“After careful consideration, I selected Alisha to fill this role because I know that she shares my vision of intentionally using these settlement funds to help Ohioans struggling with substance use disorder for years to come,” DeWine said. “Alisha has turned her passion and life experiences into a career promoting and developing policies that support long-term recovery and the advancement of the behavioral health field.”
OneOhio Recovery Foundation is the state’s primary tool to disperse the $1.8 billion in settlements received after litigating pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors for their role in the national opioid epidemic.
The foundation will disperse 55% of that $1.8 billion, or about $990 million. Dan Tierney, a spokesperson for DeWine, told the Dayton Daily News that the foundation is intended to create statewide programs designed to reach vulnerable Ohioans in all parts of the state in order to curb opioid abuse and promote mental health.
Tierney said the governor’s office wasn’t interested in allocating all of the money to local cities, villages or townships proportionally because, ultimately, those individual settlement amounts would be too small to actually help abate opioid abuse.
“The majority of the money is going to be managed by this foundation to create statewide programs that will provide services to these smaller local communities that, absent an organization like OneOhio, would not be able to be done with those small checks that would probably only be a few hundred dollars,” Tierney said in an interview with this news organization.
As for the remaining settlement funds, 30% of the total will be used as direct compensation to local municipalities and 15% of the total will be reserved for the state, according to Tierney.
The OneOhio Recovery Foundation will meet in public and, according to Tierney, is meant to be a relatively transparent process that will loop in local officials. However, it was decided in the state’s recent operating budget that the foundation will be exempt from some aspects of the state’s public records laws; an exemption that means the foundation will be able to negotiate confidentially.
The public records exemption, along with the the budget’s contention that OneOhio Recovery Foundation board members were not public officials, was an area of concern for Ohio House Minority Leader Allison Russo, D-Upper Arlington. On the budget’s day of passage, shortly after former House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced in the biggest bribery scandal in state history, Russo said the foundation had a “lack of oversight” built-in to the process and called for more government accountability.
“What we’ve done in this budget, is we’ve created this OneOhio Recovery fund, and we’ve said, ‘You know what? You’re a private entity. You’re not subject to public records requests, nor, if you serve on this board, are you considered a public official,’” Russo said. She contended that such exemptions “opened the door” for malfeasance.
Tierney said transparency has always been a part of the plan.
“That is certainly the governor’s expectation that that’s how this entity operates, and certainly there will be a lot of transparency involved in publicizing the information on a voluntary basis so the public has confidence that the money is being well spent,” Tierney said.
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