Gmoser predicted “in a couple years or less it’ll be blown as if it never happened and there won’t be one drug user that’s going to benefit a quarter from it.”
“All of this money, the major amount is with the commissioners, $4 million, everybody else they just get a handful here and a handful there,” he said. “All of this money, especially with the folks that receive the least amount, it’s all going to be pissed away. It’ll never be used for anything productive because nobody has enough money individually to do anything productive. Period.”
He suggested all of the entities should pool their money and collectively decide — with advice from experts — the best way to spend it, to insure the biggest impact. He said they should develop a plan to directly help drug addicts — like adding recovery beds countywide —but also invest some of the money, “so every year that money would grow and could continue to be used, otherwise it’ll evaporate.”
In 2017, as Ohio Attorney General, now Gov. Mike DeWine was one of the first in the nation to sue opioid makers and drug distributors for their role in flooding the market with massive amounts of highly addictive opioids.
The first settlement payout came in July 2022 and it was part of Attorney General Dave Yost’s OneOhio settlement with the major distributors. It stemmed from investigations by Yost and other state attorneys general into whether the three distributors fulfilled their legal duty to refuse to ship opioids to pharmacies that submitted suspicious drug orders.
He negotiated on behalf of all the governmental jurisdictions in the state including counties, cities and others. Under the OneOhio plan, 55% goes to the OneOhio Recovery Foundation, 30% to local governments and 15% to the state. Most Butler County jurisdictions signed onto the settlement. There has been a tandem multidistrict litigation going through the federal district court in Cleveland.
Nearly every community countywide joined most of the lawsuits and thus far have collected $7.18 million and spent $966,857. Settlements continue to trickle in.
Commissioner Don Dixon said this is one of the reasons the commissioners have held several countywide meetings to discuss issues like the homeless situation and the explosive property tax fiasco. He said he supports Gmoser’s idea so they’re “just not buying something to be buying something. We have to buy something with a plan.”
“I concur with Mike Gmoser, that’s the purpose of the committee was to have all the governmental entities involved, have a hand in even just the concept of countywide,” Dixon said. “Pooling our money and not duplicating services and deciding how we can get the most value out of those dollars.”
The commissioners haven’t touched their allocation yet, but there has been talk of using some of it to address the homeless problem. Middletown has spent the most thus far, allocating $518,797 of the $758,280 the city has already received on various opioid programs.
Hamilton has collected $918,001 and spent $305,306 to buy an ambulance. The majority of the 17 communities that have received settlements haven’t yet decided how to spend the funds.
The Journal-News polled officials in the largest cities and townships to see if they are willing to consider Gmoser’s suggestion. Fairfield, Ross and West Chester township officials said they’d rather keep the money local.
West Chester Twp. has spent $26,713 of its $443,332 on first responder behavioral health programs. Trustee Mark Welch said he is willing to consider it but “we’d just be giving the money away and we probably wouldn’t see the benefit we’d see if we just used it ourselves.”
“I’m sure that the strings would say that the county is going to use this in the way they best see fit and I don’t think it’s necessarily going to benefit West Chester,” Welch said.
Fairfield Twp. Fiscal Officer Shelly Schultz said she and the township administrator decided they won’t ask the trustees to consider pooling their money — they’ve received $112,411 and spent $49,238 on a school programs and remote control cars used in drug prevention events.
“We need to use our money to pay for things we need in the township,” she said. “We are currently short in fire, police and roads department and operating in the red for all three, so we need to spend any money we have in our township.”
Likewise, Ross Twp. Fiscal Officer Julie Joyce-Smith said the trustees unanimously voted to keep using their $26,947 — $15,500 is already committed — for a new Flock camera system, “They felt the constituents of Ross and the surrounding areas were better served by this use.”
Officials in Fairfield, Hamilton, Liberty Twp., Middletown, Monroe, Oxford and Oxford Twp. said they either would be willing to discuss it or need more information about the proposal.
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