The Federal Emergency Management Agency will not provide money to help towns in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom recover from major flooding in 2025, the agency told state officials in a Feb. 7 letter.
On July 10, 2025, torrential rain and flash flooding caused major damage to homes, roads, bridges and other public infrastructure in Sutton, Vt., Burke, Vt., Sheffield, Vt., Wheelock, Vt., Newark, Vt., and East Haven, Vt. In August, Gov. Phil Scott requested a Major Disaster Declaration from FEMA, estimating the damage at $1.85 million, which exceeded the state’s $1.2 million threshold for a disaster declaration.
“The impacts of this storm, in conjunction with previous storms, exceed the resources of the State of Vermont,” he wrote. Vermont has experienced catastrophic flooding in each of the past three years.
The Trump Administration denied the request in October. The state appealed that denial in November. The Feb. 7 response was a final rejection of that appeal.
Without FEMA money, officials in the affected towns say they will struggle to pay for the repairs they’ve already made to essential infrastructure. In some cases, towns may need to raise taxes. As flooding becomes more frequent and extreme in Vermont, the FEMA denial raises the specter of Vermont towns being left to pay overwhelming recovery costs without the considerable support that the federal government has provided in years past.
Jim Sullivan, Burke’s town administrator, said the denial has caused him to worry both about the town’s current financial position and the next storm.
“After you see it three years in a row, you really have to be almost thinking that it is going to happen, not that it may happen,” he said.
FEMA’s letter said that, after federal officials reviewed the appeal letter, “it has been determined that supplemental federal assistance under the Stafford Act is not warranted. Therefore, I must inform you that your appeal for a major disaster declaration is denied.” FEMA provided no other reason for the denial.
A disaster declaration would have allowed towns to be reimbursed for up to 75% of the cost to repair damage to their public infrastructure.
Scott, in his appeal letter to FEMA, said the 2025 flooding in Caledonia County “has brought communities like Sutton, Burke, Sheffield, and Wheelock to the brink of financial disaster.”
Sutton sustained the most damage from the storm at $1.4 million, a figure that more than doubled the town’s annual highway budget. Town Clerk Patricia McClure told VtDigger in January that the town would need to take out a low-interest loan to pay for the repairs unless it obtained the FEMA funding.
“We would be looking at a five-year loan at 1.3%, and that’s gonna significantly raise our taxes,” McClure said at the time. She was not immediately available to comment on Monday.
“We are a very small town with a lot of farmers and elderly that would have a hard time with this extra expense in the budget,” Sutton town officials wrote in a note that was included in Scott’s November appeal letter.
Sutton has been hit by flooding three years in a row.
Burke, which has also been hit by repeated major flooding, sustained roughly $200,000 in damage in 2025, Sullivan said. He expected FEMA’s denial, he said on Monday.
“I felt like, given the political temperature and the way things have been, that we weren’t very likely to get that,” he said.
Sullivan is now looking for grants to complete road repairs the town hasn’t been able to fund yet. More broadly, the town will need to tighten its belt; it won’t be able to upgrade a playground and make other road repairs, he said.
“Those things are just not going to be able to get done,” he said. “So I think a lot of us smaller towns are going to have to look at our projects and reassess whether we can actually afford to do it.”
Eric Forand, director of Vermont Emergency Management, said “there are no further options” for the towns to get money from FEMA for the July 2025 storm.
While the municipalities may be able to apply for grants from the Vermont Agency of Transportation or other state agencies, “at this point, there’s no real funding from the state, specifically through VEM, that has any ability to support after these disasters,” Forand said.
Asked whether Vermont Emergency Management is concerned that FEMA could deny aid for future floods, Forand said state officials are “not speculating.”
“We’re trying to work with FEMA to get some clarification on what that might mean at this point,” Forand said. “But it’s a little bit opaque right now. We don’t have a lot of information coming from the federal government.”
The state’s declaration requests have been denied in the past, he said, but it wasn’t the norm.
“We’re just trying to figure out what the new normal is,” he said.
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.