Written Testimony — Meleah Geertsma, Alliance for the Great Lakes, on House Bill 307 (September 30, 2025)

Summary

Written testimony of Meleah Geertsma, Director of Water Infrastructure at the Alliance for the Great Lakes, submitted to the Development Committee of the Ohio House of Representatives for the hearing on the Lead Line Replacement Act, House Bill 307, with a submission date of September 30, 2025. The testimony supports the bill and states that there is no "safe" level of lead exposure. It states that lead service lines are consistently the greatest source of lead in household drinking water and that Great Lakes water systems have hovered just below the older federal action level under the Safe Drinking Water Act. It closes by inviting the committee to join Representatives Jarrells and Blasdel in support of the bill.

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“Written Testimony — Meleah Geertsma, Alliance for the Great Lakes, on House Bill 307 (September 30, 2025).” Archived at Pandemic Darlings, https://pandemicdarlings.com/source-documents/2025-10-01-development-testimony-testimony-10726-8b0f08a242/, SHA-256 d5ca38e5cad9467b708a6aabcb1960b565d95401777d6c51d4fe0d95df56d7fb.

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           Written Testimony of Meleah Geertsma, Director of Water Infrastructure,
                                Alliance for the Great Lakes

           Submitted to the Development Committee, Ohio House of Representatives
                 Hearing on the Lead Line Replacement Act, House Bill 307
                             (submission date September 30, 2025)


Chairman Hoops, Vice Chair Lorenz, Ranking Member Abdullahi, and esteemed members of the
House Development Committee, my name is Meleah Geertsma and I am submitting written
testimony in support of House Bill 307, the Lead Line Replacement Act, on behalf of the
Alliance for the Great Lakes, where I direct the Water Infrastructure Team. I hold a bachelor’s
degree in public health, as well as a law degree and a master’s of public health. I also bring over
two decades of public health, legal and policy experience to the Alliance, including working on
lead in drinking water issues at the local, state, and federal levels for nearly a decade. The
Alliance, in turn, is a regional organization committed to protecting the health of the Great Lakes
and the people and communities that depend on them.
One of the greatest threats to the health of our region’s people from water is the legacy of lead
that runs through our Great Lakes communities. This harmful history continues to negatively
impact the health of children and adults today, limiting their potential and putting a drain on our
economy. Now is the time for Ohio to do its part to address this legacy once and for all, along
with other Great Lakes states like Michigan and Illinois that have stepped up to get the lead out.
From the outset of my work to understand lead in drinking water, I dug deep into the science and
data behind the issue, learning how short we’d fallen as a country and region in adequately
identifying, testing for, and controlling or removing lead, despite significant efforts. From my
public health training, I already knew that there is no "safe" level of lead exposure – meaning
that there are harms to health documented by the scientific research at all levels of exposure.1
The impacts include not only profound harms to developing fetuses and young children at even
low levels of exposure, but also threats to adults’ cardiac, neurological and reproductive health,
such as behavioral problems, hypertension, reduced fertility, and miscarriages.2
I learned that lead service lines are still ubiquitous in homes and neighborhoods across our Great
Lakes region, and that in many cases, systems did not have a complete picture of how many of
their service lines are still made of lead and where those lines are located. In Ohio, important
recent work on mapping and reporting lead lines has shed new light on this widespread problem.3
I also learned that lead levels in residential drinking water can vary widely from sample to

1
  See Cleveland Clinic, “Lead Poisoning,” available at https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/11312-lead-
poisoning.
2
  See id.; see also Ohio State University, “Lead Safety Fact Sheet,” available at https://ehs.osu.edu/kb/lead-safety-
fact-sheet.
3
  See Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, “Lead Lines Mapping,” available at https://epa.ohio.gov/divisions-
and-offices/drinking-and-ground-waters/reports-and-data/lead-lines-mapping

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sample and day to day and house to house even within the same water system, and that lead
service lines are consistently the greatest source of lead in household drinking water – an
understanding advanced in labs based in Ohio by scientists and engineers trained at Ohio
universities.4 And I learned that on the whole, Great Lakes water systems have hovered just
below the older, inadequate federal action level under the Safe Drinking Water Act, meaning that
they have significant amounts of harmful lead in their water even today.5
I also learned that in too many places throughout our Great Lakes region, the burden of
understanding the threats posed by lead in drinking water and addressing those threats falls on
families and individuals. But not everyone has the resources or the information to understand let
alone mitigate this threat. Nor should people have to rely solely on their own resources to protect
themselves and their families against a public health emergency that arises from water
infrastructure – a core public service – or worry that their children will be poisoned when visiting
a friend’s or family member’s home. And water systems should not have to go it alone, but need
the full support of the state to address this ongoing challenge.
With this important bill and the leadership of Representatives Jarrells and Blasdel, Ohio has the
opportunity to step up now and ensure that the legacy of lead that is still with us does not
continue to harm current and future generations. I invite you to join them, and thank you for your
time and attention to this important infrastructure and public health matter, as well as the
opportunity to submit testimony on House Bill 307.


Respectfully submitted,
Meleah Geertsma, J.D., M.P.H.


Director of Water Infrastructure, Alliance for the Great Lakes




4
  See, e.g., Lytle, et. al. (2019), “Sequential drinking water sampling as a tool for evaluating lead in Flint, Michigan,”
available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0043135419302647.
5
  See, e.g., Washington University McKelvey School of Engineering, “New lead testing method could reveal higher
levels in water,” available at https://engineering.washu.edu/news/2021/New-lead-testing-method-could-reveal-
higher-levels-in-water.html.

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