So where do you think the population is falling?

Florida, precisely the place which (to hear some talk) Vermont should emulate by cutting taxes and weakening regulations lest thousands flee to…well, someplace like Florida

Could be. But right now, Vermont’s path looks a lot safer.

Its population is growing (slowly) and it is one of the few states gaining jobs these days. It’s Florida which folks are fleeing.

The news was right there on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, which noted that after a century of almost unbroken population growth, Florida actually lost 58,000 people between April 2008 and April 2009.

In percentage terms, 58,000 is a tiny chunk of more than 18 million. But by all accounts, the decline is continuing. And in part because of that lack of an income tax, population decline hits Florida especially hard. Without an income tax, the state relies heavily on sales and property taxes. When property values go down and people buy less (both because there are fewer of them and the ones who stay cut back), the loss of state revenue is even more acute than it is elsewhere.

Ah, but there’s hope on the horizon, some Floridians think. The state has always been a retiree Mecca, and as those millions of Baby Boomers start to retire in the next few years, perhaps many of those millions will emulate their elders and head to the Sunshine State.

But not everyone is confident that they will. The big question, the Times quoted a Florida professor saying, “is will they choose the same type of retirement as their parents.”

An interesting question because of a new study, reported here last week, indicating that Baby Boomers might be less likely to retire to Florida than to….could it be Vermont?

Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. When it comes to attracting retirees, Florida will continue to have two advantages over Vermont: (1) No state income tax; (2) Warm winters.

But it’s crowded, without many areas of remoteness, and as outlined here on August 19 (The Boomers Are Coming) new data indicate that in retirement, the Baby Boomers will not crave urban conveniences as much as “desirable physical attributes – pleasant climates, mountains, beaches, lakes,” and all of it far from the metro area crowds.

All of the low-tax Southern states have pleasant climates (for those who like heat and humidity), and many have mountains, beaches and lakes. But they’re all relatively crowded, which is why the News Guy speculated (without first having the chance to talk to the authors of the report) that Vermont might be a desirable destination for Baby Boomer retirees.

As it happens, one of the two authors, Peter Nelson, is a Vermonter, a geography professor at Middlebury College on sabbatical in Washington, D.C., for a year as a visiting scholar for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, which released that study.

When reached, Nelson said that, yes, there could be a “strong propensity for these Baby Boomers to find at least certain types of areas in Vermont attractive.”

Left alone, these Boomer retirees could be economically beneficial to rural Vermont. Most of them will have some money, which they’ll spend at the local shops and restaurants. Some of them no doubt will hire locals to build, repair, or clean houses, do yard-work, and the like.

But Nelson has an idea. It’s not yet a fully-developed idea, but he plans to spend the next few months trying to develop it. His idea is not to leave these Boomer retirees alone, but somehow to enlist them – their expertise and their money – to help perk up local rural economies.

“It’s hard for communities to direct these newcomers’ energies in ways that benefit the general population,” he said. A lot of the people arriving potentially have something very meaningful to contribute but I haven’t seen a community that’s effectively organized itself to harness this potential. If you’ve got five or six retired folks from financial services, what kind of organizational structure could be developed to harness their expertise to create some employment opportunities for local people in their twenties and thirties?”

As Nelson sees it, the county economic development agencies are the best vehicle for trying to get wealthy retirees to start or finance local businesses.

“The selectboards are dealing more with day-to-day operations of municipalities,” he said. Regional economic development agencies, their charge is more how do we create a stable economy for not just a town but an aggregation of towns. They operate at larger scale.”

But he acknowledged that he was not sure exactly how to transform this concept into action, and not everyone involved in rural economic planning is convinced that the goal is realistic.

“I’m a little skeptical,” said Jerry Johnson, a political science professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, identified by Nelson as one of the scholars interested in the concept. “It’s a great idea but I’m not sure if it’s gonna fly anywhere.”

Johnson said that while he agreed that retirees want to have an impact on their new communities, they were more interested in volunteer work than in going into business,

“They work on the arts festival, at the library,” Johnson said. “They didn’t retire to start another business.”

Also skeptical, but somewhat more optimistic, was Ray Rasker, another Montanan, an economist who specializes in rural economic development.

“People don’t start up a business to create jobs,” Rasker said. “Their motivation is to make money. A side effect of it is that it creates jobs.”

But, he said, “I don’t think I would discount the wave of retiring baby boomers, people who’ve had a career, who are well-connected. “ Some, he said, “might keep working to a certain extent.”

Rasker said he thought the capital and the expertise of rural retirees could be tapped, but only if the other fundamentals of rural economic development were in place. The most important of these, he said, was protection of “environmental amenities.” After that come “good schools, high quality of life. access to markets, capital, transportation.”

As Nelson acknowledged, the importance of transportation makes economic development difficult in places such as the Northeast Kingdom, just because the nearest airport isn’t all that near.

In those areas, Rasker said, the best strategy might be to try to attract retirees by making sure local high-quality health care facilities were available.

“If I was king of economic development I’d insist on three things,” Rasker said. “Airport access, health care, education, and not necessarily university, probably more vo-tech.”

All of which, of course, costs money. So maybe the best economic development policy for places like rural Vermont requires some (selective, prudent) government spending as well as enough regulation to protect those “environmental amenities.”

Not, in other words, the Florida model, which for the nonce at least does not seem like a model to emulate.

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