Would You Like a Fig Leaf with that Latte? 
By Martin Harris

It’s an opinion which I can’t document with statistical charts and facts, but it does seem to me that national companies seeking — however unreasonably, in the view of the new gentry-left, anti-business majority in Vermont — to open shop in Vermont, are far quicker to pull the plug and depart, upon realizing what degree of opposition is arrayed against them, than they used to be. Wal-Mart’s efforts starting in 1993 to build a store in St.Albans, for example, were a nearly-two-decade marathon, but Aldi’s and now Starbuck’s have withdrawn from the Middlebury arena after a mere couple of months or so of watching their applications twist in the wind.

Recent official studies, documenting the breadth and depth of the anti-business climate in Vermont, are by now sitting on the desks of corporate-placement/site selection consultants everywhere, and may well be the cause of the new, shorter, "dwell-time" during which companies are willing to try to satisfy the participants in the now-typical Vermont planning and zoning process before abandoning the effort and diverting their capital-investment budgets elsewhere; we don’t know and they won’t say. Instead, Starbuck’s, for example, merely blames it all on a corporate retrenchment in long-term store-opening strategy and a new focus on customer "experience" instead. It would, indeed, be highly improbable for them to say, directly, of the Vermont P&Z process, "S**w this, we’re outta here".

The closest to this sort of language I’ve ever heard came, interestingly enough, from the mouth of an Entergy (nuclear-power corporation, then owner of the Vermont Yankee plant in Brattleboro) representative who opined, in an informal question-answer session after his presentation during a Vermont-issues conclave in Randolph a couple of years ago, that if the home office had any inkling of the State regulatory climate they were buying into with their purchase of VY, they would never have done so. Since then, matters involving VY have grown even worse, with targeted tax proposals mixed in with new regulatory demands and, of course, the ongoing street theatre of a very substantial shut-it-down contingent convinced that their fellow citizens wouldn’t miss and maybe even don’t deserve the one-third of power demand which VY presently supplies at typically-low nuclear-power costs. These tie-dyed activists may not be fully rational, but they all vote. Understandably, also since then, Entergy has taken the first quiet steps to shed its Brattleboro burden, setting up a separate Vermont Yankee corporation not linked to the parent corporation. It’s a pattern repeated in Green Mountain Power’s recent self-sale to a Canadian holding company and Verizon’s on-going maneuvers to exit the State.

Such diplomatic fig-leaf language as Starbuck’s uses to cover up its relatively precipitous abandonment of its hopeful Vermont beachhead may be based on a couple of things, one being such a vocally-expressed Middlebury negative attitude might well result in suppressed latte sales anyway, and therefore an imprudent building investment; and the other being that such attitudes might well change, over time (the Beautiful People aren’t noted for deeply held long-term discretionary-consumption behavior patterns, and Starbuck’s may be figuring that, given a few more years of Progressive (pun intended) gentrification, Middlebury may well become more receptive of a look-at-how-upscale-I-am cafe-latte-vendor than its activists now admit. To Starbuck’s new executive suite folks, such a long view is surely worth a no-cost-to-donor rhetorical fig leaf.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights