State to 3M: Pay up for pollution

State officials want 3M to pay for the damage caused by company chemicals that contaminated Mississippi River fish and tainted groundwater beneath much of the east metro area.

Representatives of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency already are meeting with the company in hopes of reaching a settlement without going to court.

"For the past three years we've been focused on cleanup, on getting that moving forward," said Kathy Sather, director of remediation for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. "The time is right now for us to look at the natural resource damage that's always part of the remediation that we do."

Sather would not speculate on how much the damages might be. "It all depends on what we end up quantifying as far as what the actual injury is," she said. The MPCA is working with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and with affected cities to gather information before formal negotiations begin with the company, Sather said.

"Everything's very preliminary at this point," she said, declining to disclose further details.

3M spokesperson Jacqueline Berry said the company had no comment on the matter.

3M phased out the compounds known as perfluorochemicals, or PFCs, in 2002 after making them for nearly half a century at its Cottage Grove plant. They were used in numerous products including Scotchgard, non-stick cookware and firefighting foam. The company dumped wastes in area landfills and at the plant decades ago, before those practices were illegal.

However, the cleanups do not address the groundwater that was contaminated as the chemical spread for years beneath parts of Lake Elmo, Oakdale, Woodbury and Cottage Grove. It also does not deal with PFCs found in the Mississippi River near the Cottage Grove plant, or in fish contaminated downstream.

3M has also spent several million dollars in Oakdale to build a new filtration system for some city wells, and in Lake Elmo to expand the city's water system to more than 200 homeowners whose private wells were contaminated. Minnesota Health Department tests have shown traces of contaminants in hundreds of other wells in Woodbury and Cottage Grove, some at concentrations high enough to recommend bottled water or home filtration systems.

The state claims that the 3M pollution and cleanup is governed by the state Superfund law, which deals with liability for hazardous wastes. 3M has disagreed strongly that the state can require compensation through the Superfund law, because PFCs are not classified legally as "hazardous wastes."