SHELBURNE — Before a crowd of around 400 environmental advocates, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., recalled how he once upset senators from the Midwest when he snuck Lake Champlain onto the list of Great Lakes, a designation that lasted less than a month.
The crowd laughed and applauded.
“I got some grief from others around the country,” he said.
Speakers at the event — held to honor the outgoing senior senator’s contributions to the environment — hailed Leahy’s willingness to bring outsize dollars and ideas to his tiny home state, and to bring Vermonters’ ideas to Washington. Leahy is set to retire in January, after 48 years in office.
Banners hung behind the podium, each with individual sheets of paper that listed areas that had been conserved or laws that had been passed with Leahy’s help — the Green River Reservoir, Glastonbury Wilderness Area, the Vermont Wilderness Act of 2006, the Upper Connecticut River Partnership Act.
The country’s National Organic Program was rejected at first by the chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, who told the senator from Vermont, “this is a crunchy granola thing,” Leahy recounted.
After the chair retired, Leahy succeeded him “and we passed it,” he said. “That crunchy granola program is a $60 billion industry.”
“To list the many significant places that have been protected because of funding or legislation initiated by Sen. Leahy would take longer than even you have the stamina to listen to,” Gaye Symington, a former speaker of the Vermont House, told the crowd.
She named two she considered particularly impactful: The Marsh-Billings Rockefeller National Historical Park, home to the Conservation Institute, and the Lake Champlain Basin Program, which has awarded more than $8 million in 1,300 local grants and funded more than 80 research and demonstration projects since 1992, she said.
Candace Page, a veteran reporter for the Burlington Free Press and now a consulting editor to Seven Days, said she got to know Leahy before she became a journalist and he a senator.
First a Chittenden County prosecutor, Leahy wasn’t always known for his environmental work, Page said.
“Vermonters knew Pat as the guy who prosecuted murders, fought drug crime and who made the national news with his memo to Vermont police departments on the naughty problem of what to do about skinny dipping hippies who were offending the tender sensibilities of some Vermonters,” she said. “He told them to find a better way to spend their time.”
As a reporter, she said, she and Leahy approached each other “with some degree of wariness and skepticism.”
“Today, I’m here, as I think you are, too, to offer my deepest thanks to the senator, not just on behalf of the state I love, but on behalf of the planet,” she said.
Leahy said he’s taken ideas born in Vermont to Washington, such as the Forest Legacy Program and the Community Forest Program.
“The idea came from all of you here in Vermont, and I consider myself very fortunate to be able to bring those ideas to the rest of the country,” he said.
He closed his speech by saying that he and his wife, Marcelle, are looking forward to stationing themselves permanently in Vermont, and said he’ll be there to help the next set of leaders.
“And, it is a great lake,” he said.
