# Veolia > [!note] Partial page > Built out for the Flint corporate-liability thread and the 2026 Milwaukee contract loss; the global privatization footprint is still to come. **Veolia** is a French multinational providing water, waste, and energy services; its U.S. arm is **Veolia North America (VNA)**. In the [[Flint water crisis]], VNA was the engineering consultant hired by the city in early 2015 to assess the troubled water system — and became, along with engineering firm Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam (LAN), one of the principal corporate defendants in the civil litigation. Plaintiffs alleged VNA failed to flag the absence of corrosion control and downplayed the lead danger. After a 2022 federal trial ended in a mistrial, Michigan Attorney General [[Dana Nessel]] announced a **$53 million settlement** with VNA in February 2025, to be distributed among roughly 26,000 plaintiffs, many of them children. ## KB significance Veolia represents the **corporate-liability and privatization** layer of the Flint story — the role of outside contractors in a system already hollowed out by austerity and emergency management. As a global water-privatization firm, it also connects Flint to broader debates over the private operation of public water systems. ## Milwaukee: losing the contract (August 2026) On August 17, 2026, MMSD's ad hoc committee unanimously recommended replacing Veolia — the incumbent operator — with [[Jacobs Solutions]] on a 10-year wastewater contract worth up to $700M. Jacobs bid $54M lower **and** agreed, as part of its final bid, to end its partnership with [[Palantir]] after local organizing over Palantir's [[ICE]] work. Full Commission vote due September 2026. See [[Jacobs MMSD Palantir Divestiture]]. Worth noting for this page's privatization thread: the fight was not over whether a private operator should run the system, but over *which* one — and the deciding public argument was about a subcontractor's surveillance customers. ## To expand - Corporate structure and global water-privatization footprint - Specific role and contract in Flint (Feb 2015 assessment) - 2022 mistrial and 2025 settlement terms - LAN parallel litigation