The Mississippi Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council is meeting Monday in Jackson with the goal of helping state lawmakers move closer in spending tens of millions of dollars to prevent deadly overdoses.
This spring, lawmakers established this council to make recommendations on how Mississippi should spend most of its money from national lawsuits related to their roles in the opioid epidemic, a crisis that has claimed over 10,000 Mississippi lives since 2000. The council, overseen by Attorney General Lynn Fitch, is set to oversee around $300 million of Mississippi’s expected $421 million of settlement money over the next 15 years.
The meeting is set to take place at the Carroll Gartin Justice Building at 1 p.m., and a livestream can be accessed through this link.
The full council last met in August, when it finalized a call for applications on how to spend Mississippi’s money. That call closed in September. Subcommittees, each made up of some of the group’s dozens of members, have been meeting since to evaluate those applications.
Fitch’s office recently published a summary of those applications that assigns each request a score between 0 and 100, with 100 being the most qualified for funding. The council created 10-point tiers based on how highly it recommends the Legislature funds each project.
The subcommittees scored 21 applications in the top tier of grants — requests that asked for just over $34 million of opioid settlement funds. Around $23 million of those high-scored applications were from organizations with representatives serving on this council. Many of those representatives are the top officials of the requesting group. For example, two applications from the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, which is led by council co-vice chair Wendy Bailey, were the top-scored projects.
The subcommittees did recommend some funding adjustments even from highly-scored applicants. It suggested adjusting grant funding for Oceans Healthcare, whose chief executive officer Mark Stovall serves on the council, from roughly $4 million to just over $2 million.
Committee members are supposed to recuse themselves from evaluating grant applications they’re directly or indirectly involved with, according to the council’s rules. There’s no evidence any council member had a hand in evaluating their own application.
A state law enacted this year says the committee must finalize its recommendations by Dec. 1. Lawmakers are expected to approve or reject those suggestions during their 2026 session that begins in January.
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