Delgado, town halls & the press

Fritz Mayer
Posted 2/22/19

In his first in-district work week since being sworn in, Congressman Antonio Delgado held a conference call with reporters on Feb. 22 and said he has held a total of nine town hall meetings since …

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Delgado, town halls & the press

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In his first in-district work week since being sworn in, Congressman Antonio Delgado held a conference call with reporters on Feb. 22 and said he has held a total of nine town hall meetings since being becoming a member of Congress. 

Answering questions from reporters, he shared his view on President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to enable him to build a wall along the southern border.   Delgado said, “It’s a dangerous precedent. Congress has the exclusive power of the purse as defined in Article One of the Constitution. We have appropriated the funds that we deem necessary on a veto-proof, bipartisan basis.  For him to then turn around and then declare a national emergency in the absence of any war, national disaster or disease is incredibly alarming.”

Delgado said his office had been concentrating this week on local agriculture.  He said he took a tour of Don’s Dairy Supply in Delaware County that manufactures on-site milk processing technology. He said more of that kind of technology is needed in the district. “Without that kind of local technology, the monopolized, concentrated conglomerates can sweep in and in essence take away any of the regionalized reality.  So the goal of us is to figure out how to build that out.  That’s going to take some funding, some investment. We have to make sure our roads, our rail, our broadband, our cell service are where they need to be to access the market place.”

Two villages in Delgado’s district have had their water supplies contaminated with perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulphonate (PFOS), which are chemicals used in many industrial processes and products. Delgado and others have been pushing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish a safe threshold for PFOA and PFOS contamination in drinking water, but he said the agency appears to be in no hurry to do so. 

“This is an alarming situation.  It seems as if the EPA, at least from my vantage point, is not prioritizing this enough. They didn’t say they would not be establishing maximum limits, so that does create some hope.  But the fact that we are delaying this process and not acting with the urgency that I think is required is very distressing.”  Delgado invited Hoosic Falls resident Michael Hickey, whose father died of cancer believed to have been caused by PFOA exposure, to the State of the Union Address to stress the need to address the issue.

Delgado said he has signed onto legislation that would designate PFOS and PFOA has hazardous substances that would allow the EPA to go into a site that was contaminated and clean it up as a Superfund site, rather than leaving it up to private individuals or organizations that may have caused the contamination. He said he was also looking a legislation that would require companies that are using these types of toxic chemicals to test surrounding water supplies and reveal the results of those tests to the public.

On another matter, Delgado was asked about the advisability of President Trump’s planned trip to Viet Nam where he plans to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “It’s unclear to me what the President’s objectives are, and on that alone, I’m concerned.  When you make these kinds of trips, particularly with leaders who have been clear adversaries, and have posed serious threats to the security of our country, you want to have a clear understanding of what the objectives are, what the goals are.  And you want to know what’s been done prior to that meeting to insure that whatever comes out of it will be consistent with your desired outcomes.  And what I’m struggling with is the looseness with which this all seems to be unfolding.”

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