The Hastings City Council met in a closed session regarding possible litigation against 3M for funds
to clean up the city water supply from PFAS (forever chemicals) contaminating drinkable and usable water in the city. Hastings City Council member Lisa Leifeld said the city opted out of a previous settlement suit years ago that brought them to this point.
“As many people know, the city had opted out of the particular MDL, it’s called a Multiple District Litigation. We had kind of calculated a couple of years ago that it looked like in that, if we had joined all of these other districts, we would have gained about three million dollars. Three million dollars is literally a drop in the lake of the water we are trying to clean here. So, the city chose not to join the MDL and go on their own. While doing that our city staff, they’ve been able to use their resources, and just turn every rock, and they’ve come up with nearly $23 million to be used for this first treatment plant that is going up right now on the north frontage road. So $23 million is quite a bit of money, and we still have a long way to go, we have two other water treatment plants that still need to be built.”
Leifeld also said the city council opted to move forward in the long process of trying to obtain those funds.
“Since we’ve started the construction process, we can now move forward with litigation. So what that’ll do, is give us the opportunity to sue 3m and say hey ok, we need the money. So where that’ll go or how long that’ll take, varying degrees of answers. We hear anything from a year to possibly six years before we have any resolution as to whether or not we get any money directly from their settlement. So that’s great news for all of the community. I keep seeing on Facebook, why aren’t they suing, why aren’t they suing? It’s bigger than that, and suing costs money, so we want to make sure we are in the right position, and we really feel like we are now.”
Leifeld said they are currently in the early stages of moving forward on pursuing litigation. Hear the full interview that aired on Community In Depth on KDWA with this story on KDWA.com.