BARRE — When Gov. Phil Scott saw his hometown devastated by floods not once, but twice within a year, he had to do something.
Known for tackling the tangible in times of crisis, Scott did what other heads of state perhaps avoid: He got his hands dirty.
In July 2023, floodwaters filled Barre’s pocket-sized Dente Park with goopy river sediment. At the park’s center, a 23-foot-tall granite statue of a mustachioed, aproned man celebrates Barre’s legacy of skilled Italian-American stonecutters.
Scott, who spent decades in the construction industry, showed up with his excavator to clear out the muck. Fresh compost was laid, and new grass seed planted. One year later to the day, downtown Barre flooded again, and the park filled with sediment again. Scott found himself landscaping the grass patch once more.
If you ask his longtime best friend, Richard Wobby, Scott was always like this.
“He’s not other governors,” said Wobby, executive vice president of the Associated General Contractors of Vermont. “We had a flood, and who was up raking out the friggin’ yard in the middle? And it wasn’t for pictures, right? He doesn’t do his shit for pictures.”
Building back his hometown — and much of the rest of the state — from natural disaster is but one of a series of acute crises to which Scott has responded during his time in office, which has also spanned the Covid-19 pandemic. Vermonters, it appears, have appreciated his performance as crisis manager.
Scott frequently polls as the nation’s most popular governor and is widely expected to win a fifth two-year term in office on Election Day next week. But nearly eight years into his gubernatorial tenure, his political foes continue to ask how he’ll tackle the state’s longer-term challenges.
“What I really want to hear from him is just less finger-pointing and more plans,” said House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington. “Like, show me what your plan is for education. Show me what your plan is for health care. Show me what your plan is for housing.”
At a recent debate, the governor admitted that he hasn’t fulfilled the baseline goal of any administration. Asked whether the state was better off now than it was eight years ago, he pointed to the laws the Democratic Legislature had enacted over his objections and said, “After the last two years, the answer is no. We’re moving in the wrong direction.”
But the solution, the governor has argued on the campaign trail this year, is not for voters to show him the door, but keep him in office as a counterweight to Democratic political whims — and send him backup down the ballot.
‘Rule of the roost’
Wobby theorizes that many of his friend’s tendencies were born of his early upbringing.
The two have been close since attending middle school together in Barre, where Wobby lived in the city’s working-class North End and where Scott lived uphill in a nicer part of town. That didn’t matter to them, Wobby said. Fellow gearheads, they bonded over souping up their bikes and “taking motors and trying to squeak a little more out of them,” he said.
In many ways, the two are foils. Asked during a recent interview what he was like as a child, Scott said with a sly grin, “I wasn’t outspoken,” so softly that he had to repeat himself to be heard. In contrast, Wobby is brash and foul-mouthed. But, Wobby said, in a world where you maybe get five good friends for life, Scott is his number one.
Scott’s father lost both of his legs in World War II during D-Day. His dad used a wheelchair, but, according to Scott, he and his two brothers “didn’t think anything of it.”
His dad still drove, just using a car with hand-controlled gas and brakes. The family still went on annual family vacations to Florida but drove three days down and back instead of flying. And the Scotts still went out to eat in the days before the Americans with Disabilities Act. They just knew which local spots could be navigated by wheelchair.
“Everything seemed the same to us,” Scott said. “My parents made it very easy to be just normal.”
When Scott was 11, his father died due to his wartime injuries. Suddenly, Scott’s mom was a single mother to three young boys. When Scott was around 16 years old, his mother remarried and moved to Florida. According to Scott, he and his oldest brother had “no interest” in going: “Our roots were here.” So they stayed in Barre and “had the rule of the roost.”
Scott and his brother learned to be self-sufficient — getting jobs, cooking their own meals, doing their laundry. “That’s what made him what he is today,” Wobby said.
“At that early age, that defined Phil Scott — the responsibility, the ‘need’ versus ‘want,’ the moral code,” he continued. “And it’s too bad. Maybe he missed some fun. Maybe he missed something. I don’t think he did, and maybe he’s further ahead than the rest of us because of it.”
‘Mr. Civility’
In perhaps a surprising career turn for the soft-spoken boy from Barre, Scott, after working for two decades in the construction business, ended up in politics. He made his first run for public office in 2000, securing one of three seats in the Vermont Senate representing Washington County.
With 16 Democrats and 14 Republicans, the partisan divide in the Senate was much tighter than it is today. Scott made a point of finding allies across the aisle, and was mentored by the late Sen. Dick Mazza, a moderate Democrat who represented the Grand Isle district for nearly four decades.
Wobby, who used to help Scott manage his campaigns, said Scott was “very successful” in the chamber, thanks to his ability to forge friendships and build trust.
“If Phil tells you, ‘This is what’s going to happen,’ to the best of his knowledge, that is the truth, and that is what’s going to happen,” Wobby said. “You can write it down in granite.”
In 2010, Scott launched his first statewide campaign for lieutenant governor. Former Sen. Joe Benning, a Republican from Caledonia County, recalled putting his money on Scott’s primary opponent, Mark Snelling — not the “strangely quiet and subdued” Phil Scott.
“I’m used to politicians who are all full of themselves. And I don’t necessarily say that to disparage them, but they want to talk about themselves,” Benning said. “I did not get that impression from Phil.”
“It turns out, his approach, apparently people like it,” Benning said of Scott, who easily won both the primary and general election. “And it was very refreshing to see that.”
Along with Benning, Sen. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, also entered the Senate in 2011. As the new lieutenant governor, Scott presided over the chamber.
A largely ceremonial role, there isn’t much on which to grade a lieutenant governor, said Baruth, who now serves as president pro tempore of the Senate. “It’s hard to run afoul unless you’re not doing the job right,” he quipped. But he said he could rely on Scott to be a fair arbiter of the Senate’s rules.
“Behind his back, we used to call him Mr. Civility,” Baruth said. “He would come in and everything was about being civil, listening to other people, finding compromise.”
Even now, with a 23-year political career under his belt, Scott maintains that he’s “not really that political.”
“I know that sounds strange,” he said in an interview last month. Inside his state vehicle, a Ford F-150 Lightning, the hobbyist race-car driver’s preset radio stations are ordered as follows: CNN Radio, NASCAR Radio, then Fox News.
The governor’s demeanor stands in sharp contrast to that of the man with whom he shares a party affiliation and has shared three general election ballots: former President Donald Trump. Once again this fall, the two candidates are leading the Republican ticket in Vermont.
And for the second time, Scott has been forthright about his intention not to vote for Trump.
Asked in September what it is about the former president he dislikes so much, Scott was unequivocal: “His character. His integrity. He’s a manipulator, a con artist.”
“I want someone who inspires people, somebody to look up to,” he continued. “It’s all about character and integrity for me. Some of his policies, I think actually some of them could be good. But I just can’t get beyond the Trump persona.”
In a state in which the electorate delivered President Joe Biden his most decisive victory nationwide in 2020, former Gov. Howard Dean, a Democrat, said Scott’s persistent denouncement of the former president “helps him a lot.”
“I don’t think Phil does this manipulatively,” Dean said. “It’s not just because people don’t like Trump. It’s because we have a character in Vermont that we’re proud of … and I think Phil acknowledges that, and I think he gets a lot of points for that.”
‘Ruling by veto’
As governor, Scott is no longer the neutral referee that he was while presiding over the Senate chamber. Instead, he’s playing against an opposing team whose ranks have been growing. And, over the past two years, the competition has become fiercer.
Scott’s electoral victory margins and approval ratings have increased over the course of his four terms as governor. But so, too, has the number of Democrats in the Legislature.
Those dual realities created a pattern in the Vermont Statehouse: Democratic legislators would pass legislation only to see it vetoed by the top Republican. Often they could override it with a two-thirds vote — but sometimes not.
“It really was ruling by veto,” Baruth said.
There have been exceptions over the years — perhaps the most prominent being his decision to buck his party and embrace legislation limiting firearms access in 2018. Scott’s change of heart came after a Vermont teen was alleged to have been plotting a school shooting in Fair Haven.
Referring to the legislation, Wobby said, “That was the best thing for Vermont, whether people like it or not, whether gun owners want to hear it or not. And then he had the gonads to sit out there on the front steps and sign the goddamn thing.”
But Scott’s public signing ceremony alongside Democratic lawmakers in 2018 was the exception, not the rule. Scott has issued 52 vetoes to date — more than double the previous record set by Dean.
For the governor, the vetoes often fulfill his longstanding campaign promise to oppose increases to state taxes and fees. On this, he has been consistent: In an ad from his first gubernatorial run in 2016, Scott said, “I firmly believe that we can’t tax people any more. There isn’t that capacity.”
Asked at a VTDigger gubernatorial debate this month what specific policy priorities he hasn’t accomplished in eight years — and how he would tackle them in his next two — Scott kept it characteristically high-level, referring back to his historic campaign talking points: “grow the economy, make Vermont more affordable and protect the most vulnerable.”
Vermont, the governor claimed, was on a decent trajectory during his first six years in office: “We didn’t raise taxes and fees. We were keeping things in check. Things weren’t going exactly as I wanted, but at least we were reducing some of the burden on Vermonters.”
Over the past two years, however, things have “gone in the opposite direction,” he said.
It was two years ago, in the 2022 elections, that the political dynamic shifted in Montpelier. Democrats secured a historic majority in the House and held onto their decisive majority in the Senate.
For Democrats, it was go time: With rare exceptions, they could reliably clear the two-thirds vote threshold necessary to override gubernatorial vetoes.
And override, they did. Over the past two years, Scott vetoed a slew of legislation, from the 2023 budget to the Clean Heat Standard to this year’s hotly debated yield bill, to name a few. The Legislature responded with six successful veto override votes in 2023 and another six in 2024.
The result, according to Vermont’s lawmakers and Statehouse observers alike, was a noticeable increase in the political temperature in Montpelier this year.
“They used to just ignore us and sit in the Fifth Floor,” Baruth said this month, referring to the governor’s office in the neighboring Pavilion Building. “Now, they sit in the Fifth Floor and throw rocks at us the whole session.”
‘Less finger pointing and more plans’
Scott, in turn, scolds the Legislature for rejecting his ideas and has taken his grievances to the campaign trail in an apparent effort to break the Democrats’ supermajority.
“I’m not asking them to cross the aisle. I just asked them to meet me in the middle, and we can work together,” Scott said at VTDigger’s debate. “But the supermajority, with the power they have and the numbers they have, has made that impossible because they have no interest in working together. They just want to score political points.”
His Democratic opponent, Middlebury educator and consultant Esther Charlestin, then took a jab at Scott for diverting the blame to part-time legislators who are only in session for four to five months of the year. After all, she said, Scott is the “head of state.”
“Blaming them for where we are … when you’ve been in office for eight years — I struggle with that,” Charlestin said. “I believe in working with legislators from the beginning, showing up, being at the table, having those hard discussions, and not leading through veto.”
Accusations of failing to come to the table were perhaps loudest all around during last session’s debate over the annual yield bill, must-pass legislation that sets average property tax rates across the state in order to fund Vermont’s education system.
From early in the session, Scott maintained that the property tax increases projected to smack Vermonters were unacceptable, and he implored the Legislature to take dramatic action.
Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, who chairs the House’s Ways and Means Committee, was at the center of the debate.
“I think that we were all — taxpayers, educators, legislators, administration — in an impossible position because of the sort of essential structure of how we fund education,” she said this month. “Budgets were already warned and money needed to be raised. And so it’s really easy to say those tax rates were unacceptable — which they were — and it’s really hard to say, what are we actually going to do about it?”
In April, the Scott administration did bring forward a proposal to Kornheiser’s committee to try to buy down this year’s property tax hike by spreading out the cost over time and draining the state education fund reserves. Democratic lawmakers quickly shot down the proposal, warning that the move could potentially rock the state’s long-term financial health.
House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, insists that it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, she said this month that, in private, it isn’t all doom and gloom. In one-on-one meetings, she and the governor maintain a cordial relationship — “laughing together” and “checking in about how our weekends were” before pivoting to policy conversations, she said.
It gives Krowinski whiplash, then, to hear the governor’s “aggressive, negative tone” with the public, whether he’s on the campaign trail or at his press conference podium. “It’s just not helpful, and it’s starting to worry people,” Krowinski said.
Scott, she said, needs to come up with policy proposals himself.
“We can’t just start (the legislative session) in January and just be like, ‘Well, the Legislature is gonna have to figure that out.’ We have to work together,” she said.
‘There’s an opportunity here’
When Scott saw his hometown of Barre devastated by floods, he didn’t need any prodding to come up with a plan.
After the first flood in July 2023, the story relayed by his staff goes, the governor took a moment in between his administration’s crisis response to sketch out a reimagined neighborhood on the city’s North End. A historically working-class community composed of modest single-family homes and a handful of businesses, the North End has been inundated by the rising waters of the Winooski River’s Stevens Branch three times within the past 15 months.
Scott would eventually present his concept to a packed Barre City Council meeting in the fall of 2023. He envisioned the neighborhood’s most flood-prone homes being demolished to make way for a park — maybe even a sculpture garden to showcase the Granite City’s proud history of granite quarrying and carving. And in place of roughly 92 existing housing units also at risk of flooding, Scott proposed a mix of high-rise, mid-rise and single-family homes, totaling 225 housing units, to be constructed with flood resiliency in mind.
Nearly a year since that city council meeting, Scott stood atop a hill behind the former North Barre elementary school in September. The building is a relic of a time in which Barre had a booming population and hundreds more children enrolled in its schools. Looking over the hill’s “pretty majestic view” of the North End, Scott described the potential for the neighborhood he saw in his mind’s eye.
“I think this is one of those times when you’ve got to contemplate what the future is going to look like and make it better,” Scott said. “There’s an opportunity here with some federal buyouts and so forth, to both solve the housing problem and dress up the entrance into Barre … and show people what Barre is about.”
For now, the most realized form Scott’s plan has taken on is in renderings drawn up by the Montpelier architecture firm Black River Design and presented to the city council.
At the October 2023 meeting, Scott was optimistic that Congress would provide federal funding to help cover the bulk of the project’s cost. But those block grants haven’t come, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s buyout process is infamously arduous. In the meantime, the city took matters into its own hands and drafted its own flood resiliency plan.
‘That isn’t what drives me’
Unlike 37 other states, Vermont has no term limits for its governors. Assuming he wins in November, Scott will have committed to serving a cumulative 10 years as Vermont’s highest officeholder.
Asked at the VTDigger debate why one person — he — should remain in office for that long, Scott said there was “too much work left to do.”
“I just feel as though somebody had to step up,” he said. “I didn’t have a lot of faith in who was going to run next, at this point in time. So I just thought, we need some consistency, continuity, and we just need more balance in the Legislature in order to get what we need.”
It’s that consistency for which Scott is best known, Benning said — the governor maintaining “that image of a level-handed person on the tiller of the ship” as the state has navigated one crisis after another.
There was, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic. The Scott administration’s response to which was lauded by the likes of Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Then, over the past two years, the state has seen repeated, devastating floods from which Vermonters are still rebuilding. That in turn has exacerbated the state’s already severe housing crisis.
“At least in my lifetime, I don’t think any governor has faced the same level of issues that Phil Scott has,” Benning said. “You’ve got these issues that are just Herculean in nature. I think many governors throughout my lifetime have maybe faced one issue like that, maybe two. But he’s had one right after the other.”
Baruth gave Scott credit for his response to Covid and his support for the 2018 gun package, of which Baruth was a chief architect. But when it comes to policy, the Senate leader said that Scott, as governor, has made more of a habit of swatting down Democrats’ ideas than advancing his own.
He questioned: “What’s your legacy if you didn’t add stuff?”
“It seems like when he’s gone, people will remember the personality of Phil Scott, and they will remember him fondly,” Baruth said. “And no one will be able to mention a single policy program that came from him.”
Whether, in hindsight, Scott’s responses to the many crises of his tenure will measure up, Benning said the answer will “depend completely on who the observer is.” A staunch gun rights activist will likely “look at him as the big traitor,” he said. An advocate for Vermont’s homeless population will likely look back in 20 years and think, “he was a waste of time and didn’t do anything for anybody,” Benning said.
“But I think, by far and large, the bulk of the population is going to look back with respect to see that somebody did the very best they could under circumstances that were very trying and give him credit,” Benning said. “When you’re setting up the scales about how he did as a governor, I think that history will look very favorably upon him.”
Scott, for his part, said he doesn’t think about the legacy he’ll leave. “That isn’t what drives me,” he bristled when asked in September. “It’ll end up being what it is.”
“But I hope whenever I leave office — whenever that is — that we’ll leave it in better shape than when we found it,” Scott said. “And right now, we’re a bit challenged in that respect.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Phil Scott says Vermont is ‘moving in the wrong direction.’ Can he change course?.