October 27, 2026 | By Lee Kahrs | Correspondent
Democrats Theresa Wood and Katarina Lisaius are running unopposed in this election season for the Washington-Chittenden House district’s two seats that represent Waterbury, Bolton, Huntington and Buel’s Gore. Photo by Gordon Miller
One candidate is a veteran of the Vermont House entering her final term.
The other is a political rookie just beginning her career.
Together, Democrats Theresa Wood and Katarina Lisaius are running unopposed in this election season for the Washington-Chittenden House district’s two seats that represent Waterbury, Bolton, Huntington and Buel’s Gore.
For Wood, this is her sixth time running as an incumbent. Lisaius is making her first run for office, seizing the opportunity after longtime state Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, announced in April that he would not seek another term after what will be 18 years in the House.
The two candidates were the only contenders in the August primary, and no challengers emerged for the General Election happening on Nov. 3. So for the past several months, Wood and Lisaius have been making the rounds, talking to voters across the district, from farmers’ markets and senior centers to parades and candidate forums, often together. Their campaigning has been centered on meeting people and hearing what’s on voters’ minds.
They recently took time to talk about what they’re hearing and what they see ahead as priorities for the upcoming legislative session that begins in January.
Rep. Theresa Wood: One more term
“Thirteen years is enough, I think.”
So says Wood, who is telling constituents that this will be her last time running for representative in the Washington-Chittenden House district. Two years from now, she will be leaving some big shoes to fill.
Wood, 79, started her legislative career in 2015 after she was appointed by Gov. Peter Shumlin to replace Rep. Rebecca Ellis, another Waterbury Democrat, who resigned to take a job with the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Wood rose through the ranks serving on the House Corrections & and Institutions Committee, later moving to House Human Services that she now chairs. She also serves on the Joint Fiscal Committee, the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee and the Joint Legislative Management Committee. After Tropical Storm Irene, she served on the Special Committee of Capitol Complex Flood Recovery.
Closer to home in the wake of Irene that hit hard in Waterbury, Wood chaired ReBuild Waterbury, a short-term nonprofit that assisted homeowners as they recovered from the flood. During that time, Wood also served as a liaison between the Town of Waterbury and the Agency of Transportation.
State Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, at left speaks at a candidate forum at Harwood Union Middle/High School on Oct. 21. State Rep. Candice White, D-Waitsfield, is at right. Photo by Gordon Miller
Wood points to another time in her career that she says was pivotal to her current role. Prior to being elected to the House, she was the Director of Developmental Disability Services and Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Disabilities Aging and Independent Living. She says that work prepared her well for her role on the House Human Services Committee. It’s also behind why she spends much of her time out in the communities talking to voters.
“That’s one of the pieces of my career that I’m most proud of,” she said. “It’s important to be integrated into a community and not behind four walls. These people like to have their elected officials accessible to them. That’s one of the reasons I try to connect with as many people as possible.”
A Waterbury native and Harwood Union High School alumna, Wood served on the school board that oversaw the merger of Duxbury and Waterbury school districts when Crossett Brook Middle School was built in the 1990s. She’s a Champlain College and Johnson State College graduate as well, and her volunteer work in her hometown includes many years with the Waterbury Rotary Club, the Waterbury Historical Society, and the Waterbury Area Senior Center.
Looking ahead to the upcoming biennium, Wood said she plans to continue to work for policies that will work for Vermonters while keeping the price tag in check.
“I’m interested in policies that make sense,” she said. “And I want to do that in a way that is fiscally responsible.”
She said voters think that her committee has a large role in state government, but she wants people to remember that there are three co-equal branches that all bear the responsibility of policy-making.
“The legislative, judicial and executive branches of state government are co-equal, which means oversight and accountability on every level,” she said. “I think that’s what frustrates me the most on the national level. Congress is not providing oversight and accountability.”
Asked about her goals for the 2027-28 biennium, Wood said she will be focused on updates to Act 76. Enacted in 2023, the legislation called for major investments in the state’s child care system and early childhood education. Some elements of the act went into effect on July 1, 2023, while others rolled out throughout 2024 and 2025.
“I’m looking at updates and keeping my eyes on that,” she said. “It was a very big investment, and I want to make sure it’s serving people well and being implemented.”
The same cannot be said for Act 143 (H.938), Wood said, which was signed into law in June and restructures the state’s system for addressing homelessness and reducing the reliance on hotel and motel vouchers. The bill allocated $83 million for shelter operations, implementation, services, rental assistance, and case management.
Wood said Gov. Phil Scott’s administration is not holding up its end of the bargain.
“The executive branch is not meeting the letter of the law,” she said. “(When the bill was in committee) members of the administration came in and said they didn’t like the bill. They said they wouldn’t participate, and never participated in the work on that bill.”
She said when Act 143 was passed out of committee, it had bipartisan support in the House.
“Republicans supported that bill,” she said. “The governor signed the bill and now is not implementing it in the way it was intended. All the talk about bipartisanship and I just have not seen it. It’s been difficult. We find ways around it. There are people in this administration who still want good policy passed, and we find our ways.”
Act 143 went into effect Sept. 1, but critics, legislators and homeless advocates alike are saying the new intake and screening process is too long and confusing. There are reports of applicants calling for motel vouchers being on hold for hours, only for calls to drop, or to learn that there are no motel rooms available near them.
Another big legislative puzzle still to be solved in the session ahead is education funding, as the state’s school districts continue to see declining enrollment and the state pushes to consolidate the system. The cost of educating Vermont students continues to rise, and Wood said there are far-reaching consequences if the state doesn’t find a way to afford education.
“The next two years are going to be an additional struggle,” she said. “The pressures on the schools affect all of us – businesses, local and state government, entrepreneurs. I am in support of a foundational funding formula. All we have is a blunt lever to try and control spending.”
Wood had a hand in working with the Agency of Education to develop pre-K legislation. Passed in 2023, Act 166 guarantees universal pre-K for 3- to 5-year-olds across Vermont, “but only if you can find it.”
“That inequity is something I’m working on to change,” Wood said.
Issues such as homelessness, housing affordability, education, along with a decreasing state population and falling revenue, make being a Vermont legislator very difficult, Wood reflected. And it’s not going to get easier.
“This is not going to be an easy session,” Wood said. “The last two years were the hardest of my 11 years in the House. We are not going to have thousands and thousands of people coming to Vermont. We will need to be creative with our community partners out there.”
Despite the difficulties of the job, Wood said she maintains her love of the work and her constituents.
“You have to have some degree of hope to do this job,” she said. “When you feel like you can still do it with hope and make change and work to your highest level, you do it. We all have a responsibility to ourselves as part of a larger community. I still have hope.”
Investing in fellow candidates
Without a contest in this year’s election, Wood has leveraged some of her campaign reserves from the 2024 race that had competition in both the primary and November elections. She began this year’s campaign season with just over $9,000 left from 2024. This year, she has taken in just one $100 contribution, but the donor is not listed per state campaign finance law. A candidate is not required to disclose the names and addresses of donors who contribute $100 or less.
To date this year, Wood has spent $3,860, most of which has been in contributing to other Democratic candidates’ campaigns, including $500 to Democratic gubernatorial primary candidate Aly Richards; $200 to Westford Democratic House candidate Julia Andrews; $150 to Lisaius; $100 each to Colchester Democratic Rep. Gayle Pezzo, Barre City Democratic state Rep. Teddy Waszazak, and Essex Democratic Rep. Golrang Garofano, who serves as vice chair on the House Human Services Committee. Wood also lists a $100 donation to Planned Parenthood.
As for her plans after this term and her return to the private sector, Wood said she won’t be going far. “I’ll still be out there volunteering and doing what I can for my community,” she said.
Stepping up: Katarina Lisaius
Democratic House candidate Katarina Lisaius (right) takes part in a candidate forum at Harwood on Oct. 21. State Rep. Dara Torre, D-Moretown, is at left. Photo by Gordon Miller
A resident of Bolton, Lisaius, 37, told the Roundabout that she had been thinking of running for statewide office on and off for years. Now, the timing is just right.
“In my mind, it’s always something I’ve considered,” she said. “Opportunities don’t often come on your timeline. Tom Stevens announced his retirement, and I thought, what better time than now to be unopposed for my first-ever race? I feel very lucky.”
She credited Wood with enthusiastically urging her to run.
“She motivated me to enter the race and learn from her,” Lisaius said. “Theresa is such a strong leader, and I wanted to work alongside her to gain as much knowledge as possible and to be able to collaborate with her. She is so thoughtful and diligent, and so thorough. I’m so grateful to be able to learn from her.”
Wood points out that a third of the Vermont House membership turns over every two years, and that’s why she is so glad that Lisaius decided to run.
“I’m thrilled to have Katarina as a running mate,” Wood said. “I’ve worked with her in the past. She is going to be a fantastic legislator. I know she will do extremely good work for the people of this district.”
Lisaius is familiar in Waterbury, where she served as the town’s recreation director for just over two years until fall 2025. She’s currently working as Advocacy and Organizing Manager at the nonprofit Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence.
A 2007 Harwood Union High School graduate, Lisaius grew up in Warren and went to college in Vermont, graduating from St. Michael’s College. Prior to her stint as Waterbury’s recreation director, she worked for the Vermont Department for Children and Families and for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Burlington office. She also makes time in the fall to work with student-athletes as an assistant field hockey coach at Harwood.
Because she has a background in human services, coupled with the timing of her run with Wood, Lisaius said her first choice for a committee assignment when she gets to Montpelier is Human Services.
“If not that, I want to be really thoughtful about any committee assignment so I can be as helpful as possible to my communities,” she said.
Lisaius said the biggest overall issue facing Vermonters is affordability, whether it’s a home, groceries, taxes, or education. She agreed with Wood that being partisan doesn’t solve any problems.
“If people aren’t showing up for solutions, somehow you’ve got to call them in and get them on board,” she said. “I deeply believe in teamwork. It doesn’t mean everyone is happy all the time. I hope at least you have people who want to be part of the conversation in the committee.”
Asked about education funding, Lisaius said she believes tackling the cost-drivers of Vermont education is a priority, and that reining in property taxes will require a broad examination of the state’s educational structure.
“I grew up within the Harwood school system and am a proud Harwood graduate,” she said. “As we navigate school budgets and increasing property taxes, we must pinpoint specific rising costs – health care, mental health, and aging buildings. Solving increasing property taxes will require looking at the entire system.
Lisaius said she realizes that it’s difficult for many to serve in the Vermont Legislature and hold a full-time job. She said her employer, the Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, has been very supportive of her political aspirations.
“My employer has been incredibly supportive in making this decision (to run) easy,” she said. “I will be working part-time through the legislative session.”
Although her bid for office isn’t a contest, Lisaius has raised and spent a modest amount on some of the campaign basics that candidates rely on. Her campaign funding reports show that she has raised almost $5,300 in donations from friends and family members, including $393 of her own money. She has spent a total of $3,928 on mailings, graphic design services, buttons, T-shirts, bumper stickers, yard signs, postcards, and a space rental for a fundraiser.
Lisaius reflected on her decision to run this year, saying she sees both an opportunity to get involved in state politics and a chance to get her community engaged in coming together to solve the issues that impact all Vermonters.
“I have been thinking that, because this is a small community, we’re so interconnected that coming together to solve some of these big problems is going to impact us all, but not taking action isn’t an option for me,” Lisaius said. “I’d rather be part of meaningful change than standing around watching it happen.”
Support from Stevens
This election is the first since 2006 that Stevens has not been on the ballot in Waterbury. With just over two months left to serve, Stevens said he’s pleased to see Wood continuing on to another term and Lisaius stepping up.
“Theresa has done so much good work for so long protecting vulnerable Vermonters,” he said, “work that [Gov. Phil] Scott and his administration have tried to ruin. So she’s fighting the good fight in a way no one else is.”
Stevens agreed with Wood’s assessment that the next biennium is going to be tough.
“The next two years are going to be brutal because the governor’s administration is surfing behind the Trump train coming out of D.C.,” he said. “So someone like Theresa Wood really needs to be there to help all Vermonters, and it’s a testament to the district that she’s still serving.”
Stevens said he has known Lisaius for a few years through her work in Sen. Sanders’ office and as the Waterbury rec director, and is thrilled that she’s running.
Having a candidate from Bolton is important for the district, too, he pointed out. Legislative redistricting in 2012 aligned Bolton with Waterbury and shifted Duxbury to the Washington-2 district with towns in the Mad River Valley.
“I’m very excited that Katarina chose to run for this seat,” he said. “The idea that someone from Bolton can run in this district and win is really good for all of us. We lost Duxbury 15 years ago in our district, so we worked hard to be good representatives for Huntington and Bolton. It’s really nice for the town, and I hope they’ll be proud.”
Stevens said that one of his hopes in stepping aside this year was to be replaced by someone younger. Lisaius is the right person for the job for that reason and more, he said.
“She’s very smart. I think she will be a huge benefit to our district and to Vermonters. I know she will apply herself and make us all proud,” he said.
But Stevens emphasized real concern for what lies ahead for the legislature in the next two years, not just on a state level, but from the federal government as well.
“I don’t think anybody really knows how bad it’s going to get,” he said. “I think this president is crazy and unstable and will push things to a limit that no one can anticipate.