I’m beginning to think of Sen. Steven Heffernan as the Mr. Magoo of the Vermont Statehouse, especially since I learned on Wikipedia that Magoo was originally intended to be “a mean-spirited reactionary.” That would have been an interesting choice in 1949 when the Red Scare was raging, but the character was recast as an amiable bungler before the first cartoon was made. Heffernan manages to encompass both the “mean-spirited reactionary” bit with the daft digressions of the Magoo so familiar to us children of the Sixties.

The reactionary was on display in Heffernan’s May 15 musings about having sex with dogs. He pivoted to his Magoo persona on Tuesday, and baffled his fellow solons with a lengthy objection to a bill that no one seemed able to follow and he was at a loss to explain.

At issue was H.710, one of those bills that causes deep slumber in anyone besides fanboys of lawmakin’ trivia. The title itself makes you think Mr. Sandman is sprinkling fairy dust on your eyelids: “An act relating to defining electricity generating facilities.” What it would do is allow multiple renewable energy generators located contiguously to be defined as a single plant. Say, if there are three solar arrays sited next to each other, they could be considered a single facility under state law.

The bill passed the House on a 108-30 vote. The Senate Natural Resources & Energy Committee rewrote the bill and approved it unanimously. Senate Appropriations also gave unanimous consent. It was on the Senate’s Tuesday agenda, and that’s when Heffernan offered an amendment to delay the bill’s effective date by two years. He explained himself in a long, discursive statement that he appeared to be reading for the very first time, so halting and unsteady was his delivery.

After he finished, two senators rose to essentially ask “What the hell are you talking about?” Heffernan’s answers were thoroughly unconvincing. And after wasting 14 minutes of floor time, his amendment was shot down on a voice vote.

I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow because it would be too painful to make sense of Heffernan’s ramblings. (Just as an example, he sometimes misidentifies H.710 as H.720, a bill on cloud computing that’s been stuck on a House committee wall since its introduction.) Should you wish to share my pain, the trainwreck performance can be viewed on the Vermont Senate’s YouTube page; Heffernan rises at the 47-minute mark and his amendment meets its fate 14 minutes later.

Heffernan’s argument is that H.710 might accelerate the loss of farmland to renewable energy buildout, and his amendment would provide more time to study this potential impact. He apparently believes that Vermont agriculture could face an existential peril if H.710 encourages farmers to sell more of their land to renewable developers.

Which is quite a stretch in itself. Just as he earlier revealed an active fantasy life when it comes to man-on-dog, he’s now envisioning a future where the entire Vermont farmscape is covered by solar arrays. The problem is… well, there are many problems. But the first problem is that he cites absurdly small figures for agricultural land actually lost to renewables.

Heffernan cobbled together a list of both existing and proposed projects on former or current farmland that total less than 350 acres.

Hmm. Would you care to guess how much farmland there is in Vermont?

That would be 1,173,890 acres, according to the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture.

Heffernan is talking about 0.0003% of Vermont farmland “lost” to renewables. Also, according to the state’s own figures, agricultural land shrunk by 19,547 acres between 2017 and 2022. The vast majority of that was due to causes other than renewable energy, most likely other kinds of development.

He then argued that conversions “will accelerate” as we continue to build renewable energy. However, (a) conversions would have to skyrocket in order to pose the slightest threat to the ag sector, (b) that scale of development would surely touch off a massive, undeniable backlash, and (c) H.710 would play no meaningful role in Heffernan’s nightmare scenario. If farmers are selling pieces of their land to renewable developers, their decisions aren’t going to be affected by whether or not contiguous solar arrays can be considered as a single facility. H.710 would do little or nothing to alter the financial calculus around solar development.

“None of H.710 refers specifically to agricultural land,” replied a bemused Sen. Anne Watson, chair of the Senate Natural Resources & Energy Committee and official reporter of the bill. H.710, she added, is simply “clarifying a definition that’s troublesome. All stakeholders came to consensus on the language.”

Fellow Washington County Sen. Anne Cummings then rose. “I’m getting confused,” she said. “It was last week we were told that real Vermonters were hardy, frugal people who just wanted to be let alone and not have Montpelier tell them what to do with their land. Now we’re being told that we should regulate what they do with their land.”

Making it a clean sweep for the Washington delegation, Sen. Andrew Perchlik asked Heffernan to cite any language in H.710 “that would make it easier to build solar on ag land.” There was an unproductive back-and-forth as Heffernan repeatedly failed to identify any such language. Finally, he acknowledged that it was a matter of “my interpretation” of the bill.

“I think this is more about an anti-solar amendment that it is about pro-agriculture,” Perchlik replied. “If you really want to protect ag land, you’re going to want to have this kind of regulation for development. Because the number-one loss of farmland is to development… I see this as just a way to attack solar projects.”

At that point the question was called, and the Heffernan amendment was decisively defeated on a voice vote. And then, no thanks to the junior Senator from Addison County, the body moved on to other business.

Senator Perchlik hit the nail on the head: the bee in Heffernan’s bonnet is renewable energy itself. There is no logical basis for his stated argument. I think he was revealing himself as a Trump-style fossil fuel enthusiast. But he knew that wouldn’t fly in Our Green State, so he had to concoct an appeal to the pride we feel about our farms and fields. And waste everyone’s time in the process.