A bill that would boost transparency of how Maine’s opioid settlement funds are being spent advanced out of committee last month.

Lawmakers on the health and human services committee unanimously voted in favor of L.D. 110, An Act to Require Reporting on the Expenditure of Opioid Settlement Funds by Certain Municipalities and County Governments.

The bill would require that direct share subdivisions — the 39 counties, cities and towns that directly receive a portion of the state’s opioid settlement funds — provide detailed annual reports to the attorney general’s office on how much money they received and spent during the prior calendar year.

An amendment supported by the committee would make those reports publicly available by requiring the attorney general to forward them to the Legislature. If the bill passes the full Legislature, the first reporting deadline would be January 15, 2026.

The nationwide settlements are the result of years of litigation with the major pharmaceutical players accused of fueling the opioid epidemic. Maine’s $230 million share of the settlements are divided in three: 50% to the Maine Recovery Council, 30% to the direct share subdivisions and 20% to the attorney general’s office.

There is little oversight for how the 39 counties, cities and towns spend their share of the money. The localities must adhere to the allowable uses laid out in the settlements, but neither the memorandum nor state statute requires the subdivisions to report their expenditures to the state or the public.

Amy Clark, a Bangor resident and the board president of the Maine Recovery Advocacy Project, or ME-RAP, told lawmakers at a March public hearing that it is “deeply troubling that those who have most at stake are not provided with a clear and accessible picture of how these officials are spending this money.”

The settlement funds are “blood money,” several testified, and those directly affected by the opioid epidemic deserve at the very least to know how it’s being spent.

“This money belongs to me and those in my community, those I have lost, their families and the public,” said Nick Loscocco, an organizer with ME-RAP.

Loscocco and Tess Parks, ME-RAP’s policy organizer and a member of the Maine Recovery Council, said that organizers began reaching out to local officials last year for information on their spending with various degrees of success.

Other options to find information, Loscocco said, are to dig through meeting minutes, which he said could be “futile,” or submitting Freedom of Access Act requests. FOAA requests, however, require a time commitment and a level of knowledge that the general public may not have, he said.

This “should not be about creating burdensome processes,” Clark said, “but about holding governments accountable and (ensuring) the promises made in the settlements are kept.”

Other supporters of the bill include the Maine Municipal Association.

Over the past two years, The Maine Monitor has reached out to local officials from each subdivision multiple times in an effort to shed light on localities’ spending decisions. Over the summer of 2023, The Monitor sent administrators a survey asking how much money they’ve spent or allocated, how they would describe their understanding of the approved uses, if they’ve formed an advisory committee or created a grant process and their biggest questions or concerns. Officials from 28 subdivisions responded.

A year ago, The Monitor sent a second survey, asking officials again about money spent or allocated and asking them to detail their process for determining how money gets spent, how they are measuring outcomes and if they are working with any community organizations, consultants and/or other municipalities, counties or the state. Thirty-five subdivisions responded.

Officials described a wide variety of approaches for how to distribute the money. A third of respondents to last year’s survey spent money on law enforcement and jail programs, including medication-assisted treatment programs in county jails, mental health liaisons for police departments or handheld drug-checking devices.

Localities have also invested a significant amount of funds toward recovery centers and housing assistance programs. York County Commissioners, for example, approved spending its entire $4.6 million allocation to build a 58-bed recovery center in Alfred. Other localities had yet to spend any money and were still determining their decision process.

Opponents of L.D. 110 said that the bill would add to already burdensome reporting requirements.

The Maine County Commissioners Association, which represents all 16 counties, said it takes “no issue with what we assume is the purpose of L.D. 110 — transparency and accountability regarding expenditures of opioid settlement funds.” However, “our concern with this bill is that it seems both unnecessary and unduly burdensome,” the co-chairs of the legislative policy committee said in written testimony.

“County commissioners are happy to share their county’s opioid settlement expenditures with any entity that asks, as counties have done with reporters and other interested parties in recent years,” they said, but L.D. 110 “would mean one more mandatory report to draft for under-resourced county governments without relieving any duty to continue providing information under FOAA or other inquiries.”

The Maine Service Centers Coalition, which is comprised of 26 cities and towns, said that because subdivisions must comply with the approved uses established in the settlements, “the reporting requirement in L.D. 110 would be redundant and add yet another state-required administrative task onto the workloads of our staffs, who are already stretched thin.”

Last year, the attorney general’s office put nearly $2.5 million of its funds toward a resource center based at the University of Southern Maine’s Catherine Cutler Institute. The Maine Opioid Settlement Support Center, or MOSS Center, began offering technical support to subdivisions in September, from how to set up a grant proposal to providing data for needs assessments, director Dr. Lindsey Smith and outreach and communications coordinator Jennah Godo told The Monitor last month.

Over the next several months, the center is working on launching data dashboards detailing how the Maine Recovery Council, the attorney general’s office and the subdivisions are spending their money.

This will fulfill the recovery council’s obligation in the MOU to publish a publicly facing dashboard on spending and outcomes. Subdivisions will submit their data on an entirely voluntary basis, however.

Brendan O’Neil, the assistant attorney general in charge of the opioid settlements, told lawmakers at the work session that the MOSS Center’s work with subdivisions, including their spending surveys, could potentially fulfill the reporting requirements in L.D. 110.

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.