MOULTRIE — Regional delegates voted for nominees to represent Southwest Georgia on the Georgia Opioid Settlement Advisory Commission and the Regional Advisory Council.

The Association County Commissioners of Georgia and the Georgia Municipal Association facilitated the regional meeting of delegates Tuesday at the Colquitt County Courthouse Annex. County Commissioner Marc DeMott represented Colquitt County.

Dave Wills, executive director of the ACCG led the meeting, with the assistance of Beth Brown, director of administration and operations of the ACCG.

The Georgia Opioid Settlement Advisory Commission, or GOSAC, was established last year by Gov. Brian Kemp to serve as Georgia’s Government Participation Mechanism regarding the allocation and use of the State Opioid Funds that will be awarded over a period of time.

Colquitt County, along with Baker, Ben Hill, Berrien, Brooks, Calhoun, Cook, Decatur, Dougherty, Early, Echols, Grady, Irwin, Lanier, Lee, Lowndes, Miller, Mitchell, Seminole, Terrell, Thomas, Tift, Turner, and Worth counties, make up the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities’ Region Four, and delegates from those counties were in attendance.

Wills said that in November, Kevin Tanner, the commissioner of the DBHDD, reached out to him and asked for help.

“He asked if the ACCG would help to facilitate the election of members to each of six regional advisory councils and three members to the Georgia Opioid Settlement Advisory Commission,” he said. “This is such an important topic or issue that the state faces and it’s really significant in terms of the dollars that are coming in from the settlement.”

He told the audience that Georgia entered into a memorandum of understanding with three pharmaceutical distributors of opioid products and, as a result, the State is getting “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“I’ve divided it up into two pots. There is $517 million that’s being paid over an 18-year period, and there is $121.7 million being paid over a nine-year period,” Wills said.

He said, relative to today’s purposes, the DBHDD decided to use how they determine the State’s regions and $191.6 million has to be spent on a regional basis.

“So, six regions. It has to be spent on a regional basis. So, that’s what we’re talking about in terms of funding,” he said.

Will said that he was not completely sure but after doing some research, he believed the money would be allocated to the regions based on three specific metrics: opioid use disorder rates, opioid related deaths and the amount of opioids distributed in the region.

“The MOU specifically says that every three years, the distribution has to be looked at and revised according to some other metrics including the number of fatalities from opioids, the amount of milligram morphine equivalent shipped into the region and addiction treatment MME’s shipped to the region,” he said.

He added that the amount of money was likely not going to be static but will shift regionally.

“Hypothetically, let’s say that you get an initial round of funding and you used it and you solved your problems. There’s no more of these criteria to be even looked at. Well, then, you would get zero but that’s ideally what you want. You don’t want to have a problem that you have to try to mitigate,” he said.

He also told them that the funds that are available have to be used for prevention, treatment, recovery and harm reduction.

Wills went on to explain that GOSAC was comprised of eight members, which includes a non-voting chair. He said the chair and three of the members were appointed by the governor, and the Georgia Association of Community Service Boards appointed one member.

“So, that leaves, in the total group, three that you will be responsible, here today, for helping to elect to the commission,” Wills said.

He said the three would be elected by them and all of the other regions and this was the fifth of six meetings that they’ve held in the state to facilitate it.

There are about 278 individuals, representing a variety of organizations across the state, that can cast ballots, he added.

“Once the votes have been tallied state-wide for the GOSAC, we will report that to Kevin Tanner, the Commissioner of the DBHDD, and we’ll do the same with respect to the regional advisory councils and that vote is definitive, here, today. Whatever you say, carries the day,” he said.

Wills told them that, in the MOU, it states that each regional advisory council needs to have three members and not more than seven with the caveat that there can be an eighth non-voting share.

“What we have proposed state-wide is that each RAC have seven members. Three of those members, by virtue of the MOU, are mandatory. Those mandatory members are one from a county board of health, one from the executive membership of a community service program and one who is either a sheriff or a designated representative of the sheriff,” he said.

He said, after extensive conversation with the DBHDD, they agreed that they would recommend four other categories of representatives including one from academia, working in a university or college; one from a substance abuse provider, licensed by the Georgia Department of Community Health; one member who has experience or has a family member who’s experienced opioid addiction; and one member from the judiciary.

To identify qualified nominees for these positions, he said, he reached out to Larry Hanson, executive director of the Georgia Municipal Association.

“Because so many cities were involved, I felt like I needed to reach out directly to him. He and their general council came over and met with our team and we talked about process,” Will said.

Then, they reached out to a number of organizations to help identified superbly qualified candidates to put onto a slate, he said, “which we’re going to ask you in a few minutes to elect.”

Will said the groups that they reached out to include the Georgia Department of Public Health, the Georgia Association of Community Service Boards, the Georgia Sheriff’s Association, the Opioid Treatment Providers of Georgia, the Georgia Council for Recovery, and the Georgia Council of Accountability Court Judges.

“We’ve got some outstanding people who are on the slate statewide,” he said of the nominee recommendations from the organizations.

Wills outlined some of the responsibilities of the GOSAC and the RAC, which, he said, was not an exhaustive list but was drawn from a document by the DBHDD that would be made public soon.

GOSAC will be the final step in recommending approval of grants to the trustee, he said, and clarified that the trustee would be the commissioner of the DBHDD. The trustee would have the final say, he added.

Wills said that GOSAC would also be consulting with the RAC’s and other stakeholders and they will be monitoring progress towards the achievement of strategic goals and objectives.

“So, there’s a reporting requirement. The same thing is true on the RAC’s. So, this is not send me the money, I spend it how I want to and nobody questions,” he said.

If an entity gets funded, there’s going to be a reporting requirement and scrutiny to make sure the funds are spent like they should be spent according to the MOU, he said.

As the funds are coming in from litigation, there are specific requirements about how they have to be used, he said.

The responsibility of the RAC’s, he said, will be to review the grant applications and make recommendations up to the GOSAC, which will, in turn, recommend them to the trustee.

Wills briefly turned the meeting over to Beth Brown, the director of administration and operation of the ACCG, and she said that next week, Tanner and Governor Kemp will make an announcement about the funding and about the online application portal and when it will open.

“The portal will open sometime in April and be open roughly for four to six weeks for the first round. … In the next couple of weeks, you’re going to be hearing more about this,” she said.

Wills expanded, saying that when the electronic portal opens and they begin to accept applications, they could from public or private non-profits that are eligible.

“So, it can be a county, a city, a hospital, a CSP. Any of the treatment organizations, potentially, are eligible to apply. I haven’t seen all of the criteria but we believe that that’s accurate,” he said.

He further explained that when an entity applied through the portal, that application would be sent out, for review, to the RAC for the region that it came from.

“There is nothing in the MOU that talks about the operation of the RAC. The regional advisory council. The MOU specifically says the money from the settlement cannot be used to pay for the administration,” Wills said. “So, in a very real sense, regional advisory councils are essentially going to be self-governing, autonomous. Except that you got to stay within the broad boundaries of what the MOU says.”

Wills said that he wasn’t sure how it was going to work and ACCG wasn’t going to be involved for the longterm but somebody from each RAC is going to need to call him to set-up a meeting and the ACCG, in conjunction with DBHDD, will have some conversations with the individual RAC’s.

“But probably either us or them are going to offer up a set of bylaws to each of the RAC’s and if they wish to adopt it, they can. They can change it. But they’re gonna become self-governing at least temporarily,” he said.

He also told them that he had spoken with his team and Hanson of the GMA about drafting some legislation, over the next few months, to take to the General Assembly next year and ask them to put a framework around the way the RAC’s operate.

Right now, if a region elects someone and they are, later, unable to serve, there’s no entity to get the region back together to elect someone else, he said, and there’s nothing in the MOU that defines how that would happen.

“I personally think that there needs to be some framework around it. So, we’re going to work on that,” he said.

Wills said that he has had some questions around the idea of “how much money do we get?”

“Look, there’s no guarantee that any county or city is going to get any fixed amount of money out of this part of the settlement,” he said.

He said the MOU states that the money has to be spent on a regional basis and there’s a long list of potential uses for the fund. He said he didn’t think that there were many cities or counties that were in a position to provide the type of services or treatments or other uses of the fund. He added that he thought it was going to be the organizations like the audience members represented that would more likely receive funds.

“I suspect that, in terms of the RAC’s operation and I think even more so at the GOSAC, they’re going to be looking for the maximum benefit for the dollars spent,” Wills said.

Brown, then, told the audience that Tanner had told the ACCG that he would be hiring a position that would be a liaison to the RAC’s and would be able to answer questions and provide some guidance.

“So we feel like that’s another person, at least, so that we have a statewide perspective of what’s going on and what’s happening,” she said.

Brown then spoke a little bit about the three GOSAC nominees and their qualifications to serve on the council. They included Betty Cason, the Mayor of Carrollton; Clay Davis, a Spalding County Chairman; and Edward Reynolds the Mayor of Bainbridge, who is from this area, Region 4.

She said that they had worked with the GMA to identify the nominees and felt confident that they would be able to fulfill those seats and meet the criteria for GOSAC members.

For the RAC nominees, there were five of the seven that were present and Brown introduced them and they each said a few words about themselves and their qualifications.

The RAC nominees are Jack Paulson from the Lanier County Board of Health; Dana Glass, the chief executive officer of Aspire Behavioral Health and Developmental Disability Services in Southwest Georgia; Gene Scarbrough, the Sheriff of Tift County; Karen Dasher from the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at Valdosta State University; Jewana Lower, program director of the Bainbridge Treatment Center; Marlisa Nixon from the Albany Area Community Service Board; and Judge Victoria Darrisaw from the Dougherty Judicial Circuit Superior Court.

Wills explained the voting process to the audience saying that the delegates that were present would vote for the GOSAC slate of nominees first and then the slate for the Region 4 RAC.

Both slates of nominees were passed unanimously by the voting delegates in the audience.

“I’m looking forward to hearing some great stuff because, at the end of the day, this is about helping to change and save lives,” Wills said in closing.