The new suit filed in Berkshire Superior Court comes as Lee continues to grapple with a controversial closed-door agreement brokered between former town leaders and GE by the Environmental Protection Agency over the polluted Housatonic River. The waterway runs through the heart of both Lee and Berkshire County. Dangerous, cancer-causing PCBs were dumped into it from a GE plant in Pittsfield to the north throughout the 20th century. While the cleanup was agreed to by multiple downstream communities, Lee alone will be the home of a new landfill of low-level toxic materials — also known as the upland disposal facility, or UDF.
“We filed a couple times before, and we have withdrawn without prejudice. We finally got our ducks in a row, and we are now suing GE and Monsanto. This has nothing to do with the agreement about the UDF or the proposed so-called cleanup of the river. This is a totally separate issue," select board chair Bob Jones told WAMC. “It's about going back almost 50 years, probably over 50 years, where in the early 70s, Monsanto knew that PCBs were harmful. They'd been producing them for decades. They knew they were harmful to humans, to the environment, and they let GE know that they were not, no longer going to sell to them unless they assign an indemnity agreement holding them, holding Monsanto free from any liability. And GE said certainly, we still want to use PCBs. And so, they signed this indemnity agreement.”
Lee officials point to a 1972 special indemnification agreement that says that GE could only continue to buy PCBs from Monsanto “without implied limitation, any contamination of or adverse effects on humans, marine and wildlife, food, animal feed or the environment by reason of such PCBs.”
Commercial production of PCBs ended in 1977 and the EPA banned their use in 1979.
“It was withheld from the public, they had studies done of employees with the names of the employees redacted, but the cancer rates were through the roof," Jones continued. "They kept using this stuff and exposing the public and the environment to it and without public knowledge- And, of course, it has long term effects. And here we are 50 years later, and they want to put this stuff in a landfill in the affecting all residents of the Housatonic River corridor. And we're saying we're not having any of it.”
“This is holding Monsanto jointly liable with GE for the contamination of the river, and we have about 1,500 pages of evidence that our attorneys have put together that show that conspiracy between the two companies," said town administrator Christopher Brittain. "They acknowledge that they are dangerous, and yet will continue to sell them anyway.”
Jones says despite a long history of unsuccessful legal action against the corporations who left a legacy of job loss and pollution in Berkshire County, he’s optimistic about the new suit.
“I know some have been dismissed, but this one shows that they actually colluded to keep the information from the public and employees as well," he said. "And so basically, they were doing harm to the general population, keeping it from government, keeping it from residents in the river corridor. And obviously, damage has been done. We can’t use the river, we can't fish it, we can’t easily, can't swim in it.”
Jones hopes that if Lee prevails in the suit, the town could use the proceeds from the settlement to continue its parallel mission to reverse the least popular aspects of the cleanup plan.
“If we had some cash, if the town of Lee had some cash, we, I think we can be able to sit down at the table with GE and the EPA and leverage an agreement that would be far more effective – that's the most important thing, far more effective – in the treatment of the of the PCBs, whether it be shipping them out of the area, or treating and river itself without the establishment of a of a disposal facility here," he told WAMC. "Right now, we have an agreement that says there's going to be a disposal facility in Lee that they're going to start building at the beginning of next year.”
According to the almost 1,800-page suit, the damages sought by Lee are “in an amount to be proven at trial.”
Jones says anxiety around the dump and yet-undetermined aspects of the cleanup plan remains high in Lee, and that a sense of powerlessness and betrayal reigns.
“Residents of all five towns were kept in the dark," he said. "They had no idea and basically, the establishment of a toxic waste dump and a haphazard insufficient cleanup of the river was established behind closed doors. One attorney for five towns, one attorney hired by GE, and now we have yet another toxic waste dump proposed for Berkshire County without the consent or acquiescence of the resident. And that is just plain wrong. That is the very antithesis of democracy.”
“The most difficult thing for the town of Lee to deal with is the fact that we had nothing to do with the contamination of the river, yet, while the rest of the river corridor is being so-called cleaned up, even though it's a 20 or 30%, cleanup, the majority of the materials that are going to stay in Berkshire County are going to be in Lee for centuries, while the other towns will have far less contamination than they did before,” Brittain told WAMC.
Brittain says the case has been fast tracked, and that the defendants will be served within the coming weeks before an expected final judgement by March 2026.
General Electric and Monsanto declined to comment.
After this story was published, Monsanto issued the following statement to WAMC:
“This lawsuit reflects an attempt by the Town of Lee to impose environmental liability on a manufacturer that did not dispose of PCBs in or near the Town and is not a party to a settlement under which the Town agreed to create a PCB disposal site. Indeed, in its complaint against Monsanto, the Town of Lee acknowledges that ‘GE dumped 1.5 million pounds of PCBs into the river between 1930 [sic] and 1979.’ After accepting a share of a $55 million settlement payment related to the clean-up, the Town is now unhappy with the remediation plan that resulted from its own settlement, and has filed suit against Monsanto, attempting to hold the Company liable for the environmental nuisance and trespass created by the Town’s own decisions.
On the accusation of alleged unlawful practices between Monsanto and GE, the agreement in question was a routine commercial arrangement between two sophisticated companies that were doing business together, and we reject that it was improper in any way. The agreement is only between GE and Monsanto; it did not (and could not) release any party from liability to third parties. The agreement had (and has) no impact on any legal liability adjudged by courts or assigned through administrative agencies like the EPA.
Incidentally, the agreement came at a time when the federal Interdepartmental Task Force on PCBs concluded that PCBs should not be banned entirely as ‘their continued use for transformers and capacitors in the near future is considered necessary because of the significantly increased risk of fire and explosion and the disruption of electrical service which would result from a ban on PCB use.’ Regarding human health risk, this report stated, ‘at the levels in which they are found, PCBs do not appear to present an imminent hazard’ to the human population.”
