A state commission is rolling out a new way for local governments to report how they’re using opioid settlement money, with plans to make the spending details easily accessible to the public.
Kentucky is slated to get over $980 million from financial settlements with companies accused of contributing to America’s opioid crisis. Half of the money is divided up among local governments while the state’s opioid commission manages the rest. The money started flowing in 2022, with more than a decade of payments to go.
Governments sharing in the national, multibillion-dollar opioid settlements are supposed to devote most of the funds toward lessening the crisis, such as addiction prevention and treatment. In Kentucky, the state opioid commission is empowered to monitor local governments’ spending.
However, the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting found last fall that most cities and counties failed to meet the state’s original reporting requirements.
Now, the commission is replacing the old rules.
Christopher Evans, chair of the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, said this is “blood money,” and “families who have suffered from the scourge of the drug crisis” deserve to know how it’s deployed.
“We recognize where the money comes from – the pain that was caused for the commonwealth to receive the money – and we want to really be strategic and smart with how we use the money,” he said. “And this will help us be better in doing that.”
Evans told KyCIR this revamped approach took months of work, beginning after Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman took office in January 2024. He said “being able to improve our processes is something you should expect to see from us, always.”
Here’s what’s changing
KyCIR reported there was confusion among local governments about how to comply with the state’s prior rules, which said to file an annual report detailing their settlement spending but also notarized quarterly forms in which they promised they hadn’t misspent the money.
Now, the opioid commission is ditching the quarterly forms – which, KyCIR found last year, many cities and counties weren’t filing regularly anyway – and instead asking local governments to file just one annual report.
The new report asks each government to use an online portal to report how much settlement money it received and how much it spent, with specifics on where the dollars went and how they were used.
“Although we are asking for more data, we did not want it to be onerous,” Evans said. “We wanted to make sure that we made it as clear, concise and user-friendly as possible.”
Cities and counties may spend opioid settlement funds on services they provide in-house or give it out as grants to outside organizations. Under the state’s new reporting process, recipients will send progress reports to local governments, which will be included in their annual reports to the opioid commission.
The first round of reports are due August 31, detailing opioid settlement spending for the 2024-25 fiscal year that ended in June.
Evans said a public dashboard will display spending data from the reports local governments file, but that won’t happen right away because the commission is building out that online tool.
Eventually, he said, “people will be able to go there and identify their county and see what has been reported in terms of the use of the local funds. … It will be a one-stop-shop where people can find that information.”
The commission’s new reporting process only applies to the most recent fiscal year, but Evans said they hope to receive some information on how local governments spent settlement funds before then, as well.
“We're moving forward from here, but our hope is that we're going to be able to get data from prior expenditures,” he said. “We know a number of them [cities and counties] haven't spent their funds yet, so that will also be helpful for us to understand.”
The Kentucky League of Cities’ director of municipal law, Morgain Patterson, said the spending dashboard could help cities decide how to deploy their settlement funds because they’ll see what their peers have done.
She also said the state’s new reporting system is easier to use, and the opioid commission and attorney general’s office have been training local officials to ensure they’re prepared.
“Unlike a lot of reporting systems I’ve seen, they’ve done a really good job of trying to make sure that everybody is involved and understands,” she said.
Jennifer Twyman is an organizer with VOCAL-KY, a group that advocates for opioid settlement funds to be spent judiciously in Kentucky on harm reduction and other evidence-based public health efforts.
Twyman supports the state commission’s plan to post details about cities’ and counties’ settlement spending online, saying, “I think the transparency is much-needed.”
Twyman said she struggled with substance use for many years.
“I could’ve lost my life, and lots of my friends are now no longer on the planet,” she said.
The payouts are meant to help stop that cycle.
“This is really, really, vitally important to me,” she said.
