CASH FROM OPIOID SETTLEMENT
Hub expects $22 million from multistate lawsuits
The cash will start to flow in this year from the state’s huge opioid settlement, and Boston expects to get more than $22 million of the more than half-billion-dollar agreement.
“Every city and town in Massachusetts is going to benefit from this,” Attorney General Maura Healey said at an event in Boston City Hall on Tuesday.
Healey announced that as the payments roll in from now until 2038, over $210 million is going to cities and towns, and $310 million is going into a statewide opioid recovery and remediation fund.
This money comes from multistate settlements of lawsuits with Cardinal, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen and Johnson & Johnson over their roles in the ongoing opioid crisis for $26 billion, of which $525 million will come to Massachusetts between this summer and 2038.
Of the city-and-town cash, at least $22 million will be heading to Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu, speaking aside Healey and a host of other local mayors, told reporters.
Wu said these are “critical life-saving dollars that will help provide the next step in recovery from these crises.”
Wu said that money will go to recovery services. She didn’t really touch questions about the Mass and Cass area, where there’s still an open-air drug market, and Boston’s Long Island, where the city wants to site a large recovery campus.
Healey wasn’t biting much either. When asked about whether the state will consider using it to create treatment campuses, as has been discussed, she said, “There are a lot of great ideas.”
Healey technically was at Boston City Hall on official office business, but the event allowed the Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner to appear alongside many of the the more prominent mayors in the state, bringing them with her to announce large sums of money for a popular purpose. Kim Driscoll, a candidate for lieutenant governor, was among those in attendance, including other mayors from the North Shore, South Shore, Metrowest and other parts of the state.
Because Wu and Quincy Mayor Tom Koch were in the same room, questions quickly flew about the Long Island bridge, which Boston continues to try to rebuild to access Long Island, and Quincy, where one end of the bridge would land, strenuously opposes it in court.
Wu didn’t comment on the bridge, and Koch too declined to say anything during the press conference, though when asked by reporters afterward he said he continues to oppose it, though he’s going to seek “common ground” with Wu.
“I anticipate having a meeting with Mayor Wu in the near future to discuss a number of issues,” Koch said.