Jeff Munger, who as a longtime aide to U.S. Sens. Jim Jeffords and Bernie Sanders helped facilitate historic transportation investments in Vermont, died on Sunday at 79.
His wife and daughters confirmed the cause was leukemia.
Munger’s grasp of transportation issues was widely respected in Vermont political circles, as well as his efforts to improve passenger rail and aviation service in one of the nation’s most rural states.
“Not every Vermonter will know Jeff Munger’s name,” Sanders said in a statement to VTDigger, “but if you have traveled a Vermont road, taken an Amtrak train, passed through a covered bridge, or flown out of the airport, you have benefited from Jeff’s work.”
The nearly two decades Munger spent crafting transportation policy in Vermont and on Capitol Hill were just one chapter of his dynamic, globe-trotting life. Before entering politics, Munger traveled the world on a sailboat with his aunt for more than seven years and owned a restaurant — experiences for which colleagues jokingly labeled him “the Real Most Interesting Man in the World.”
“You would mention ‘Djibouti,’ and he’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, when I was there —’ ” recalled Cathy Davis, president of the Lake Champlain Chamber and Munger’s former manager in Jeffords’ office, with a laugh. “He was just your definition of a character and an original.”
John Jeffrey Munger was born in Summit, New Jersey, on March 25, 1943. A former linebacker for the football team at Marietta College in Ohio, he became an adopted Vermonter after moving to Shrewsbury in 1979 for what was supposed to be a temporary visit with his brother, Russ.
That visit turned into a lifetime of dedicated service to the state, family members and former colleagues said. A year after moving to Shrewsbury, while he and Russ were building a house, Munger met his wife, Mary. The couple had two children, Emma and Hannah.
In the early 1980s, Munger helped open Murphy’s, a Mexican-American restaurant in downtown Rutland. The establishment — which he later took over as full owner — catered to Munger’s delight in feeding friends and family, his wife said.
“He loved making food for people,” Mary Munger recalled.
In 1994, Munger joined the staff of Jeffords’s reelection campaign, eventually landing a full-time role in the then-Republican senator’s Rutland office. He later moved to the Jeffords’s Burlington office, where he worked until the fellow Shrewsbury resident retired as an independent in 2007.
Munger then worked for Sanders, an independent who was elected to Jeffords’s seat from the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006, before retiring in 2015.
Munger also served on the Burlington Airport Commission, chairing the now-advisory body from 2013 to 2021. His death leaves the commission with four of its seven spots vacant, meaning the group cannot convene until one Winooski resident or up to three Burlington residents are appointed as members.
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger praised Munger’s service to the city’s airport in a statement to VTDigger.
“Jeff dedicated his life to public service,” said Weinberger, a former airport commissioner. “I will miss his collegiality and warmth.”
As a Senate aide, Munger pushed for the reintroduction of passenger rail to Burlington’s Union Station — a service which, after 30 years of toil, is set to kick off in July.
“There is something bittersweet about it happening with this kind of timing. It’s good that he could see that almost to the close,” daughter Emma Ingalls said.
“When that train starts running,” Davis said, “Jeff will be there in spirit.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote from Emma Ingalls.
