Miracle on Main St. Morrisville, Pt. I

An interview with Morrisville Planning Director Todd Thomas

Last week I wrote about what I’m calling the “Morrisville Miracle”— how a small town in Vermont managed to revitalize its downtown and add a significant number of new housing units in a matter of a few years. I think it’s a powerful story that illustrates, among other things, how incremental does not have to mean slow.

Source: Morristownvt.org

In order to get a better sense of how the ongoing Miracle has come about, I reached out to Morrisville Planning Director Todd Thomas, who graciously agreed to do an interview. I’m going to share this interview in several related parts, each with its own theme. Here’s Part I:

Revitalizing an Historic New England Downtown

Will: I wanted to chat and hear a little bit more of the story in depth. First off, though, I need some help as a Mass guy. What is the distinction between Morristown and Morrisville? 

Todd: There is and there isn’t one. It’s weird. I do this four times a week and it’s kind of a disaster, but it’s gone on long before me and it will go on long after me, but in a nutshell, Morrisville is an incorporated village within Morristown. So if you come downtown you’re in Morrisville, if you’re in the rural areas you’re in Morristown. The village is the village downtown, but in theory…they’re both incorporated municipalities, but the town also absorbs the village. The village voters are town voters, but the town voters are not village voters. But everyone just calls us Morrisville so…just ignore the whole Morristown thing. 

Will: Okay! So StrongHaven is about our little town and how we can make sure it thrives into the future. One of the big needs we’ve seen here is the need for more housing. At the same time, we have two downtown areas that are in need of revitalization. What caught my eye up there is that you seemingly found a way to revitalize the downtown and increase housing in one approach.

Todd: That was the goal. They were linked together. Yes.

Will: So can you just tell the story of what happened when you started this work? What was the mandate that the select board gave to you and how did you approach that?

Todd: Sure. So two things. There were two separate things there. I think you caught the first one in your post. My mandate from the select board was to grow the town by the rate of inflation so we’re not raising taxes on people. We’ve tried to do that until the last couple of years when it’s no longer possible thanks to the Fed and powers beyond our control. But the main thing is that when I got here in 2010, downtown Morrisville faced an existential threat: we were getting a bypass road built. From the late 1960s when it first appeared on the Vermont Agency of Transportation books until the 70s and 80s, they had talked about building a straight section of Route 100 that bypasses downtown Morrisville because traffic trailers jackknifed trying to get through downtown. It’s an old downtown that was built before tractor trailers obviously, all the fun stuff that goes with that.

So the tractor-trailers would get stuck or they couldn’t carve back around. So the thought process was to divert the traffic from downtown and get the Canadian lumber trucks that come through out of here and onto a bypass road. There were a lot of people saying this was going to be good for the town and there were a lot of people saying this is going to be very bad for the town. You’re going to see downtown Morrisville basically boarded up and shuttered down once all the pass-through traffic goes away. And we said, well, we’ve got some time to get ahead of that and when I got here in 2010, it was after years and decades of uncertainty, but the truck route was going forward. And the truck route opened on Halloween of 2013. So we had a couple of years to get ahead of it.

Will: Were the people who were worried about the bypass negatively impacting downtown…were they coming from an assumption that the economic prosperity of downtown relies on traffic going through it?

Todd: Correct. And the people who were objecting were mostly landlords.

Will: And is that true to an extent that businesses were relying on cars coming through?

Source: Morristownvt.org

Todd: To some extent. Relied on would be the wrong term. It was part of their business mix. We did a little zip code study of downtown businesses to ask where the customers were coming from. We figured out that there was a percentage of businesses, depending on the business, that did rely on pass-through traffic because there were people who had no ties to here based on our assumptions of the zip code. You’re not interviewing every zip code.

You would have been a 02719 and we would have assumed you were a second homeowner or someone passing through. So with a little bit of guesswork, we basically said, we think at least 10% of the customers depending on the business, some more, some less, was pass-through traffic. To help our businesses stay afloat post truck route we wanted to replace this pass-through customer traffic for these businesses with new downtown residents that are going to be right in their market area. So for every drive-through business sale transaction lost, our hope is to put people here who are going to pay for these businesses who actually live here. That’s worked on the whole. 

Will: That makes sense. I imagine, just kind of knowing how this plays out in other communities that there were maybe people who were saying, hey, downtown is kind of a lost cause, particularly with this bypass. We should focus commercial and economic activity on the bypass, right?

Todd: Yes, to some degree. But the bypass section is actually a limited-access highway. So you see it and be seen from it, but in Vermont, you can’t have signs facing it.

Will: I know there are a lot of sections of 100 that are open to commercial.

Todd: Most of it is, this is very rare, but for this, the funding came from the Feds. It’s a limited-access highway money so we built 2 ½ miles of interstate highway. So the sign laws…as you know there are no billboards in Vermont so the sign laws are so strict that even the businesses that are facing the truck route can’t have their signs facing the truck route. So that whole dynamic you’re talking about wasn’t really there because it’s a limited-access highway. 

Will: Great. 

Todd: I will add that one of the main property owners downtown who rents places, rents mostly commercial places, was worried that downtown was a lost cause. He was very concerned and was very actively from the sidelines trying to stop the project, the truck route project.

Will: Trying to stop the truck route because he thought there was just no way you could revitalize the downtown without those customers passing through?

Todd: Correct. And just so to be clear, the traffic count downtown is about half of what it was, which aligns with what the projections were. I have a front-row seat because my window is right on Portland Street here, Route 100.

Will: And is that impacting business?

Todd: Depends on the business. So some businesses, for example, I’ll take the Cumberland Farms downtown. Their walk-up business is up significantly, but their fuel receipts are down 10%, which was kind of expected. Fewer people pulling over to fill up their tanks because they happen to be driving through a gas station, however, there were more people living downtown so they actually got a little more people walking in to buy pizza rolls, slushies, toilet paper, whatever else you buy at the Cumby’s.

Will: Right. Does not having that amount of through traffic and particularly large trucks…does change the feel of the downtown?

Todd: 100%

Will: And do you feel like that makes the downtown more productive in some ways?

Todd: Yes. I’ve seen there’s definitely a little bit more outdoor dining than there was before. It’s not tremendous. Some stores, pizza shops, and cafes, have put some tables out, not like giant entire sections of tables out. But without lumber trucks coming through with diesel exhaust it’s much more enjoyable sitting out on the sidewalk on a day like today where it’s going to be 65 degrees to have a sandwich or a drink than it would have been pre truck route. It’s made a difference and especially with traffic, as well.

Source: Morristownvt.org

Will: Often large trucks are used as the reason why roads need to be widened and infrastructure needs to be adapted on our streets and downtown. So with that being less of an issue, are there infrastructure changes that you’ve been able to make or planning to make downtown that would actually go in the other direction towards more kind of people-centered infrastructure?

Todd: This is where I’ve failed you! I’ve tried and tried, however, change is hard and we still have plows with wings that have to get through downtown. It annoys me because we plow 40 days a year and we live here the other 325 days a year. I have plans written up with the help of Local Motion¹, a nonprofit here in Vermont, to help make our downtown more pedestrian friendly. It’s already more pedestrian friendly just because we don’t have the trucks coming through, but I’m yet to be successful in making real streetscape infrastructure changes to the downtown to foster that goal. The change has been too hard. The plow guy wants straight curves. They don’t want bump outs. They don’t want the street trees. I’m not there yet, but hopefully, I’ll get there. Maybe it will take the person after me to do it.

We’ve started to focus on helping the businesses that are already here grow. It’s really hard to get those outside places to the finish line. It doesn’t happen very often.

Will: And in terms of decision-making and prioritization, does the plow guy come first? How does that work?

Todd: We plan by the plow. The select board does not want to make the job harder for the plow guys who give up their nights and weekends and are out sanding and salting and plowing. The plow guys don’t want it so it doesn’t happen. Even when I was a planner down in Mass in Norwell…we plowed a lot less than we do here… But you’ve got to have that good relationship with DPW and work with them to try and meet them halfway sometimes and try and get some of what you want because anytime a planner like me comes up against the plow guy… we have to be practical. The plow guys need to plow the roads and clear the streets etc. 

Will: But it’s not a binary, right? I’m sure the plow operators work very hard. You guys get a lot more snow and ice than us and that’s hard work. Are there other places that have figured this out? Places that have similar needs for plowing, but still manage to have things like bump-outs and street trees?

Todd: Yeah. The downtown study I have that Local Motion did suggested bump-outs and other places have done that, but I don’t have enough traction yet. Maybe I will in the future, but as of now, I’m still fighting the truck route battle, even though that started ten years ago. We were able to put in a little pocket park a couple of years ago, that was a step in the right direction, but I’m still pushing uphill on this one.

Will: Are you seeing more people out downtown? More pedestrians and bikes?

Todd: Yes!

Will: Do you work on helping small businesses in your downtown to grow and problem-solve?

Todd: Yes. I do and I have a coworker who does it as well. In many ways, I’m like a one-person chamber of commerce here, but I do have a colleague named Tricia here, she’s the Community Development Coordinator, and her job is to talk to local businesses, and see what they need. For example, we have a Morrisville Development Fund. During the pandemic when we had a mandated shutdown, Tricia made sure that fund, which has a half million dollars in it, actually paid every business in town a few hundred bucks during the winter months to make sure they stayed alive. She talks to the downtown businesses, and sees what they need. I’m actually the one who deals with recruiting new businesses or lining up new businesses, matching people who call me with space or new buildings that are coming online because I’m the one who deals with the permits and I’m the one who knows what spaces are coming available. I do more of the lining up a business who calls and says oh, I want to be in Morrisville, and I can say oh, I’ve got this space available here. So I kind of mix and match. Tricia keeps tabs on who’s here, how to help them grow, and how to help them succeed. 

Will: And how proactively have you been able to be in terms of bringing businesses downtown? Are you going out and looking for folks or are they coming to you?

Todd: It’s a little bit of both. Going out, there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years is that we’re not on the main highway. You guys probably aren’t either. We’re on the wrong side of Stowe from Interstate 89 so chasing smokestacks, as we call it, is a waste of your time here. It’s really hard to chase someone to come here who doesn’t know, hasn’t been here, or doesn’t understand the community. For a while I was working with Buffalo Wild Wings, they wanted a location here, and I had a landlord that would have loved to have them in the north end of town and they just didn’t…they said, I don’t know that side of the Green Mountains, I don’t know that community, I’m not comfortable with it. We’ve really started to focus instead on helping the businesses that are already here grow. It’s really hard to get those outside places to the finish line. It doesn’t happen very often.

Will: What are some of the different things that you found worked in helping your current businesses to grow?

We’ve seen more people wanting to be in Morrisville, and more people wanting to buy homes here. More people want to be in the village. That sense of pride in the community

Todd: In terms of the downtown…there’s a statute in Vermont we can do tax stabilization so what we’ve done is if you invest in the downtown and redevelop a building, say you build a new building, especially if it’s got commercial space in it, a mixed-use building, we stabilize your taxes. Let’s say your building is worth $200,000 buildings this year. You can build the fricking Taj Mahal and we’re not going to recognize the new value until five years later. So for five years your tax base for the town tax is off the $200,000. You can pump a million dollars or a ten million dollar addition…we don’t see that until year 6.

Will: So that gives businesses time to grow their own revenue before they get hit with the higher tax bill.

Todd: Exactly. And we’ve only done that in the core of the downtown. We haven’t done that…we’ve got a commercial core uptown that’s got grocery stores, Marshall’s, and Big Lots. We don’t do that there. We only do that in the historic downtown. 

Will: And what has all of this meant for the overall bottom line for the town? Are you starting to see growth in your overall revenue stream from this or is this too early for this to pay off?

Todd: Oh no. We’re growing at a rate that most towns in Vermont are not. A lot of towns, especially southern Vermont have declining grand lists and we’re growing by about 2% a year the last few years, which is really healthy. The thing about Vermont is Chittenden County does really well around Burlington. Everything else does not do well. We’ve done well. We’ve always grown our grand list, we’ve grown it by over 2% and we’ll do that again this year. So we are a success story. We’ve seen positive growth happening. We’ve also seen more people wanting to be in Morrisville, and more people wanting to buy homes here. More people want to be in the village. That sense of pride in the community along with what my coworker Tricia does for the downtown festivals. We have a new music pavilion down by the river in the park. It’s really been a community-building project. It’s more than just me. I’m the zoning piece, but the community piece that’s Tricia. We’ve been very successful in the last decade.

Up Next: The Morrisville Miracle Pt. Deux, Housing, Zoning and A Bike-Share Derail(leur?)ed

Thanks for reading, y’all! Stay tuned tomorrow for the next installment of my interview with Todd.

1. See this post for a cool clip of Local Motion’s work in Burlington, VT