‘Not how funding decisions are supposed to be made’: Mississippi opioid settlement council members favor own organizations for grants ...Middle East

In a rectangle of desks outlined by some of the most powerful Mississippians, Andy Taggart took control of the conversation.

The former candidate for state attorney general is a member of the Mississippi Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council, and he speaks frequently at meetings. The group will recommend how lawmakers should spend hundreds of millions of lawsuit settlement dollars earmarked for preventing more drug overdose deaths. 

On that November afternoon in the Mississippi Supreme Court building, as the group discussed how the state should spend up to roughly $100 million, Taggart preemptively asked for forgiveness for monopolizing the conversation. But he had a question for Dr. Dan Edney, head of the Mississippi State Department of Health. 

Edney, a co-chair of the council, sat across the room from Taggart. The Health Department submitted one of 126 applications requesting money, which were reviewed by one of the council’s eight subcommittees. 

“I was on the prevention and treatment subcommittee that gave a very high score to the Department of Health project,” Taggart told the council members. The agency asked for about $5 million to expand addiction treatment in rural areas. 

Taggart and his subcommittee colleagues scored the application one tier below the proposals most highly recommended to be funded. He seemed surprised to learn it wasn’t in the highest category.

“Maybe it is Tier 2,” Taggart said. “I gave you a high score, Dr. Edney.” 

“Thank you,” Edney responded as other council members burst into laughter – the type of jesting common among people who work closely together. Knowing that the tiers and project recommendations were yet to be finalized, Taggart continued. 

“My question is, can you help us better understand it?” he asked Edney. “I was impressed, because I knew the heart of what was intended. But I don’t know the mechanics of what was intended.”

Edney obliged, and went into further details about the project. 

The opportunity to explain his application demonstrates one of the advantages of being an opioid settlement council member who represents an organization requesting part of the settlement money. 

Just one floor below where the state’s most difficult legal questions are argued in front of state Supreme Court justices, multiple council members who represent opioid settlement applicants used time to further explain why proposals they closely work with deserved funding. 

Those opportunities weren’t extended to applicants who didn’t have council representation, at least at the Nov. 3 meeting. 

“That’s problematic,” Greg Spore, a state public defender and opioid settlement council member, said after the meeting. “Who’s lobbying for them?” 

Of the roughly $142 million requested from applications scored in the top two tiers, over $94 million was sought by organizations with representatives who serve on the council. 

When asked after the meeting about his back-and-forth with Taggart, Edney said he was not and will not be involved in scoring his department’s opioid settlement applications. 

“I was answering questions that were posed to me,” he told Mississippi Today. 

Taggart, who has for decades been involved in state Republican politics, said he deferred all public comments related to the council to its chair and vice-chairs — Attorney General Lynn Fitch, Department of Mental Health Executive Director Wendy Bailey, and Edney. Fitch’s office declined to speak on behalf of Taggart, and Edney and Bailey didn’t respond to Taggart’s email. 

Each year since 2022, Mississippi has been paid tens of millions of opioid settlement dollars, money that is supposed to help respond to the overdose public health crisis. But 15% of those dollars — the money controlled by the state’s towns, cities and counties — is unrestricted and being spent with almost no public knowledge. Mississippi Today spent the summer finding out how almost every local government receiving money has been managing the money over the past three years.Read The Series

The council, only a few months old, adopted a rule over the summer that prevents its members from voting on applications they’re closely associated with. But Matthew Steffey, a Mississippi College School of Law professor, said members have other avenues to lobby for projects they consider important. 

Adopting rules that prohibit applicants from voting on their own applications is the absolute minimum ethical standard, Steffey said. It would be stronger, he said, to require applicants to leave the room whenever their applications are being discussed by the council.

“Most of the persuasion happens before the vote,” Steffey said. 

Michelle Williams, Fitch’s chief of staff, said in an email to Mississippi Today that the council is made up of leaders from a variety of backgrounds related to addressing substance use disorder. 

“These are also the people who may be best able to use the funds to continue their work responding to the opioid crisis for Mississippi and it would disadvantage the State’s response to prohibit them from applying,” Williams wrote.

She added that many council members sought clarification from applicants throughout the review process, but she did not provide examples. Neither Fitch nor Williams answered Mississippi Today’s question asking whether the attorney general believes the council needs stronger rules on ethics. 

Edney said he can’t speak to whether the process has been fair to applicants who don’t have council representation. Bailey echoed Williams’ sentiment in an email, saying it was always likely that council members would also be applicants. 

Two of the Department of Mental Health’s three opioid settlement applications received the highest grades of the 126 proposals. Bailey said she is always open to reviewing and strengthening procedures to improve the council’s fairness and public confidence.

“We all share the same commitment to accountability and integrity in how these funds are allocated,” she said. 

The council is set to meet again on Dec. 2, and members are expected to further discuss the applications ranked in the top two tiers and other applications the council flagged at the last meeting. The group is required by state law to finalize recommendations for the Legislature by Dec. 7 — 30 days before the start of 2026 regular legislative session. 

Spore, the public defender, said he wishes many applicants ranked in lower tiers could further explain their proposals to the council so they could share why their aims are important and unique. 

One of them was Grace House in Jackson, which offers affordable sober living as women recover from addictions. Spore said when he worked for the Hinds County Public Defender’s Office, one of his clients entered the program as a condition of receiving probation. 

“She completed the program there, and she was thriving,” he said. 

Grace House applied for $600,000 to create more treatment options for women who’ve recently finished intensive addiction rehabilitation. Stacey Howard, its executive director, said many Jackson-area programs that provided these services have shuttered in recent years because of funding challenges.

The council scored Grace House’s application in the third tier, and the proposal is unlikely to be discussed at the next meeting. Howard said she has received no information about why her organization received the grade it did. 

Because the secondary program was aimed at people without health insurance, she thinks a rejected grant proposal would be a loss for the most financially vulnerable Mississippians.

“If you’ve got money, then you can afford to go places, even out of state if you need to, to get treatment,” Howard said.

Brittany Denson, the sober living home’s operations coordinator and former Grace House participant, said on-the-ground organizations like hers have important knowledge on the prevention, treatment and recovery needs — information the Department of Mental Health has said the state doesn’t have a comprehensive handle on. The settlement money could be an opportunity to further act on that knowledge.

Organizations like Grace House have operated without opioid settlement funding for years, and Denson said she hopes that will continue even if the Legislature doesn’t invest in them. But she thinks discounting them for politically connected groups is a missed opportunity to end the public health crisis that has permanently taken many of her friends away. 

“It’s going to kill people.”

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