A property owner has sued a Wisconsin city and three insurers to recover cleanup costs for contamination it says the city caused decades ago.
Fox Investments LLC filed the complaint on July 23, 2026, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, naming the City of Kaukauna, Sentry, The Travelers Indemnity Company and Employers Insurance Company of Wausau as defendants. A fictitious "ABC Insurance Company" is also named as a placeholder for any other carrier not yet identified.
According to the filing, Fox and affiliated parties owned all or portions of the property at 400 Fox Shores Drive from about February 1998 to January 2020, where Fox operated an apartment complex known as Fox Shore Apartments.
The complaint alleges the contamination dates to a much earlier period. It states the city owned and operated the site from 1967 to 1974, when it was part of a former railyard with a roundhouse. Fox alleges the city bought the land on an "as is" basis to clear it for redevelopment, and that in November 1974 the city burned down the structures - activity that, "upon information and belief," spread contamination across the property and adjoining land.
The complaint says the contamination was identified in 2018, when a lender's Phase II Environmental Site Assessment found heavy metals - "arsenic, cadmium, lead, selenium and mercury" - in soil, along with PAH constituents "including benzo(b)fluoranthene, fluoranthene, benzo(a)pyrene and chrysene" in groundwater, at levels the filing says exceeded state standards.
Fox says it reported the contamination to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources under the state's Spill Law, and that on January 17, 2019, the DNR named Fox a responsible party and directed it to investigate and remediate. According to the complaint, Fox retained Stantec Consulting to carry out the work, the DNR closed the site on May 10, 2022, and Fox incurred $235,683.63 in investigation and remediation costs.
For insurers, the notable feature is how the carriers are brought in. Fox is pursuing the city's historic liability insurers directly under Wisconsin's direct-action statute, Wis. Stat. § 632.24. The complaint alleges, "upon information and belief," that Sentry, Travelers and Wausau each provided coverage to the city during the years it owned the site, and that those policies cover Fox's claims. The filing does not identify specific policy periods or policy numbers.
Fox brings three claims: cost recovery under the federal CERCLA statute, negligence and unjust enrichment. The complaint alleges the city is "strictly liable" for response costs under CERCLA as a past owner and/or operator "at the time of disposal." On the unjust-enrichment claim, Fox alleges the city later hired the same consultant, Stantec, and benefited from work Fox had already paid for.
The case reflects a familiar long-tail environmental scenario for carriers: coverage allegedly written decades ago, for contamination said to have occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s, surfacing as a claim only recently. Under the direct-action statute, the insurers are named alongside the city rather than left to a separate coverage dispute.
None of these allegations have been tested in court, and no judge has ruled on the claims. The matter is at the complaint stage.
