CANTON – Environmental activist and congressional candidate Donald Hassig of Colton will speak to promote the establishment of mass transit across the North Country Monday at the county Board of Legislators meeting.

He will urge the county to be part of what he hopes will be a grass-roots movement throughout the 21st Congressional District, which covers the area from Lake Ontario to Lake Champlain, to “create affordable and effective mass transit systems in NY-21.”

He will ask the board to create “a mass transit task force charged with producing strategies for developing excellent bus and train service within the region.”

And Hassig said he will start this movement in St. Lawrence County and then take his appeal to other counties around the North Country.

Hassig said in a statement that his inspiration derives from a personal desire to use less fossil fuel energy to get around.

Hassig ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress from the 21st District in 2012 under the Green Party banner, and has said he intends to run again in next year’s election. His campaign last year was punctuated with arrests for disorderly conduct and trespassing as he tested free speech law singing, dancing and campaigning is public areas in the face of objections. Some of those charges were thrown out in court.