More than $10.5 million has flowed into Rhode Island cities and towns so far from legal settlements with opioid manufacturers, distributors and sellers with no explicit requirements that the municipalities publicly report how the money is spent.
The direct payments to cities and towns are part of nationwide settlement agreements with companies like Johnson & Johnson, McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen which state and local governments accused of flooding their communities with addictive opioid painkillers.
Rhode Island is required by law to report its share of the more than $190 million in settlement money – which began flowing into the state in 2022 and is expected to continue until 2038 – to the Governor, state legislative leaders and the state Attorney General. But there are no such public reporting requirements for the projected $29 million in settlement cash paid directly to Rhode Island cities and towns.
“We are in danger of not having a record of how these settlement monies are actually spent,” said Christine Minhee, an attorney by training and founder of OpioidSettlementTracker.com. None of these settlement funds, she said, should be “spent in the shadows.”
Even finding out precisely how much each city or town is receiving was nearly impossible because neither the local governments nor the state had publicly reported the information – until now.
After requests from The Public’s Radio, the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office released a detailed summary showing exact dollar amounts of the settlement money allocated to cities and towns. (The state’s summaries, unlike those documented by OpioidSettlementTracker.com and the national KFF Health News, also include money Rhode Island received from separate settlements with Teva and Allergan.)
The payments range from less than $800 to the Town of Exeter, to more than $2 million to the City of Providence.
Mihee’s group and the national nonprofit Vital Strategies have published a state-by-state guide on opioid settlements. The guide shows Massachusetts as one of 15 states that have promised to publicly report 100% of their settlement funds, compared with an 80% public reporting commitment in Rhode Island.
Though cities and towns “are not required to proactively report their use of settlement funds, they are responsible for ensuring that they meet their obligations to use the funds in accordance with the terms of the settlements,’’ Rhode Island Atty. Gen. Peter F. Neronha’s spokesman, Brian Hodge, said in a statement. As signatories to the settlements, he said, “they are ultimately accountable to the court as well as their residents and constituents regarding how they spend these public funds. Those expenditures, like any other municipal expenditures, are a matter of public record.”
The Public’s Radio surveyed Rhode Island cities and towns that received more than $200,000 each in settlements. Six municipalities - Providence, Warwick, West Warwick, Johnston, North Kingstown and Barrington - reported that they had spent or allocated some of their settlement money and described what it was used for. But none of the cities or towns that responded to the survey have reported the expenditures in ways that are easily accessible to the general public.
Providence, which received the biggest payout – $2.27 million – has spent $86,000 and has contracted to use another $400,000 for behavioral health outreach workers and recovery support services, Patricia Socarras, the mayor’s spokeswoman, said in an email. The expenditures will be reported to the Mayor’s Coalition on Behavioral Health. Any settlement fund expenditures also will be noted, she said, in the city’s forthcoming Overdose Prevention Plan.
Warwick, which received the second-largest payout – $1.05 million – has spent just over $51,500 and encumbered another $50,000 of its settlement money, mostly to pay a social worker who is embedded with the Warwick Police Department, Elizabeth A. Tufts, a spokeswoman from the city’s mayor, said in an email. The settlement expenditures will be recorded in the city’s next annual financial statement for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023.
State public health officials have offered guidance to cities and towns about strategies for deciding how to spend the money. But how transparent local governments are about their settlement spending depends on each city or town.
For example, Woonsocket officials declined to answer questions from The Public’s Radio about its settlement money. The former mill city, which has the state’s highest rate of overdose deaths, has collected more than $409,000 in settlement cash. But neither the city solicitor nor the finance director would answer questions from The Public’s Radio about its settlement funds. Instead, the finance director suggested submitting a public records request.
The lack of transparency troubles Jennifer Dubois, who lost her 19-year-old son, Clifton, to a drug overdose in 2021 in Woonsocket.
“I would really ask the City [of] Woonsocket to take a look and just say, what if this was your child?’’ Dubois said. “What would you want readily available for that child?
On the one year anniversary of her son’s death, Dubois joined a march to Woonsocket City Hall to protest the city’s refusal to consider hosting a supervised drug consumption site, which the state legalized in June 2021. This year, she paid to post a billboard in downtown Woonsocket with her son’s photograph next to the words “FOREVER 19 CARRY NARCAN.”
Dubois said she hopes that city officials who will decide how the settlement money is spent will “really listen” with open minds to the experts, community advocates and people who have lost loved ones to overdoses.
“I'm looking to make sure that this money is really being used to directly help the opioid crisis,’’ she said. “The money doesn't need to be used for more law enforcement.”
Dubois said that she doesn’t think anybody is purposely hiding anything, but said that she’ll be paying close attention.
“Everybody in the city has a right to know how (the settlement money) is spent,’’ Dubois said. “It should be public knowledge.”
Rhode Island requires that cities and towns use 100% of the money to “abate the harms of the opioid epidemic,’’ more than the 85% that most other state settlements stipulate.
Cities and towns also can use their funds to offset past expenditures that meet the requirements, as long as the municipality passes a resolution to do so, according to the Memorandum of Agreement.
Rhode Island could enact more stringent reporting rules like those in Massachusetts, where municipalities that received $35,000 or more are required to report their opioid abatement plans and expenditures to the state. (A summary of Massachusetts’ settlements by Vital Strategies is available here.)
Rhode Island Senator Joshua Miller said that he would consider legislation to mandate public reporting of settlement funds if cities and towns don’t do so voluntarily. Miller, a Democrat from Cranston, sits on the state’s Opioid Settlement Advisory Committee which oversees the state’s 80% share of Rhode Island’s settlement funds.
“The whole idea of the advisory (committee) on the other 80% is very transparent,” Miller said, “so why shouldn't the rest of it be?”
This story was reported with assistance from KFF Health News (formerly known as Kaiser Health News).
Health Reporter Lynn Arditi can be reached at larditi@thepublicsradio.org. Follow her on Twitter @LynnArditi
