Bill would create Vermont Office for Entrepreneurship to coordinate rural small-business services

A bill introduced to the Vermont Legislature would create an Office for Entrepreneurship within the Agency of Commerce and Community Development to coordinate small-business services across rural regions, the bill sponsor said Tuesday.

The sponsor said the proposal grew from experience running a coworking space and teaching small-business planning courses in a rural area where economic-development services are spread across large distances. "This bill you're gonna see a lot of me today," the bill sponsor said, describing the proposal as a reintroduction of one piece of a prior omnibus entrepreneurship bill.

The sponsor argued current supports such as the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) and related federal programs are constrained by federal performance mandates that emphasize metrics such as jobs created and jobs saved. The sponsor said that, under those mandates, "you're the only things you care about are jobs created and jobs saved." They also said they were required to spend about $200,000 in grant funds for programming under prior responsibilities.

Committee members pressed for differences between the new office and existing providers. One committee member asked, "So why would this be different or better than just giving more money to the small business development center?" The sponsor replied that an Office for Entrepreneurship would allow the state to define success for Vermont and better coordinate local actors that are often "stretched super thin" and do not always know one another.

The sponsor said Vermont lacks a recent statewide economic-development plan, noting, "we haven't had a statewide economic development plan since the Shumlin administration." They described the office as intended to focus on smaller-scale entrepreneurs — home-based food businesses, photography, and other microbusinesses — that may not be on the radar of larger export- or job-focused programs.

On placement and coordination, the sponsor said the office would be housed at ACCD and that staff had begun outreach to ACCD leadership. There was no formal motion, vote, or timeline recorded in the transcript segment provided.

The bill sponsor said the proposal was reintroduced as a single piece from a prior omnibus entrepreneurship package and described the bill as a first step toward right-to-start and entrepreneurship-network efforts the sponsor has engaged with nationally.

No formal committee action, referral, or vote on the bill was recorded in the provided transcript; next procedural steps were not specified.