What Regional Leaders Should Know About Contamination Cost Recovery

By Judge (ret) Hank Naughton, Partner at Napoli Shkolnik

Earlier this month, I was in Tulsa at the National Association of Regional Councils’ 60th Annual Conference, talking with regional planners and public officials about litigation as a revenue stream.

Before I joined Napoli Shkolnik, I spent close to three decades in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and served as a Justice of the Massachusetts District Court. I chaired the Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security for ten years. I’ve sat on the other side of the table from the attorneys. I know what it looks like when a government entity is staring down a contamination problem, a public health crisis, or an infrastructure failure and trying to figure out how to pay for it without going back to taxpayers.

The answer, more often than officials realize, is that the company that caused the problem can be made to pay for it.

That’s the core of what I presented at the conference, focused on cost recovery programs as genuine revenue mechanisms for regional governments. We hope that water districts, municipalities, and counties understand the resources that are out there to use to fund remediation, treatment infrastructure, and public health responses without rate increases.

What I hear constantly from leadership in towns and counties is that they know they have a problem, but what they are less sure about is whether they have legal standing to act on it and whether the process is worth starting. I would urge every public official in that position to think carefully about the resources they are leaving on the table.

At Napoli Shkolnik, the Public Client Group represents state and local governments in these situations. The firm’s attorneys hold court-appointed leadership positions in multidistrict litigations involving PFAS water contamination, opioids, and firearm industry accountability. The AFFF MDL, in which the firm played a central role, produced more than $14 billion in settlements with manufacturers including 3M, DuPont, and Tyco. That money goes to communities.

My own focus right now is on PFAS, or forever chemical cost recovery, where we represent municipalities and water utilities against defendants who knew these chemicals would migrate into the water supply. I came to this work after years of pushing environmental and water protection legislation in Massachusetts. While regulatory efforts are important, litigation produces resources that regulation alone never delivers.

For the regional planners I met in Tulsa, the message is straightforward. If your jurisdiction is dealing with contaminated water, elevated public health costs, or infrastructure damage you can trace to a manufacturer’s product or an industry’s practices, you may have a claim.

The Public Client Group at Napoli Shkolnik has built its practice around that exact problem. We don’t add to the burden on taxpayers. We look for the party responsible, and we go after them.