The five-person board is directly deciding which organizations should receive a large pot of money from lawsuits against pharmacies and drug companies for their role in the opioid epidemic.
This unconventional style of hearing funding requests at a public meeting was opposed by a health care CEO as well as County Supervisor Mary Rickert, who worried this process could rush the allocation of this money over the next 14 years.
“I think it’s premature for us to go through and pick one group or another,” said Rickert. “I think this is a much more in-depth process that has to take place before we can make those kinds of decisions.”
After listening to funding requests from 20 different groups, supervisors decided to move forward with proposals from at least 10 of them.
Board Chair Kevin Crye saw connections between proposals from Youth Options Shasta and the Shasta County Child Abuse Prevention Coordinating Council and wanted them to bring back a joint funding plan to reach youth for early intervention on drug and alcohol use. He gave them a price tag of around $3-4 million over the next couple of years.
That’s around how much the Shasta County Office of Education asked supervisors to allocate towards addressing youth substance use.
Other projects approved by supervisors include medically assisted treatment programs and a marketing campaign for the dangers of opioids. County staff will have to figure out the costs behind all of these proposals, since they likely don’t have enough in the bank right now to give money to everyone. Supervisor Tim Garman said his initial calculations put the running tally at around $28 million, but didn’t have specifics on how much of that was requested upfront versus over a longer period of time.
Crye is hoping to start allocating funding before the end of the year. The county already has $10 million in settlement funds, with the rest coming over the next 14 years.
