For islander Laura Wishik, this will be a summer to remember — the time her David and Goliath legal fight against a multinational corporate polluter paid off big for the City of Seattle.

Wishik, as the longtime director of the environmental law section of the Seattle City Attorney’s office, was the city’s lead attorney in its eight-year battle to hold the chemical giant Monsanto responsible for decades of harm caused by its products.

And late last month, Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison announced the conclusion of that fight: Seattle was awarded the largest ever single-city settlement from chemical giant Monsanto — $160 million in exchange for the release of the city’s claims against the manufacturer’s role in polluting city stormwater and the Lower Duwamish with highly toxic PCBs.

To put the victory in perspective, the city’s settlement eclipsed Washington State’s 2020 settlement with Monsanto for $95 million to address harms caused by PCBs. At that time, the state hailed the settlement as Washington’s largest independent environmental recovery against a single entity.

PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), manufactured for use in many home and industrial products by Monsanto from the 1930s until 1977 and banned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) since 1979, have been found to cause cancer and a host of other life-threatening health conditions.

As so-called “forever chemicals,” PCBs do not break down readily, and bio-accumulate in the fat tissues of fish all over the world. This is especially the case in waterways that are lined by industrial corridors, such as the Lower Duwamish — posing grave danger to immigrant communities that have traditionally caught, eaten, and shared contaminated seafood from the river.

In a press release that thanked Wishik, as well as other key players including the private law firm of Keller Rohrback, and the city’s client, Seattle Public Utilities (SPU), City Attorney Davison said the financial settlement will serve to address the huge costs of eliminating the lasting effects of PCBs.

“The settlement money will help care for the Lower Duwamish and mitigate the cost of pollution control to find and remove PCBs,” Davison said — expanding SPU’s “source control” program to identify and address continuing sources of PCBs in paint or caulk that could further contaminate stormwater, as well as to continue to remediate the waterway by dredging contaminated sediments and capping areas with clean materials.

A life of service

As word has spread on Vashon about Wishik’s involvement in the huge settlement from Monsanto, some islanders have recalled her service in local capacities — as a past school board member, Vashon Park District board member, parish council member at St. John Vianney Church, and as the former president of the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust in the late 1990s — a pivotal time when the Land Trust acquired two of its most prized properties, the Shinglemill Creek Preserve and the 90-acre Fisher Pond nature preserve.

Wishik’s legal expertise and steady leadership greatly helped the Land Trust acquire those holdings, said Dave Warren, who was director of the Land Trust during those formative years.

“She’s a fighter and a very smart person,” said Warren.

Likewise, Michael Soltman, former Vashon Island School District superintendent, recalled Wishik’s tenure as school board chair during a purpose-driven time in the 2000s and 2010s when the school district passed a bond measure to build its new high school and launched its locally sourced food program, among other accomplishments.

“Laura, as board chair, was strong and compassionate,” Soltman said. “She was principled, she was fearless and courageous, and she was reasonable in finding a solution and middle ground — I loved working with her,” he said.

A complex legal battle

For Wishik, the effort to hold Monsanto accountable began in 2016, when Baron & Budd, a law firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas, approached the City Attorney’s office, seeking to represent Seattle as well as other municipalities in a lawsuit against the chemical giant.

Baron & Budd’s pitch to the city, Wishik said, focused on the contamination of the Lower Duwamish — an issue she had worked on since 1990 when she was hired by the city.

Wishik said that she talked to then-City Attorney Pete Holmes about Baron & Budd’s offer to represent the city, which he approved.

But there were red flags about that representation almost from the start, according to Wishik.

Early on, when Monsanto sought to dismiss Seattle’s claims, Wishik rewrote what she called Baron & Budd’s “lousy brief” in the case, weaving in her much deeper understanding of the facts and law. She then argued the case herself before Western District of Washington Judge Robert S. Lasnik, who dismissed Monsanto’s claims after hearing her oral argument.

Wishik’s work at that time, Holmes said in an interview, firmly established that state law of the case would be difficult for Monsanto to legally overcome.

As time progressed, Baron & Budd’s case against Monsanto was consolidated into a complex class action suit that in 2022 resulted in a $537.5 million settlement for 2,442 public entities across the country. However, by that time, Seattle had exited its relationship with the law firm and was going it alone against Monsanto, with new representation by the Seattle firm of Keller & Rorhback.

The reason? Wishik said that in 2019, Baron & Budd attorneys had begun to secretly negotiate with Monsanto for the settlement that eventually netted their law firm and other plaintiff’s lawyers over $90 million in attorney fees.

“They worked out this elaborate settlement that would include every local government in the country that had stormwater or wastewater that might be contaminated with PCBs,” she said. “Most of those local governments would get a few thousand dollars to test to see if they had PCBs. And then if they found PCBs, they would have no money to deal with it … and have no future claim. It was, in my opinion, unethical and criminal. I kept hoping the judge would reject it and say, ‘This isn’t a fair settlement.”

Cities and counties that remained in with Baron & Budd’s class action received vastly lower settlement sums than the one Seattle eventually got: about $8 million for the County of Los Angeles; $6.7 for Spokane; and $7.5 million for Long Beach, California, for example.

Of the municipalities and governments that struck out on their own, none received close to the amount that Seattle achieved with its settlement — with even the District of Columbia settling its lawsuit with Monsanto for $52 million.

Baron & Budd had told Seattle it might get $25 million of the settlement it was proposing, Wishik said — but she and Holmes decided to hold out for much more.

“I was convinced we could get more,” Wishik said, adding that Baron & Budd had refused her request to speak to their mediator.

Holmes, recalling his difficult decision to exit the class action suit in 2021, said that Wishik’s persistence and courage in urging him to do so, as well as her formidable skills as a lawyer, had informed his ultimate decision.

“We had some agonizing talks because we could [have] wound up with nothing,” Holmes said. “If it were not for Laura’s superior advocacy and legal analysis, I might well have succumbed to the pressure.”

Wishik, too, recalled Baron & Budd attorneys pushing hard for Seattle to remain in the class action suit — “telling me that I was a bad lawyer and we would never get more money,” she said.

It seemed, at that time, that she was fighting two Goliaths — both Monsanto and Baron & Budd.

“It felt like we were dealing with this very, very big power that they had,” Wishik said. “They had this team of lawyers and they had all the cities and counties signed on, essentially going along with them. I knew some of those [city and county] lawyers and I would talk to them, and they just didn’t see a way to fight on their own.”

Going for gold

In urging the decision to split with Baron & Budd, Wishik found an important ally in Andrew Lee, the current head of Seattle Public Utilities.

“He was adamant that we were going to go for gold,” she said, adding praise for the outside legal team of Keller Rohrback in its able representation of the city in the case.

“They had represented the state of Oregon against Monsanto, so they had a lot of knowledge and a commitment to the case,” Wishik said.

She also recounted how she had not only served as the city’s lead attorney but also a fact witness in the case, because, she said, “after decades of working on the issues, I knew more than others about the facts.”

Her deposition in 2021 by Monsanto’s attorneys — hired from five highly paid firms across the county — lasted a grueling six days, with Wishik being questioned by different attorneys every couple of hours.

“I don’t think it worked, but it was definitely done to keep me off balance,” Wishik said, with a laugh.

The result of all of Wishik’s work, according to Holmes, showed the power of one person.

“When it comes down to a single lawyer, it was a difference between a paltry sum and the largest sum awarded to a municipality — $160 million — and that’s Laura,” he said. “She is a great litigator and a great legal mind. This is the capstone to her career.”

So what’s next for Wishik?

More time with family, doting on her four dogs, and mentoring a young woman from Guatemala who will soon arrive to live with her and her husband on Vashon, she said.

An ease into retirement — which Wishik, at 68, said won’t come right away.

“I won’t fully retire until I’m 70 and can collect my full Social Security benefits,” she said.

She could have made much more money as a corporate lawyer, she said, but she decided long ago that wasn’t something she wanted to do.

“I wanted to be on the white hat side of environmental law,” she said.