Tag Archives: H.710

If You Want Renewable Energy, You Have No Business Voting for Phil Scott

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Last week, Gov. Phil Scott reached another landmark. Not in a good way, and not that anyone noticed. He vetoed two bills, S.230 and H.710. According to the Vermont State Archives, they were his 63rd and 64th vetoes*, which means he has issued more than three times as many vetoes as any other governor in the history of the state. (Howard Dean is in second place with a measly 21, and he was in office longer than Scott.) That fact should not be overlooked when this guy professes a devotion to working across the aisle and getting things done and (cough) not being a politician.

*As of this writing, VSARA lists 62 Scott veto messages but has not officially posted S.230 and H.710. Just in case anyone follows the link and tries to fact check.

This post concerns the latter veto, which borders on the inexplicable — even for a veto-crazy chief executive. The House passed H.710 on a lopsided 108-30 vote, and it was so uncontroversial in the Senate that no one asked for a roll call. It passed without a recorded vote.

You may recall H.710 from the outrageous objections made by Republican Sen. Steven Heffernan, Addison County’s extremist-in-moderate’s-clothing. Mind you, Heffernan wasn’t arguing against the bill; he merely wanted to postpone its effective date by two years so its potential impact could be studied further. His completely imaginary concern was that Vermont farmland was being gobbled up by giant solar arrays, and H.710 might accelerate that trend. Despite his objection, he didn’t offer a “No” vote, nor did he request a roll call.

His concern, as I reported earlier, exists solely in his own mind. The actual amount of farmland given over to solar is vanishingly small.

But wait. That thought, or something even more insidious, also exists in the mind of Phil Scott. Because he whipped out his veto pen and consigned H.710 to the dustbin of Stuff He Doesn’t Like.

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With All Due Respect to the Junior Member from Addison, That’s 14 Minutes the Senate Will Never Get Back

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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.

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