New Hampshire likes to be first. It boasts America’s first modern state-run lottery, the first ski school, and even the world’s first paintball game. And Dixville Notch, NH residents enter the first votes in each presidential election.
Thanks to a recent $236 million verdict in a state-sponsored lawsuit, New Hampshire may be gunning for first in the hearts and minds of America’s plaintiffs’ bar too—a distinction, Washington Legal Foundation’s General Counsel Mark Chenoweth argues in a June 11 New Hampshire Union Leader op-ed, that the state should not proudly embrace.
New Hampshire hired private, contingent-fee attorneys to sue oil companies for groundwater contamination. As Mark explains:
They alleged that leaking underground storage tanks contaminated local groundwater with the chemical MTBE. But rather than sue gas stations that owned the leaking tanks (and violated EPA rules), the state’s hired guns went after deep-pocketed oil companies (that were following EPA rules). The lawyers calculated that they could win a large payday, regardless of those companies’ actual responsibility, by putting deep pockets and pollution claims in front of a jury.
In compliance with a statutory mandate, EPA allowed the addition of MTBE to gasoline to improve air quality. Congress anticipated that leaks might occur, so it created a fund states could tap for clean-up. New Hampshire did not seek money from the fund, perhaps, the Union Leader op-ed notes, because the state would have to use those funds for groundwater clean-up. Not wanting to be limited, the state filed suit instead, even though it could not show physical harm to any person or destruction of any property.
New Hampshire now could have a $236 million slush fund courtesy of a jackpot justice verdict, and as Mark writes, “Attorney General Joseph Foster has staunchly opposed placing the money in a state-managed trust devoted to testing and clean-up.”
New Hampshire’s “success” has inspired neighboring Vermont to jump on the MTBE lawsuit bandwagon. Dallas law firm Baron & Budd and New York firm Weitz & Luxenberg will be joining up with New Hampshire’s local counsel, the Pawa Law Group, to represent Vermont and its litigious attorney-general, William Sorrell.