Vermont Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security Director Joe Flynn has requested a Preliminary Damage Assessment team from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to determine if any county in the state qualifies for federal disaster aid.  If the assessment is approved by FEMA, the teams will be in-state early next week.

Governor Peter Shumlin is defending a controversial land deal in which he acquired his neighbor’s property for less than a half of its assessed value.

The governor said he was trying to help a neighbor who was in financial and legal trouble. And Shumlin said he reached out to his neighbor again this week and promised to improve the deal.

Dogged by headlines over the land deal, the governor spent the afternoon after a tour of flood ravaged northwest Vermont doing damage control with the media.

According to former Governor Jim Douglas, the Republican Party has two paths it can follow in the future.

One is to promote a narrow group of issues based on a strict ideological and inflexible point of view. The other is to become a “big tent” Party that allows its members to have different positions on a number of controversial social issues such as same sex marriage and abortion.

Douglas says it is now clear that the inflexible approach, as promoted by many local Tea Party groups, is not the path that the GOP should pursue in the future.

Last year, nearly a quarter of Vermont’s middle school students, and a higher percentage of secondary school students, were labeled “substantially below proficient” in a standardized science test given throughout the United States. 

School districts are adjusting lesson plans to bring up those scores. And in the Northeast Kingdom, there’s an unusual hands-on approach to learning about astronomy.

The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation has a plan for taking care of the White River and its tributaries, and it is now asking for public input before finalizing and implementing it.

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, more and more soldiers continue to come back home to Vermont.

For some, the search for employment and housing  is a major hurdle. A group called Leadership Upper Valley recently hosted a town meeting style event designed to help ease veterans’ re-entry.

In the audience at the elegant Quechee Club were many well-dressed community leaders who listened to a panel of military experts, including Major Christina Fanitzi.

Governor Peter Shumlin says that the new law  decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana should allow law enforcement to deal with is a more pressing drug problem in Vermont.

“I would argue, that if you want to talk about the biggest threat to our downtowns, to our quality of life, to a low crime rate, which we’ve always enjoyed in this state, to our family members being destroyed by an epidemic, it’s opiates," Shumlin said. "It’s heroin. It’s Oxycontin. It’s all of the issues that are driving crime in this state.”

Pete Hirschfeld of the Vermont Press Bureau talks with VPR's Bob Kinzel about the future of the Republican Party in Vermont and the steps to end the division on issues.