hiring locals or if they do hire them at wage slave rates, and causing real estate to become out of reach of the average local. Yes the resorts are responsible for real estate becoming unaffordable. No one even hardly wanted land in places like Killington, Plymouth, etc., years ago. They were cheap, affordable places for the locals. The resorts changed that and the damage they do to locals outweighs the benefits they bring.

That 50 million is revenue not profit, big diference. Many resorts barely make a profit. You have been regurgetating the same falsehoods for years.

Many of those foreign workers are college kids from South America. You know that their summer vacation is our winter right? Ski resort hire them because there is not enough people in the LOCAL labor pool.

Resorts want to hire locals...no housing hassles. At Sugarbush every morning workers stream over App and Roxbury Gaps everyday. These are Vermonters from Northfield and Bristol and beyond who choose to work there. Most work in the summer elsewhere or have a summer business. Not hiring locals, pure BS.

[arctichomesteader]

Originally Posted by MRVphotog

That 50 million is revenue not profit, big diference. Many resorts barely make a profit. You have been regurgetating the same falsehoods for years.

Many of those foreign workers are college kids from South America. You know that their summer vacation is our winter right? Ski resort hire them because there is not enough people in the LOCAL labor pool.

Resorts want to hire locals...no housing hassles. At Sugarbush every morning workers stream over App and Roxbury Gaps everyday. These are Vermonters from Northfield and Bristol and beyond who choose to work there. Most work in the summer elsewhere or have a summer business. Not hiring locals, pure BS.

Plenty of people in Rutland willing to work but Killington brings in foreigners to work for even less. Not BS at all.

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by arctichomesteader

Plenty of people in Rutland willing to work but Killington brings in foreigners to work for even less. Not BS at all.

They certainly don't turn up at the series of job fairs Killington stages every fall looking for seasonal help. The resorts import international workers because they have to.

Originally Posted by MRVphotog

That 50 million is revenue not profit, big diference. Many resorts barely make a profit. You have been regurgetating the same falsehoods for years.

Many of those foreign workers are college kids from South America. You know that their summer vacation is our winter right? Ski resort hire them because there is not enough people in the LOCAL labor pool.

Resorts want to hire locals...no housing hassles. At Sugarbush every morning workers stream over App and Roxbury Gaps everyday. These are Vermonters from Northfield and Bristol and beyond who choose to work there. Most work in the summer elsewhere or have a summer business. Not hiring locals, pure BS.

I'm astounded by the ignorant class envy. $50 million in sales is barely a medium sized business. Other than Killington, all the ski resorts in Vermont are classified as small businesses (less than $50 million in revenue). They're all barely hanging on by their fingernails and are a couple of bad years away from going out of business. They manage to fill their parking lots with affluent people who live in much more affluent places than Vermont so they must be evil.

You want to be able to afford a nice home at a ski resort? Start by getting A's in public school. Go to a selective college and major in something useful where you can get work afterwards. Get yourself a good job. Be competent for at a couple of decades at that job. Get married to someone who also got A's in public school, went to college, and got a good job. That is the profile of the typical homeowner at any ski resort in the United States. They earned it.

[arctichomesteader]

Originally Posted by GeoffD

They certainly don't turn up at the series of job fairs Killington stages every fall looking for seasonal help. The resorts import international workers because they have to.



I'm astounded by the ignorant class envy. $50 million in sales is barely a medium sized business. Other than Killington, all the ski resorts in Vermont are classified as small businesses (less than $50 million in revenue). They're all barely hanging on by their fingernails and are a couple of bad years away from going out of business. They manage to fill their parking lots with affluent people who live in much more affluent places than Vermont so they must be evil.

You want to be able to afford a nice home at a ski resort? Start by getting A's in public school. Go to a selective college and major in something useful where you can get work afterwards. Get yourself a good job. Be competent for at a couple of decades at that job. Get married to someone who also got A's in public school, went to college, and got a good job. That is the profile of the typical homeowner at any ski resort in the United States. They earned it.

Locals apply for those jobs and don't get hired. The resort prefers to hire the foreigners.

How about instead of catering to the wealthy of other states, we cater to our own residents? Encouraging an industry that leads to skyrocketing real estate prices without paying high incomes to the locals is poor policy. There aren't many jobs available in VT that pay what the average condo owners of Stowe or Killington earn. You can dismiss it as "class envy" if you want but our state should have policies that support the average resident not the atypical resident or visitor.

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by arctichomesteader

There aren't many jobs available in VT that pay what the average condo owners of Stowe or Killington earn.

So instead of the class envy against affluent out-of-staters, you might examine why there aren't many jobs in Vermont that pay 5%-er salaries. Outside of GlobalFoundries, UVM and a few other colleges, and the Medical Cartel, I doubt you'll find any other employer in Vermont where more than 5% of their employees make the $110K to get them into the top-5% of wage earners. If you want more affluent Vermonters who can afford condos at Stowe, they need to have the job skills to be worth paying $110K+. That means they probably were born with a 120+ IQ and attended college studying something an employer is willing to pay for. In a state of 630,000, there are only about 25,000 people in the labor force who meet that criteria. What big employer is going to move to Vermont offering high paying jobs when you have such a small labor pool capable of doing the work? And the ones who do move in are going to import most of their talent because it doesn't exist locally. I'll bet there are damned few employees making 6 figures at GlobalFoundries who are native Vermonters.

If you randomly stopped 100 people in the lift line at Stowe and administered an IQ test and general knowledge test, I'm 100% certain that far more than half of them would be in the top 5%. It's why they can afford to ski at Stowe. Try the same test in Rutland. I doubt you'd find more than a hand-full in the top-5%. No employer is going to rush to Rutland to open up an office building to employ those people at $100K+ salary. They're not capable of doing the kind of work that merits a $100K salary.

And circling back to the topic of this thread, this is why bright, young, well-educated Vermonters leave the state. Unless they pick medicine as their career, the 5%-er jobs available in the state are few and far between. They choose to leave the state to establish an economically viable career. This is the nature of any rural place in the United States.

[cgregor]

IQ doesn't have as much to do with making a good income as accident of birth. Some fifteen years ago, Paul Krugman showed how income did not relate to college education, but to the households' economic standing. Of all of those who go to college, the ones in general who have the most money and the most wealth were born into families already there.

[workitoutnow]

As a 6th Generation 40 something Vermonter, I left Vermont for Los Angeles a year ago and will never go back.

As a child, it was an excellent place to grow up. I received an excellent education and learned how to properly treat people.

As an adult, the jobs were scarce, the social life was terrible and the crime was bad. I had my house ransacked and robbed by some prescription drug heads, and the sheriffs office just laughed it off without taking even one fingerprint. Not to mention the terrible weather. Bleak for 8 months of the year, and then 4 beautiful months that make you forget the crazy Winter, then it's back again.

I feel safer here in Los Angeles than I ever felt in Franklin County. The money is good, and the people are actually friendlier. The weather, well you know how great it is. Food is cheaper, and although housing is expensive, the housing stock and choices are better than Vermont will ever get. The hiking is even better here.

Don't bother saying "But the earthquakes!!!!!!" I'd still trade an earthquake for a marginal life in Vermont.

I love it, and parts of it I miss. The bad outweighs the good, for sure.

[naadarien]

As a...ahem...flatlander married to a 7+generation Vermonter, my experience is that most of us want our cake and eat it too.

We want work in local towns to lower the commute, because there is no way to get anywhere fast here unless you live and work along an interstate. Except every large business I know relies on ready access (roads, trains, planes). We however don't want more interstates/powerlines/wind turbines/train tracks (ie, infrastructure) messing with our beautiful, untouched glorious land and views. Trust me, I love both myself, but you can't have it both ways: 19th century infrastructure with 21st century jobs. Something must give and for now it is jobs from big companies...while folks cheer about how the town they know and love didn't become a gigantic Wal-Mart.

We want great schools (and some of us have that), but again we want them local. If I had a dollar for every person telling a story about how we couldn't possibly teach kids well in a large combined school district when I (and hundreds of thousands of kids around the country) graduated from a school ranked in the top 1% in the nation, in a senior class of 901 kids, I'd be a millionaire. I was in the top ten students of that graduating class. It is absolute rubbish that we couldn't teach a higher level of education to kids by combining schools and saving money (or rather spending the money we do get more efficiently in other ways because let's be honest, there is no saving, no money going back to taxpayers in a combined school plan).

Most towns simply don't have the tax-base (again, from lack of good high paying jobs) to support their schools and provide quality education for all. The ones who do well are the ones who parents have the time and resources to make sure that happens, which means those at the bottom will tend to stay there. If a school isn't serving its weakest students then it is failing, period, and should be closed. But no, we'd rather have closer schools that underperform than farther and larger schools that do marginally better.

Large businesses rely on an educated populace to fill its human resource needs. We don't train kids to meet that standard. So the jobs won't come because the businesses don't see us as a good investment.

Our one consistent commodity is our land. I love that Norwich example except no one in their right mind is going to sell their property to the lowest bidder. We either make it so Vermonters can afford to buy that $120k property or we don't, but in the mean time our land continues to appreciate, and in the places where businesses did decide to create jobs are lots of people looking to spend the money they make at those jobs, and I see nothing crazy about wanting to spend your hard earned money on some pretty views (did that myself here, 3 times over)...and the old guy who barely made enough money to save for retirement can now sell his one valuable asset for a nice nest egg that he will spend in some place warmer and cheaper.

This really isn't rocket science. We stay on this path and VT will be like the Cape or NJ. Places with beautiful properties owned by wealthy people who hire locals to care for their million dollar cottages. Frankly, I'm banking on that myself. I'd love for someone with more money than G-d to stop by and buy my property. Don't get me wrong. I love my pretty little square patch on this planet, but if someone offered to make me debt free in one day, I'd take it in heartbeat. Don't fool yourself.

[cgregor]

Keeping Vermont really special requires in large part deciding which we value more: our money or our quality of life. If we want a superb educational system, we'll have to ditch the "efficient education" model that at present misrules the nation and put teachers in charge. If we want the land to stay unspoiled, we have to invest in rail and bus transportation and hike the cost of using personal vehicles; we also have to invest in greenbelts around every Vermont city and town. If we want to get rid of the "drug problem," we have to legitimize drug use and bring production, marketing and distribution under strict state control. And if we want to eliminate poverty, we have to live by the admonition, "Whenever you saw me hungry or thirsty. . ."

[Sierrajeff]

Originally Posted by naadarien

We want great schools (and some of us have that), but again we want them local. If I had a dollar for every person telling a story about how we couldn't possibly teach kids well in a large combined school district when I (and hundreds of thousands of kids around the country) graduated from a school ranked in the top 1% in the nation, in a senior class of 901 kids, I'd be a millionaire. I was in the top ten students of that graduating class. It is absolute rubbish that we couldn't teach a higher level of education to kids by combining schools and saving money (or rather spending the money we do get more efficiently in other ways because let's be honest, there is no saving, no money going back to taxpayers in a combined school plan).

Very well said. I completely understand the desire to have local schools (and the shorter bus / parent car-pool rides that go with them). But I'm also the product of a consolidated public high school, in rural West Virginia (a place with very similar human and physical geography to Vermont). My H.S. emcompassed 3 grades (10, 11, 12) and had 1500 students - as a result, it could offer everything from auto mechanics and shop classes to calculus, physics and two years of organic chemistry. I'm forever grateful that I had a chance to go to a school like that; a quiet rural campus (without any of the urban trappings of grit and danger), but with an incredible array of academic opportunities. I think my life would have been very different if I'd gone to a small local high school with limited academic options - I don't think I'd have been inspired to go on a college track at all, let alone push myself to the sort of career that I have today.

As a side note - at the time I went, the elementary, intermediate and junior high schools were all still local - so it really was the best of both worlds; younger kids attended smaller local schools - where they were able to get close teaching and form close friendships - and then they moved on to a consolidated high school with the much broader academic offerings.