Preserving a Sense of Place

A family foundation in Vermont helps towns plan for future without erasing the past

The Orton family is in the business of preserving links to the past. Lyman Orton, the 62-year-old chairman

of the Vermont Country Store, oversees the bustling multimillion-dollar retail operation that grew out of a plank-floored general store his father, Vrest Orton, opened 58 years ago in tiny Weston, Vt. With its vintage candy counter and artfully jumbled collection of homespun wares and past-era remedies, the still-flourishing operation is a nostalgic nod to country stores of yore.

However, the bulk of the business doesn’t transpire across a worn, wooden countertop, but through more modern means: mail-order catalogs and the Internet, where millions gain access to the old-school inventory. Mr. Orton’s three sons now sit on the board, and the company employs some 600 workers. The private company does not reveal financial data, but Catalog Age magazine put the Vermont Country Store’s worth at $65-million in 2000.

Mr. Orton’s business approach is mirrored in his philanthropy. Through his family foundation here, Mr. Orton is embracing modern technology as a way to help cities and counties around the country plan their futures — without wiping out their heritage and sense of place.

The Orton Family Foundation was established in Weston in 1995 with an initial cash outlay of “just a few hundred thousand dollars,” according to Mr. Orton. Operations moved to the larger town of Rutland in 1999. It is an operating foundation, meaning it largely develops its own services and programs rather than providing grants to others. Nine years and some $15-million after its start, the foundation’s principal offerings include:

• A suite of software programs the foundation developed, called CommunityViz, that use 3-D graphics and data analysis to help community planners visualize different scenarios for growth and gauge their impact. It has been used in a variety of communities, from rural farm towns to Los Angeles neighborhoods.
• A Community Video program that teaches local leaders how to create documentaries on their city or town’s history, current concerns, and desires for the future.
• A Community Mapping program aimed at getting school-age children to use global-positioning and geographic-information-systems technology to create community maps to highlight specific local issues or concerns. Elementary students in rural Colorado, for example, use the program to map roadkills along a local highway. The goal of the project — dubbed Critter Control — is to help local officials identify where animal-crossing signs are needed.

The Orton foundation has a $6-million endowment, but the Orton family channels profits from the Vermont Country Store to provide the bulk of the organization’s $3-million annual operating budget. The funds are allocated in four-year increments of $12-million, an amount foundations officials say should remain steady.

Not Taking Sides

With its headquarters here in Rutland’s Merchant’s Row, a collection of historic downtown commercial buildings, the foundation’s offices also face a Wal-Mart, the retailer that for many anti-growth activists has come to symbolize the antithesis of small, local businesses. Foundation officials say the setting suits the organization, which is not in the business of promoting one type of development over another.

“Change and development don’t have to be bad things — don’t have to be threatening or undermine environmental, economic, and social values,” says the foundation’s chief executive officer, William Shutkin.

The Vermont Forum on Sprawl, in Burlington, which the foundation organized in 1997 and spun off into a separate nonprofit organization in 2001, takes a more active role in advocating specific forms of commercial and residential development.

Mr. Orton’s vision for the operating foundation grew out of the decades he spent as a volunteer on the Weston planning commission.

“I didn’t have a clue what I was doing,” Mr. Orton says of the “battles” he and his fellow citizen planners fought while grappling with zoning issues, development proposals, and the like. He knew the land-use decisions the commission made would have a major impact on generations to come, and that other planners across the Green Mountain State and beyond were struggling to prepare their small communities for the future.

A test came in the 1980s, which Mr. Orton calls a “boom time in Vermont,” when ski resorts expanded, businesses sprouted along roadsides, and housing developments sprung up on pristine hilltops.

“The way growth was unfolding didn’t seem at all the way the people in the communities had envisioned it,” says Mr. Orton, a seventh-generation Vermonter who had become increasingly concerned about the future of the state’s green landscapes and quaint towns. “Sprawl was coming to Vermont.”

Migration to Rural Areas

Sprawl is an issue many local leaders increasingly face, says Mr. Orton.

For most of the past 75 years, the general trend was for rural areas to lose population as residents sought better economic prospects in urban areas. But this migration pattern appears to be reversing. Most rural areas in the United States are now growing at the fastest rate in more than 20 years, reports Renewing the Countryside, a nonprofit group in Minneapolis that helps people relocate from metropolitan areas.

“Small communities across the country are growing because there’s an exodus from major cities,” says Allen Frischkorn Jr., executive director of the National Center for Small Communities, in Washington. “People want a more relaxed lifestyle or are tired of pollution, congestion, or high taxes.”

Mr. Frischkorn sees the trend continuing, especially as more baby boomers reach retirement age and seek out small-town life. Technology plays a role in rural growth as well. “With the Internet, computers, and FedEx, you can work just about anywhere in the country now in certain kinds of jobs,” Mr. Frischkorn says.

From the foundation’s perspective, this population shift is a cause for concern.

“Small communities are the most vulnerable to rapid change and aren’t equipped to manage it,” Mr. Shutkin says. “Larger communities, just by definition, have more resources.”

Mr. Orton says he wanted to do something to help those local planners who lacked the information they needed to make sound decisions about future growth and development. But “there was no organization we could just give money to that was doing these things,” Mr. Orton says. “So we had to do it ourselves, creating an operating foundation to try and create tools and solutions that the for-profit community wouldn’t do because it wasn’t profitable.”

Mr. Orton hired consultants and developers to design software that uses computer graphics and real-time computation to help local planners evaluate their options. The software, CommunityViz, made its debut in 2001. To date, the foundation has put about $10-million into the effort, and it employs about 20 people to work on it in offices in Boulder, Colo., not far from where Mr. Orton keeps a second home.

Using maps of a given geographic area, the software system displays 3-D development models, images of buildings whose size and number can be manipulated, to show what a development project would look like.

The program’s analytical component, meanwhile, estimates the development’s environmental, social, and economic impact (calculating an array of things such as tax revenue, infrastructure costs, increases in traffic, habitat loss, and the number of new school-age children). By changing the size or pattern of the development model, the program recalculates the impact accordingly.

Douglas Walker, CommunityViz’s managing director, says the program uses the “common language of visualization” to cut through the “tower of Babel” environment that can exist when citizens sit down with professional planners and developers.

‘Now I Understand’

Southern Minnesota’s Eureka Township was an early CommunityViz user, courtesy of the land-conservation group 1000 Friends of Minnesota, which received a free, early-release version of the software several years ago.

The agricultural town, which has a population of 1,400, is 25 miles from the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, and local leaders sought to create a plan to manage development in anticipation of suburban encroachment.

“It’s hard to visualize when looking at a township that’s largely undeveloped land what it really means to have one house every acre or one house every third of an acre,” says Mike Greco, who chaired a Eureka committee that was asked to develop a growth plan. “CommunityViz made it something you could see, so that nontechnical people could say, ‘Ok, now I understand what that development pattern would look like in the landscape.’”

Brian Culpepper, a specialist in geographic information systems at the University of Arkansas who evaluates software for a U.S. Department of Agriculture program that provides planning assistance to rural communities, says there are a number of planning software systems on the market, “but none are as complete as Community Viz.”

“They’ve compiled the ability to build scenarios and visualize them in one package, which was something you couldn’t find when the product was released,” he says. “The product is in some ways like a video game, such as SimCity, where you can propose ideas or options and then instantly get feedback.”

Mr. Culpepper adds that CommunityViz “has no direct competition.”

Today CommunityViz costs between $2,500 and $5,000, depending on the program options selected. Local nonprofit groups and government offices often work together to pay for the program. CommunityViz sales contribute roughly $1-million a year to the foundation’s bottom line, but they don’t begin to cover development costs of the software, officials say.

“If CommunityViz was going to be profitable, I’m sure Bill Gates would have figured it out and made it himself by now,” Mr. Orton says.

Hometown Movies

Another key to successful local planning, the Orton Foundation has come to realize, is getting residents engaged in the process. And one way to do that, the foundation says, is to make a hometown documentary.

Mr. Orton’s son Cabot, who has produced or directed a number films that have appeared on public television and at film festivals, was the driving force behind the foundation’s video program. He was a co-author of the manual “Lights, Camera, Community Video,” which includes a DVD of sample videos that the foundation sells for $40. A teachers’ guide to the program, designed to help high schools produce videos, is available for $20. More than 50 localities have put their town’s tale on screen through the program.

Larry Nielsen, the city manager in Bangor, Mich., says he has seen the benefits of a local film project after running into difficulties getting residents to discuss the town’s past, present, and future through other means. The weekend and evening planning and “envisioning” meetings he had organized has beensparsely attended.

In 1999, Bangor leaders responded to an Orton Foundation request seeking six towns to test its new Community Video Program. With $3,000 and a draft how-to manual from Orton, and another $5,500 raised locally, the town produced a 30-minute documentary on Bangor.

“It was just terrific,” Mr. Nielsen says. “People responded so well to the video camera that we were able to capture their emotions, dreams, and love for the community. The video became a nice benchmark for us and we visit it all the time as a planning document.”

Before formally introducing the program in 2001, Orton provided $3,000 apiece, plus help with video production, to five other towns seeking videos.

Producing a video, however, can be an expensive proposition. After factoring in camera equipment and supplies, the videos can cost from $500 to more than $10,000 to produce. The Orton program includes fund-raising advice, and the foundation sometimes provides its own video-production grants.

Last winter the foundation formed a partnership with the Colorado Development Council to help six Colorado towns make videos, and will provide production help worth up to $1,500 for each video.

Key Public-Policy Issue

As the foundation considers its own growth strategy for the coming years, Mr. Orton plans to draw on the strengths of the foundation’s new executive director. Mr. Shutkin joined the foundation in April, having previously worked as a lawyer, author, part-time professor, and environmentalist. He founded and led two Boston-area nonprofit groups: New Ecology, which promotes environmentally friendly urban development, and Alternatives for Community and Environment, an environmental advocacy group. His 2000 book, The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, met with acclaim.

Mr. Shutkin, a part-time Vermonter who has had a house here for six years, says he believes the foundation “is dealing with one of the most important public-policy issues of our time.” He adds: “Undergirding these land-use debates are issues that cut to the core of our sustainability as a society, our energy policies, our national security, our economy.”

Mr. Shutkin says he will encourage the Orton Foundation to make greater use of the Internet, including offering its community-planning software online. He also wants to add new elements to the software, such as a “wind tool” that could help cities and towns weigh the pros and cons of wind-turbine electrical generators as an alternate source of energy.

“Another new programmatic direction for us is seeing how the foundation can play more of a convener role,” Mr. Shutkin says. “We want to create learning networks and promote innovative and entrepreneurial thinkers and doers in the fields of planning and sustainable development.”

Toward that aim, he envisions creating an “unsung hero” award for citizen planners who have successfully “navigated through difficult land-use politics.”

When Mr. Orton views the future, meanwhile, he contemplates what he doesn’t want to see.

“The foundation promotes healthy change and growth,” he says. “We don’t want to have citizens feel like Rip Van Winkle waking up 20 years later, looking at their town, and going, ‘What happened? Where did it go?’”

THE ORTON FAMILY FOUNDATION

History: Created as a private, operating foundation in 1995 by Lyman Orton to help small U.S. cities and towns cope with economic, social, and environmental changes. The foundation receives the bulk of its funds from the profits of the Orton family business, the Vermont Country Store.

Mission: To develop tools and programs to help local officials make decisions about land-use planning and to encourage members of the public to participate in the planning process.

Endowment: $6-million

Budget: The foundation’s annual budget is around $3-million. The Orton family has given the foundation $15-million since its inception.

Programs: The foundation’s CommunityViz software package uses graphics and data analysis to help local planners visualize development scenarios and examine the environmental and economic impact of each. Through its Community Video program, the foundation helps show local officials how to create video documentaries detailing a region’s local history, attributes, and aspirations for the future. The foundation’s community-mapping program is used by school-age children to create maps related to local resources or concerns.

Key officials: William Shutkin, president; William Roper, director of programs; Lyman Orton, founder and board chair

Address: 128 Merchant’s Row, Second Floor, Rutland, Vt. 05701; (802) 773-6336

Web site: http://www.orton.org