Guest commentary: Dane County needs to postpone a deal to indemnify the National Guard for PFAS

A proposed agreement could cost residents hundreds of millions of dollars and threaten our safe drinking water.

Unless you’re a close watcher of the Dane County Board of Supervisors, you might not have seen that the board is set to vote at its December 21 meeting on a measure that could determine hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax liability for us in Dane County and have a generational impact on whether our tap water remains safe to drink, cook with, and bathe in.

The measure is RES-168, the “joint-use agreement” (JUA) between the county and the federal government for the National Guard’s use of the Dane County Airport. Under previous JUAs, which typically span 10 years, the National Guard provides firefighting services for the airport in exchange for free use of our airport runways. Since the local Guard unit maintains its own firefighting and emergency response service, and since fires and crashes are fairly rare, it costs little to extend that service to Dane County’s civilian airport. This saves Dane County the $3 to $6 million per year (about $3 per ticketed passenger) it would otherwise cost to maintain our own fire department at the airport.

This year’s JUA is mostly the same as the last one—with one catch. The National Guard is insisting that the JUA include indemnification for the federal and state government’s responsibility for the PFAS contamination at Truax Field. Cleaning our water and removing the contaminated soil will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and this JUA would put the cost entirely on Dane County taxpayers.

This is the first time the JUA has come up for renewal since 2018, when the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) uncovered the extent of contamination at Truax Field by cancer-causing PFAS chemicals. This contamination was caused by decades of the National Guard’s use of PFAS-containing firefighting foam in training exercises, along with the occasional fire. The DNR found the National Guard, the City of Madison, and Dane County to be the responsible parties for the costs of cleanup. Currently those costs are unknown, and five years after discovery, remediation has still not even begun.

Even the extent of contamination is not yet understood. We do know there is a plume of contaminated soil at Truax Field that leaks PFAS into groundwater and from there, Starkweather Creek, Lake Monona, and all of the downstream lakes and rivers. The groundwater also drains into Madison’s municipal water wells, and, in 2020, every single one of Madison’s 22 wells was found to be contaminated with PFAS. The Madison Water Utility Board has shut one off, Well #15, due to high levels of PFAS, and stated that the utility is barely able to maintain supply without it. This raises the question, “What would happen if an additional well showed high levels of contamination?”

The City of Madison is planning to build a $6 million filter to bring the well back online, paid for with our sliver of a national class-action PFAS settlement against 3M, the makers of the foam, and a grant from the state. Since these were one-shot sources, another good question might be, “Who would pay if Madison needed to build $6 million filters for the other 21 wells?”

Even though the government claims to have stopped dumping PFAS at Truax Field, new PFAS leaches into groundwater from the contaminated soil every time it rains. Since PFAS are so-called “forever chemicals” that do not break down once they are in the environment or our bodies, the levels of PFAS in Madison’s municipal wells (and surrounding private wells) will only increase with time, for as long as the contaminated soil has not been remediated.

Which brings us to the issue at hand: who will pay for that remediation, and how would that be affected if the joint-use agreement broadly indemnifies the federal government from its responsibility? 

Our supervisors naturally don’t want to accept such a one-sided agreement—which is why the National Guard is trying to strong-arm supervisors by threatening that, if they refuse, the Guard will withdraw their firefighting services faster than the county can procure a new vendor, which would close our airport until we could get services set up again.

This is a terrible choice to force on the people of Dane County. We should not face a situation where we as taxpayers and water-drinkers are solely and entirely on the hook for the health risks of drinking PFAS-contaminated water as well as the costs of remediating decades of PFAS pollution caused by the federal government. And the Dane County Board should be unwilling to make that agreement under duress.

The only real solution is for Governor Tony Evers, as Commander-in-Chief of the Wisconsin National Guard, to guarantee firefighting services for as long as the county needs to replace them. This will allow the county board to negotiate a fair agreement without a gun to its head.

But it will take time to involve the Governor in the negotiations, and most of Dane County still hasn’t heard of the JUA or had an opportunity to meaningfully participate in the democratic process. Which is why the Dane County Board must postpone this issue when it comes to them on December 21.

That gives us precious little time to write to our supervisors and tell them we want them to postpone. Many of our supervisors have their own concerns with this agreement, and by using our public voice, we give them the cover and the courage they need to act on those concerns. If we speak, they will act.

You can send a letter to your supervisor very easily at https://fightforfairness.us—a new effort by the growing coalition of taxpayers, water-drinkers, businesses, and organizations learning about this issue and demanding fairness in the costs of cleaning up the government’s PFAS. Will you join us?