After weeks of public debate, Wentworth County commissioners approved a formula Thursday splitting $14.2 million in opioid settlement funds among treatment, prevention, law enforcement and administrative costs.
The Wentworth County Board of Commissioners voted 6-3 Thursday to approve a formula for spending the county’s $14.2 million in opioid litigation settlement funds, directing 55 percent toward treatment and recovery services, 20 percent toward prevention and education programs, 15 percent toward law-enforcement-based diversion efforts, and the remaining 10 percent toward administrative costs and data tracking. The vote followed two additional public hearings after commissioners first debated the funds last month.
“This isn’t exactly what any single commissioner walked in wanting,” said Commissioner Deborah Ashworth, the board’s chair. “But I think it reflects the balance this board needed to strike, and I’d rather have a formula six of us can stand behind than one that barely passed and immediately faces a fight to reverse it.”
A compromise, not a clean win
The final formula fell short of the 30 percent law-enforcement share Commissioner Hank Reyes had proposed, though it doubled the initial 7 percent figure some treatment advocates had floated as a starting point during last month’s hearing. Reyes voted in favor of the final package despite the lower figure, saying he preferred a guaranteed 15 percent to continuing a fight that risked delaying the money’s release altogether.
“Fifteen percent is less than I asked for, and it’s still a meaningful commitment to the diversion programs I care about,” Reyes said. “I decided a guaranteed number now was worth more than holding out for a bigger number that might never come.” Commissioners Ashworth, along with five colleagues, voted in favor of the final formula, while two commissioners who wanted an even larger treatment share and one who wanted a larger law-enforcement allocation voted against it.
This isn’t exactly what any single commissioner walked in wanting. But I think it reflects the balance this board needed to strike, and I’d rather have a formula six of us can stand behind than one that barely passed and immediately faces a fight to reverse it.
Commissioner Deborah Ashworth, Chair, Wentworth County Board of Commissioners
Where the first installment goes
The formula applies immediately to the $2.6 million first installment the county has already received, meaning roughly $1.4 million will flow to treatment and recovery providers this year. Dr. Kwame Asare, director of the Wentworth County Department of Health, said his department will oversee a competitive application process for that funding, open to organizations including Wayfinder Recovery Services and Riverside Free Clinic, both of which testified in favor of the formula last month.
Donna Wysocki, executive director of Wayfinder Recovery Services, called the vote “the single most stable piece of funding news this crisis has produced in years,” while noting her organization will still need to apply competitively rather than receive an automatic allocation. “I’d have preferred a guarantee with my name on it,” Wysocki said. “What I got instead is a fair shot at real money that doesn’t expire in twelve months like almost everything else we rely on.”
Dr. Marisol Vance, medical director of Riverside Free Clinic, said the clinic plans to apply for settlement funding specifically to help offset the two expiring grants she has warned could otherwise force service cuts within the year. “This doesn’t solve our funding problem by itself,” Vance said. “But it’s the first real reason I’ve had in months to think we might not have to cut anything at all.”
Neighborhood targeting left to the application process
The board did not adopt a formal neighborhood-level earmark, despite requests from City Council Members Gary Petrowski and Terrence Boudreaux, who represent Cedar Hollow and Lowertown respectively, that a specific share be directed to the two neighborhoods the county’s own annual report identified as accounting for the majority of overdose deaths. Asare said the department’s grant-scoring criteria will instead weigh proposals partly on the neighborhoods they serve, without a hard percentage requirement.
“We didn’t write a specific neighborhood quota into the formula, but we didn’t ignore the data either,” Asare said. “Applicants serving Lowertown and Cedar Hollow are going to score well on need, because the numbers support that. I think that gets us most of the way to what Council Members Petrowski and Boudreaux were asking for, even without a hard-coded percentage.”
Petrowski said he was satisfied with that explanation, though he said he would be watching the first round of awards closely. “I’ll take Dr. Asare at his word for now,” Petrowski said. “But if the first awards don’t reflect where this crisis is actually concentrated, I’ll be back in front of this board asking why.”
What comes next
Asare said applications for the first round of settlement-funded grants will open within 30 days, with awards expected before the end of the year. He said the department plans to publish award decisions publicly, including the criteria used to score each application, a transparency commitment he said was added directly in response to concerns raised during the earlier debate.
Ashworth said the board will revisit the formula in two years, once the county has data on how the first round of funding performed, rather than treating Thursday’s vote as permanently fixed. “We’re not carving this into stone,” she said. “We’re making our best judgment with the information we have today, and I expect we’ll adjust once we can see what this money actually accomplished.”