MONTPELIER — Vermont officials are building a case to appeal President Donald Trump’s rejection of a state request for federal disaster aid that would help a number of Caledonia and Essex county towns foot the bills from major flooding this past July.

Gov. Phil Scott made the request for a major disaster declaration in August. If approved, it would have unlocked Federal Emergency Management Agency funding to help municipalities cover the costs of repairing critical infrastructure and starting new projects to halt the risk of future flooding, among other possible expenses.

The state’s application cited about $1.8 million in damages, which is more than the $1.2 million threshold states need to meet to qualify for a federal disaster declaration.

July’s flooding marked the third year in a row that Vermont communities suffered damage from major storms. The state successfully obtained disaster declarations from the White House after flooding in 2023 and 2024. Both those years, it also applied for — and received — funding for individual assistance from FEMA. For 2025, Gov. Scott did not request individual assistance, which has different damage cost requirements.

On Thursday, Doug Farnham, Vermont’s chief recovery officer, told legislators the state has since determined the actual cost of July’s damage could be closer to $4 million, or about twice that earlier estimate. That’s largely due to greater than expected costs for rebuilding infrastructure in the Caledonia County town of Sutton, he said.

Sutton was seemingly the hardest hit of any town by this summer’s flooding, which came after the town spent millions of dollars recovering from the flooding in the two years before.

Farnham told the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee that state officials had been working with local leaders on how to bolster the state’s case in an appeal — “essentially, frame our argument a little bit more strongly,” he said.

Trump rejected Vermont’s application for FEMA assistance in late October. Vermont has until Nov. 21 to decide whether it will appeal that decision, according to Farnham.

Gov. Scott, who ultimately has to make that call, told reporters at a press conference later Thursday that he initially was not planning to push back on the White House’s denial, but suggested the information about higher costs had changed his mind.

“We are working on something right now to appeal the decision based on the increased dollar amount,” the governor said.

Trump’s decision to reject Vermont’s aid request came on the same day he denied similar asks from other largely Democratic states including Illinois and Maryland. At the same time, he approved declarations for the largely Republican states of Alaska, Nebraska and North Dakota. He also approved a request from the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota.

The decision in Maryland was a rejection of an appeal, the same mechanism Vermont is now considering. Trump wrote on social media the same day that he had “won BIG” in Alaska in the last three presidential elections, according to the Associated Press.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson called the federal government’s response “non-political” in a response to VTDigger last month. The spokesperson said the federal government had found that the damage in Vermont “was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments to recover.”

Also during Thursday’s Joint Fiscal Committee hearing, legislators questioned Farnham over reporting last month in Grist that described shortcomings in how the state used and oversaw a $2.9 million grant to help victims of the state’s 2024 flooding navigate FEMA applications and access other resources.

The story, which was also published in VTDigger, described how that work faced high upfront costs and how a substantial amount of the grant money was used to pay bills from a multinational consulting company, Guidehouse.

“How much money was — maybe, wasted isn’t the right word — was an unnecessary use of funds before this got figured out?” asked Rep. Robin Scheu, D-Middlebury, who chairs the state budget-writing House Appropriations Committee.

“Zero dollars, representative,” Farnham replied. “It was all necessary administrative work. It was building the systems, training everyone, putting everything together.”

Farnham added that he did not dispute facts in the story but contended that its narrative was “framed as negatively as you could” toward the state.

This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.

RANDOLPH — Vermont’s state chapter of the Democratic Party has a new leader — and he’s taking the helm at a challenging moment for the party in Vermont and across the country. 

Lachlan Francis, a political consultant from Westminster and former chair of the Windham County Democratic committee, was elected state party chair on Saturday at Vermont Democrats’ biennial reorganization meeting. Francis beat out one other candidate for the job — Justin Willeau of Vershire, the former secretary of Orange County’s Democratic committee and owner of a coffee business — by 33 votes to 12.

The two candidates were vying to succeed outgoing party chair Jim Ramsey, who’d held the job on an interim basis since February but opted not to seek it again. Ramsey took on the role with less than a full, two-year term left after former chair David Glidden resigned.

Also on Saturday, the party reelected its current vice chair — Amanda Gustin of Barre City — to another two-year term, as well as a slate of other statewide officers who oversee the party’s electoral strategy and manage its finances.

Only the race for chair was contested. The roughly four dozen people who voted in Saturday’s election, held on the Vermont State University campus in Randolph, were largely members of county Democratic committees from across the state. 

Francis steps into the job a week after Vermont’s Republican Party also elected a slate of top officers for the next two years. A key focus for Democrats — who are likely to maintain control in the 2026 election of both the state House and Senate — will be winning back seats the party lost in 2024. That’s when the state GOP flipped a historic number of seats in both chambers, dismantling powerful Democratic supermajorities.

Many of those races were colored by voters’ concerns over the cost of living and how safe they feel in their communities. The extent of Democrats’ success in 2026 will hinge on the party’s ability to find messages that resonate with many of the voters who spurned its candidates — some of them incumbents — in races a year ago. 

Meanwhile, at the national level, Democrats are grappling with what flavor of left-wing politics could appeal to the most voters as they attempt to win back control of both houses of Congress next year and set the stage for a White House win in 2028. 

The national party has also been divided in recent days over decisions by some members of its Congressional caucuses to break ranks and join most Republicans on a spending deal that ended the federal government shutdown, but without a guaranteed extension of enhanced health insurance tax credits. (All three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation voted against the measure.)

“Obviously, we’ve got a lot on our plate — to say the least,” Francis said Saturday in brief remarks after the results of the vote were announced. He added in a press release issued later Saturday that, as chair, he would “strengthen our grassroots infrastructure across the state, support candidates who put people first, and ensure that we make Democratic values winning values in every election, in every community.”

Francis previously managed now-U.S. Rep. Becca Balint’s first campaign for Vermont state Senate and worked on one of former Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan’s campaigns for that office. More recently, he has worked as a researcher at Global Strategy Group, a national Democratic polling firm based in New York City.

At age 29, Francis also brings more youth to Vermont Democrats’ ranks. His election Saturday makes him one of the youngest state Democratic Party chairs in the country, according to May Hanlon, the Vermont Democrats’ executive director. Hanlon herself is 26, which makes her the youngest Democrat in her role in the country, she said. 

To be sure, much of the state GOP’s success in last year’s election was thanks to campaigning by Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who continues to be among the country’s most popular governors. In recent polling Scott also remains popular with Vermont Democratic voters who have a propensity to split their tickets on Election Day. 

A major question facing the state Democratic Party in the first half of 2026 is whether it will run a challenger to Scott, assuming he runs for reelection, who would make for substantial competition. In the last two election cycles, Scott trounced his Democratic opponents, both of whom had relatively little name recognition across the state. 

Two state Democratic heavyweights — Treasurer Mike Pieciak and Attorney General Charity Clark — have been rumored to be eyeing the Fifth Floor job though have not publicly said yet whether they’re running.

Both Pieciak and the state party have been especially critical of many of Scott’s responses to actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration in recent months.

Willeau, in his pitch to the room on Saturday, suggested the party take a less offensive stance against Scott — whom he called “our favorite punching bag” — because of the five-term governor’s popularity with Democratic voters.

“I think the question is, does this committee represent Democratic voters the way they actually vote?” he asked. “And, if it doesn’t — how well do we know ourselves?”

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