The West Virginia First Foundation, a nonprofit board with millions of dollars in opioid settlement money available to put toward relief for state residents, had a tough talk about moving that along faster.
“From my perspective, right now, our pace has been quite frankly, glacial with regards to this. I mean, I hear all this stuff. And I recognize that we need to be careful and have needs assessment but these are things we could have been working on in the last three months or months,” said Parkersburg Mayor Tom Joyce, a member of the foundation board.
“And it’s just, it’s frustrating me because folks that at least in this region, want to know, when can I make an application to expand my program? When can I make an application to start a new program and all I can tell them is well, we got a meeting next week. We’ll see.”
West Virginia will have about $1 billion following a number of lawsuits against distributors, wholesalers and pharmacies. The money is still coming in.
The “West Virginia First Memorandum of Understanding” lays out the terms for the state and the many counties and cities that may receive a portion of settlement dollars to push back against ongoing drug addiction issues.
A major portion of the millions of dollars, 72.5 percent, goes to the private, nonstock, nonprofit Opioid Foundation, which will now distribute the funding for work toward abating the opioid epidemic in communities around the state.
The money can go to a variety of efforts, but the state has such needs that several members of the board today expressed urgency to get moving. They expressed their views during a two-hour meeting.
“I have a lot of people who are here on me asking regularly, what’s going on what’s happening? When can we request funds? And I keep having to say, I’m not sure yet. We don’t we don’t have a concrete plan in place. There’s a lot of work that has to be done,” said board member Tim Czaja, community corrections director in Berkeley County.
“I recognize that this this does need to be done very thoughtfully and appropriately and we don’t want to just be throwing money out the door just because we feel like we want to do it. It needs to be done properly. So I trust that you’re gonna you’re gonna put in work needed to make it happen appropriately.”
Jonathan Board, executive director of the West Virginia First Foundation, agreed with that sense of urgency. Board was just hired in May and continues work to get underway, like hiring staff. He said the group needs to be able to operate “with the understanding that we are moving at lightspeed with every intention of getting this done as quickly as we can.”
He added that additional help would be beneficial because “I’ve got work product ready to go.”
Matthew Christiansen, a board member who also serves as the state health officer, proposed focusing on some goals that could be achieved in the near future.
“I think in the early term it would be helpful for us to issue some guidance about what our funding priorities might look like in this first wave of funding,” he said.
He continued, “In the short-term there are some areas that we’ve discussed that are low-hanging fruit that are huge needs. Some of the things we’ve talked about are prevention, reentry workforce initiatives. The more we can constrain that on the front end, the more clear we can be to the people applying about what will be a successful grant application on the back end. If we open up broadly without some level of structure, it’s going to have a flood of applications all of which are going to be good ideas coming from good people and we’re not going to be able to fund them all because of the amount that we’re going to get.”