Be transparent about opioid settlement cash

The funds received by the state and its counties as part of a settlement with opioid manufacturers and marketers may not come directly from taxpayers, but they are meant to be used for the public good.

Guest editorial

The state’s Opioid Misuse and Addiction Abatement Trust must therefore conduct its business in full view of the public, including abiding by all the rules imposed by the Sunshine Act, as required in the court order that created the trust.

This transparency will both allow for public accountability and ensure funds are used in the most effective way possible.

Unfortunately, since first convening in July of 2022, under the leadership of Tom VanKirk — a health insurance executive who was appointed to lead the board by former Gov. Tom Wolf — the trust has consistently skirted and sometimes brazenly disregarded transparency laws. If the board will not abide by the rules, accountability must come from elsewhere — in this case, Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has the power to remove VanKirk at any time.

The situation makes it difficult for experts and on-theground practitioners to understand what’s driving these decisions and to contribute to ensuring these funds help as many people as possible.

Commonwealth Court created the Opioid Misuse and Addiction Abatement Trust by court order on July 12, 2022. The trust is meant to collect and oversee the distribution of more than $1 billion allotted to the state as part of a $26 billion settlement reached the year prior.

In order to avoid the absurdities that followed the $200 billion tobacco settlement in 1998 — which included states using the funds for public infrastructure, tax relief and in one case marketing for, yes, tobacco farmers — opioid settlement funds can only be used for purposes listed in a document known as “Exhibit E.” The list is long, in order to accommodate different realities and priorities in different regions. Thorough and strategic planning is necessary to ensure funds reach their lifesaving potential.

Shapiro and other state attorneys general who negotiated the settlement, set a target to use 85% of funds specifically for treatment and prevention of opioid use disorder.

But from the beginning, tracking plans for Pennsylvania’s share has been difficult.

According to reporting by SpotlightPA and Pittsburgh NPR affiliate WESA, the trust’s board met privately and without public notice for the first few months of its existence. This occurred despite the express directive in the court’s order that “the proceedings and meetings of this Trust shall be governed by the Sunshine Act.”

Once meetings became public, the board prohibited public comment — another Sunshine Act violation.

Perhaps most troubling of all is that the trust’s business is about to kick into high gear. Friday was the deadline for all county recipients of settlement funds to report their expenditures to the trust, which will judge the suitability of each county’s spending — and can dock funding to counties whose work it doesn’t approve.

But rather than making these monumental decisions in full public view, as the court clearly intended, VanKirk has proposed considering the counties’ submissions in private “working groups” before presenting recommendations to the full board, which will almost certainly rubber-stamp them. SpotlightPA and WESA report that VanKirk has not bothered to offer even a figleaf legal justification for this maneuver, which directly violates the Sunshine Act.

The people of Pennsylvania must have confidence that this potentially transformative billion-dollar infusion of funding is not going to waste. In this, they must count on Shapiro, who took a leading role in the litigation that led to the settlement as attorney general but has a spotty record on transparency. But these funds are a significant part of his legacy: He has nothing to lose and much to gain from communicating to VanKirk that he will not tolerate skirting or ignoring the Sunshine Act in the trust’s business.

Pennsylvanians deserve firm commitments to transparency and accountability from the state opioid settlement trust and from Allegheny County officials. We must not look back, decades from now, at an historic influx of life-saving resources that were not used to save lives.

—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette