Tables PFOA Agreement And Will Reconsider It
by Alex Brooks
A rather large crowd of 90 or so citizens came to a meeting called by the Hoosick Falls Village Board of Trustees on Thursday January 12 to consider whether to accept an agreement negotiated between the Village and the two companies that caused the PFOA contamination in Hoosick Falls, Saint-Gobain and Honeywell.[private]
The agreement called for a payment of $850,000 to reimburse the Village for costs it has incurred over the past year and a half dealing with the PFOA crisis.
Mayor David Borge started the meeting making the case for approving the agreement, saying the Village needs the money from this agreement to cover the losses it has sustained from the PFOA crisis and to pay off the professionals it hired to help it deal with the crisis. Approximately 40% of the settlement money, or about $337,000, would reimburse the Village for its own losses and expenses, and about $513,000 would be used to pay the bills of the Village’s team of engineering, legal and communications consultants, who have been working without payment for their services for more than a year. $410,000 would go to the Glens Falls law firm Fitzgerald Morris Baker Firth PC, which has advised the Village and negotiated this agreement. Of that, about $100,000 would be passed through to Behan Communications, for public relations assistance provided to the Village during the crisis. The remaining $100,000 would go to MRB Group, for engineering consulting work they have done for the Village related to the PFOA crisis.
However, when the public was allowed to speak, they were unanimous and vehement in urging the Board not to approve the agreement.
About 22 people spoke against the agreement over the course of about two hours, and by the end of that time the Village Board unanimously tabled the matter and agreed to take another look at the agreement and possibly renegotiate it. This decision was met with a round of applause.
The most authoritative of those who spoke was the attorney for Healthy Hoosick Water, David Engel. His critique is detailed and wide-ranging, and was presented in a letter as well as verbally. The heart of it is first that the agreement releases the companies from future claims by the Village in far too comprehensive a manner, and secondly that it affirms the right of the companies to bring a claim against the Village as part of future litigation that may result from the PFOA contamination. Engel said the Agreement should “require that the companies indemnify and hold the Village harmless against all future claims arising from the presence of PFOA within the Village,” and also should include a binding commitment by the two companies to “be jointly responsible for all future costs borne by the Village on account of the PFOA contamination.”
Engel also said he does not believe there is a need to rush into a settlement right away. While acknowledging that the settlement would bring immediate financial relief to the Village, he notes that the primary beneficiaries will be the Village’s consultants and law firms. Engel’s letter said “Those vendors can and should wait until a better deal is crafted.”
Further, Engel notes that the DEC Consent Order with the two companies, executed seven months ago in June 2016, “contemplated that the Village would reach an agreement on payment of the Village’s costs within 45 days.” He said the DEC Order provided that DEC could seek cost recovery on behalf of the Village in the event that a Settlement was not reached, so if the Village finds the two companies uncooperative, it could seek compensation for its costs through DEC without signing away its rights to seek compensation from the two companies for costs it may incur in the future.
Engel concluded his letter by offering to work with the Village to “arrive at a much better outcome.”
Hoosick Falls Mayor David Borge said this week that he and members of the Village Board are reviewing comments from last Thursday’s meeting, both written and verbal, and once they have done that the Village Board will meet again with its attorneys to consider how to proceed. He believes there was some misunderstanding of the agreement among those who spoke, but he also believes the Board can learn something from the comments they received at the public meeting. Taking everything into account, they will propose a course of action and come back to a public meeting to present it. He said this will definitely happen by the regularly scheduled Village Board meeting in February, if not before. [/private]