Representing Water Utilities and Local Governments in PFAS Cost-Recovery Claims: Lessons from the Drinking Water Settlements

Kenneth Sansone, Senior Partner | SL Environmental Law Group PC

Kenneth Sansone is a Senior Partner at SL Environmental Law Group PC, a firm that exclusively represents states, municipalities, water and wastewater utilities, airports, and private entities in lawsuits to recover the cost of cleaning up contaminated water — including PFAS, 1,4dioxane, perchlorate, and 1,2,3-trichloropropane (TCP). He helps represent more than 300 public entities in the AFFF multi-district litigation against PFAS manufacturers (In re: Aqueous Film-Forming Foams Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2873), and his firm reports recovering more than $1 billion for its clients from the first phase of the 3M and DuPont PFAS drinkingwater settlements alone. A former Assistant Attorney General for the State of New Hampshire, Mr. Sansone has more than 20 years of experience litigating complex civil and criminal cases in federal and state trial and appellate courts, and he has spent the better part of the last decade building, trying, and settling the exact species of cost-recovery case this program is about.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Sansone earned his J.D. from New York University School of Law and his B.A., magna cum laude, from Duke University, where he was an alternate captain of the Duke men’s ice hockey team. He is admitted to practice in California, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, and he practices out of the firm’s offices in San Francisco, California and Concord, New Hampshire.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Sansone has been described as one of the nation’s leading attorneys in PFAS litigation and water contamination recovery, and he is the lawyer the water sector turns to when it wants to understand how these cases are built and how the money gets allocated. He is a regular faculty member for the industry’s major associations, including the American Water Works Association (AWWA) 2023 Annual Conference & Exhibition, the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) 2024 Annual Conference, the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) 2024 Executive Management Conference, and a National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA) virtual session in December 2024, and in November 2025 he headlined a national live forum on EPA’s decision to retain the CERCLA hazardoussubstance designation for PFOA and PFOS and what it means for utilities. He has been a featured guest on Water Online’s “In the Flow” podcast series, and his analysis of PFAS cost-recovery litigation has been sought out by Water Finance & Management, Water Online, Airport Business, and the Bangor Daily News and Maine Monitor, which profiled his firm’s strategy in the wave of wastewater PFAS suits filed by Maine municipalities against the chemical manufacturers.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Sansone writes and speaks extensively on the liability and cost-recovery questions that follow PFOA and PFOS through the water cycle — from the drinking-water plant to the wastewater plant, the biosolids field, and the airport fire-training area. He co-authored “How CERCLA’s PFOA, PFOS Designation Could Impact Wastewater Treatment” (Water & Wastes Digest, April 2024), which laid out how the Superfund designation could expose publicly owned treatment works to liability for contamination they did not create and urged utilities to test effluent and biosolids and to consider litigation against manufacturers to recover costs; “How Public Works Can Get Help Paying for PFAS Cleanup in Wastewater”; and “Airports After the Water Settlements: What’s Next for PFAS?” (Airport Business), which examined why the 3M and DuPont drinking-water settlements left airport-property AFFF claims unresolved and how early filers received enhanced allocations. In his public commentary he has been direct about the economics of these cases: that cost-recovery litigation is “another form of financing” that complements rather than replaces grants and loans; that settlements are unlikely to cover the full lifecycle cost of PFAS treatment; that MDL settlements bind only the parties who opt in, with unsettled cases returning to the plaintiff’s home court for trial; and that state statutes of limitations as short as two years can decide whether a utility’s claim survives at all.

• Experience

Mr. Sansone’s results are the benchmark for what a water-system cost-recovery case can be worth. As lead trial and appellate counsel for the City of Pomona, California, he carried a products-liability suit against SQM North America — the subsidiary of a multinational mining company whose perchloratetainted fertilizer, applied decades earlier to citrus orchards, had contaminated the City’s drinking-water wells — through more than a decade of litigation, multiple trials, and multiple trips to the Ninth Circuit, winning a jury verdict in September 2021 that the Ninth Circuit affirmed in May 2023 and that resulted in SQM paying the City more than $30.6 million for incurred and projected thirty-year treatment costs, awarded costs, and interest. He has obtained more than $155 million in recoveries for water systems to treat TCP contamination traced to defective pesticides sold by Shell Oil and Dow Chemical, and he and his firm now represent hundreds of drinking-water and wastewater systems in MDL No. 2873 before the District of South Carolina, including the Maine municipal sewer operators — Bangor, Portland, South Portland, Scarborough, Brunswick, Sanford, Wells, and York among them — pursuing manufacturer liability for PFAS in wastewater and biosolids on the same theory that produced the $13 billion-plus 3M and DuPont drinking-water settlements. Having built the plaintiff’s case in these suits from the first well sample through verdict, appeal, and settlement allocation, Mr. Sansone knows precisely how a water utility proves source, causation, and treatment-cost damages, where those proofs are vulnerable, and how the plaintiff’s own share of the problem gets fought over — making him uniquely positioned to show defense counsel what they are really up against when the water utility sues the plant, and how to make the plaintiff carry its share.

SESSION 1 – The PFAS Regulatory Landscape, Who Pays, and Products Liability as the Cost-Recovery Vehicle | Kenneth Sansone | 12:00pm – 1:40pm

Legal action against the chemical manufacturers responsible for PFAS pollution has become one of the most significant new sources of funding for water utilities and local governments nationwide — producing multibillion-dollar settlements with 3M, DuPont, and other manufacturers for U.S. public drinking water providers, and now extending to entities facing PFAS contamination in wastewater, biosolids, and soil. This webinar walks practitioners through how that happened and how the same strategies are being used today.

He then explains how contaminated entities have used, and are using, products liability law to hold the manufacturers responsible for pollution accountable: the theories of liability, the role of the MDL, how claims are filed and valued, and how settlement funds are allocated among claimants.

Finally, Mr. Sansone traces the full legal process that led to the recent drinking water settlements and shows how wastewater utilities, airports, and other entities with PFAS in soil and effluent are pursuing recovery through the same playbook — including the deadlines and statute-of-limitations issues that can determine whether a claim survives.

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm