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Politics & Government

Representative Mindi Messmer Coming to Bedford on Monday, May 7

State Representative Has Worked With and Fought For Local Families Affected By Water Contamination

State Representative Mindi Messmer will be speaking at the Bedford Democrats

meeting on Monday, May 7, at 6:30 p.m. The meeting will take place in the MacAllaster
Room at the Bedford Public Library, at 3 Meeting House Road, Bedford.

Find out what's happening in Bedfordfor free with the latest updates from Patch.

Representative Messmer is a progressive running for Congress in the first district to succeed retiring Representative Carol Shea-Porter. She is an environmental scientist and small business owner who became involved in public service after identifying a double pediatric cancer cluster in five seacoast towns. She has served on the Governor’s Task Force since 2016, working to determine the cause of the cancers, which may be linked to groundwater contamination from perfluorinated chemicals dumped at the Coakley landfill. Representative Messmer has worked tirelessly alongside environmental groups to bring transparency to and challenge the effectiveness of the Superfund cleanup at the landfill, most recently winning House passage of a bill requiring installation of a water treatment system at the site. Over the past two years she has worked with families and legislators from the Merrimack area who have been losing sleep over test results that show double the amount of PFOA in the systems of people living near the Saint-Gobain Plastics plant. She has fought for legislation to lower acceptable limits for arsenic, MBTE, PFOA, and other perfluorinated chemicals in drinking water, to regulate such chemicals and monitor emerging contaminants, and to make available blood-testing for chemical levels She has also worked with firefighters exposed to cancer-causing chemicals.

Representative Messmer has worked to pass other public health and environmental bills, including one that will reduce the occurrence of childhood lead poisoning which recently became law. She has also sponsored bills in other areas including one establishing protective orders to prohibit abuse and financial exploitation of elderly, disabled, and impaired adults, one that would limit publicly-funded universities from using public funds to engage in union busting, and a resolution against hate crimes, racism, and discrimination, all of which have passed the House. She helped engineer a successful revote on a bill to ban gay conversion therapy for minors. She also worked to defeat an anti-choice bill establishing an abortion registry and has consistently fought in the state legislature to protect the reproductive freedom of women.

Find out what's happening in Bedfordfor free with the latest updates from Patch.

Representative Messmer is running a grassroots campaign and does not accept donations from Super PACS.

For more information, see https://www.mindiforcongress.com/

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