Burlington Is Poised to Elect Newbies to the Vermont House

On the same night that Amanda Janoo clinched the Democratic nomination for governor, her communications director, Jeffrey Peterson, cruised to victory in a primary for a state House seat representing Burlington.

He’s a 28-year-old political strategist who has never held elected office and is a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Come January, Peterson will likely be one of at least six new Burlington representatives sworn in to serve in the legislature. The city boasts 11 total seats in the House.

Longtime Democratic leaders from the Queen City, House Speaker Jill Krowinski and Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth (D/P Chittenden-Central), have opted not to seek reelection. Instead, a mix of socialists, former Burlington City Council members and office seekers with scant political track records have stepped into the void — and will be called upon to lobby for Burlington at a particularly delicate time. The city’s requests for more state help with issues of homelessness and public safety have been met by a shrug from Republican Gov. Phil Scott.

Burlington is all but certain to enter the next legislative session with diminished political clout, regardless of who wins in the general election. 

“We are fortunate that there are 11 of us, and that good fortune can’t be squandered on doing anything but supporting Burlington,” said Karen Paul, a former president of the Burlington City Council who is running unopposed for a South End district seat in the House. “It’s incumbent upon us to figure it out and do the best we can, and Burlington is going to need all of us working in the same direction.”

For years, Burlington was represented in the upper echelons of the Statehouse. Baruth was elected president pro tempore of the Senate in 2023, and Krowinski has been House speaker since 2021. Baruth was widely lauded for using his perch to secure $16 million in state PCB cleanup funds to defray the cost of Burlington’s new high school. Krowinski pointed to funding for a new Burlington day shelter and efforts to overhaul the state’s homelessness response system as recent benefits she sought for the Queen City. 

Also calling it quits: Rep. Kate Logan (P/D-Burlington), who served four years and chaired the House’s Progressive caucus; and Tiffany Bluemle, a Democratic Burlington rep since 2021 and a ranking member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which writes the state budget.

That leaves Reps. Brian Cina, a Progressive/Democrat, and Democrat Carol Ode as the two longest-serving Queen City representatives. Both won election in 2016.

Ode has the most prestigious committee assignment of any of the five Burlington incumbents who are running for reelection: House Ways and Means, which makes pivotal decisions around spending and taxation. In advocating for Burlington’s needs, Ode proposes pitching the city’s problems as Vermont’s. She said that statewide, there’s a need for more money to address homelessness, substance-use disorder and mental health.

“It’s not Burlington versus the state,” Ode said. “Vermont’s not alone among states, and Burlington is not alone among urban areas or cities facing all of the same problems.”

Candidates interviewed by Seven Days agreed in general that affordability, health care access, homelessness and the opioid crisis are major issues. However, three Democratic Socialist candidates — Peterson, Trang Do and Adam Franz — said they are eager to pursue major systemic change, such as universal primary care.

Logan said having new blood at the Statehouse will be a boon for Burlington. Elected officials in leadership roles have to keep the entire state in mind, she said.

“The speaker of the House and the Senate pro tem have to be working on bringing people together from every corner of the state to get them into agreement,” she said, “and they’re not there to represent their community.”

Queen City voters will recognize some of the new House candidates. Aside from Paul, who seeks an open South End seat, two other former city councilors are on the ballot: Ali Dieng, a Democrat, and independent Dave Hartnett, both of whom will compete with Ode for two seats in the New North End.  

Dieng served as an independent on the council and was often a swing vote on issues that divided the council’s Democrats and Progressives. He ran unsuccessfully for Burlington mayor in 2021. Earlier this year, Burlington Democrats passed over Dieng when he raised his hand as a potential candidate to replace Bob Hooper, a Democrat who resigned from the House amid allegations of sexual harassment.

In an interview, Dieng noted that he caucused with council Democrats and said he would be a team player in Montpelier.

“I think we need to organize the Burlington legislators and have a consistent communication and meetings with the mayor and put out a plan about how we’ll make sure that the resources of the state are helping the city solve our problems,” Dieng said. 

Asked what the departure of legislative leaders could mean for a city that has grappled for years with public safety issues, Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, a former state rep, declined to comment. City Council President Ben Traverse (D-Ward 5) expressed optimism.

“I do think it is hard to lose some of the really big voices that we’ve had in Montpelier the last few years. That said, I’m excited by many of the new candidates that are running,” he said, referencing Dieng and Paul in particular. “I think that there’s a lot of importance in bringing fresh energy and new perspectives to the table.”

Of course that doesn’t happen right away. Newcomers in the Statehouse typically lack the political clout necessary to score wins for their hometowns. And they don’t often get the choicest committee assignments, which are key to getting a say on the big issues.

“Without seniority, legislators don’t have as much success in pushing legislation through and getting what they want done,” said Bert Johnson, a professor of political science at Middlebury College.

Just recruiting enough candidates for the 11 House seats has been a struggle for Burlington Democrats. Two candidates, Ben Boseley and Do, won their primary elections through write-in campaigns after no Democrats submitted signatures to get on the ballot in their districts. In another race in which only one Democrat, Franz, was on the primary ballot in a two-seat district, the Democratic party subsequently nominated Elizabeth Allen-Pennebaker to run. Allen-Pennebaker was the lone person to step forward.

“I offered myself as the backup of the backup of the backup,” she said in an interview. “If there is anybody else, I would defer to them, and there was nobody.”

She’ll face Franz and Aaliyah Davila, a University of Vermont student who was nominated by Republicans.

Allen-Pennebaker was initially a vocal opponent of a “just cause” eviction charter change that Burlington voters passed in 2021. The measure would require landlords to have a reason to evict a tenant, and, at the time, Allen-Pennebaker owned two properties. She worried the effort would make it difficult for her to evict problem tenants.

In the end, the legislature approved the charter change, but Gov. Phil Scott vetoed it in 2022.

In an interview last week, Allen-Pennebaker said she was remorseful about participating in the campaign and had changed her opinion on the policy. In the years since, she sold one property and is planning to donate space in another to local nonprofits in an effort to be a “landlord for good,” she said.

Allen-Pennebaker has no political experience and described herself as an “Austrian-style social democrat,” not a democratic socialist. She’s a former Champlain College professor who works as a cannabis industry consultant. She takes inspiration from the Social Democratic Party of Vienna, which supports public housing, subsidized construction and capped rental costs. She believes Burlington, and Vermont more broadly, needs to embrace these ideas to thrive.

If elected, the socialists in the mix may have a difficult time finding common cause with traditional Democrats in Burlington, let alone the more conservative members of the House. But Franz and Do said they gained some political experience organizing a union at local grocer Healthy Living. The socialists believe, particularly after Janoo’s win, that they are at the vanguard of rapid change to the political landscape. 

“I’m a proud socialist, but most people in the world are not self-identified socialists,” Franz said. “If somebody disagrees with me on nine out of 10 issues, but we have that one thing that we can work on together, I would love to work with them on that.”

Peterson, meanwhile, has pitched himself as a young but experienced political strategist. He cut his teeth working in Washington, D.C., for longtime former senator Patrick Leahy before leading local nonprofits and eventually landing with Janoo.

Peterson calls himself a “fusion candidate” who wants to bridge the gap between Progressives and Democrats.

“I think people are really ready to get past the tired conversation of party politics and get to a working class-centered politics,” Peterson said. “I think that has, frankly, tripartisan appeal, and that’s definitely the coalition that I want to help build and be a part of.”

Like Peterson, Do grew up in Vermont; her family emigrated from Vietnam when she was a child. She graduated from the University of Vermont and now lives in Burlington’s Old North End. Both Logan and Franz helped recruit Do to run her last-minute write-in campaign, and she’s made housing affordability and “tax fairness” central parts of her platform.

Regardless of who is elected, Johnson, the political science professor, said cohesion among Burlington lawmakers will be key. He pointed to studies that have backed that up.

“If every representative from the city agrees on what should be done, then the legislature is much more likely to do that,” he said. ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “Newbie Wave | At the Statehouse, some fresh faces from Burlington will replace ranking leaders after this fall’s election”

This article appears in Performing Arts Preview • 2026.

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