HOOSICK FALLS — The village of Hoosick Falls, as a public water provider, joined the 3M PFAS class action lawsuit, putting together testing data for the past nine years or so.

“For the next three years we’re estimating to get about three million dollars,” said Mayor Rob Allen. “That’s going to go a long way to I think recovering a lot of the focus and energy that had been lost over the past decade because of our need to focus all of our energies on the water contamination filtration, investigations, and our new water source.”

This settlement is separate from the legal process with Saint Gobain and Honeywell over PFOA contamination.

The village has had a permanent filtration system since 2017. Its new water source is probably about six months from being operational.

“For a long time, we’ve really wanted to get past this, get past what water contamination questions and PFOA did to the village’s spirit, its economy, and its community,” said Mayor Allen. “We’re very close.”

The 3M PFAS settlement is also separate from the $65 million settlement that was approved two years ago for individual citizens for payments and long-term medical monitoring.

The mayor talked about how some of this 3M PFAS settlement could be used.

“We’ve already had some preliminary talks about some preventative maintenance items that we’ve been putting off just because we haven’t had the funds,” the mayor said. “There’s always municipal equipment, dump trucks, police cruisers, of that sort. There’s also the fact that we have had debt for a fairly long time. And if there’s a couple bonds out there and we can find a way to chip away at some of those bonds, that immediately goes back to our residents.”

The mayor says 3M will provide most of the settlement money and pay in three installments over three years. DuPont will also pay, twice over two years.

Many communities around the country are going through PFAS contamination. Hoosick Falls seems to be ahead of the curve.

“A lot of communities will be using this settlement money that we’re receiving for a new filtration system or for the pursuit of a new water source,” said the mayor. “We have both of those already so it’s going to allow us to take those funds and put it into areas that we know we had to neglect over the past several years because of the water contamination situation.”