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With legislative adjustments and new outside help, Mississippi’s Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council will return to Jackson on Tuesday to begin its second cycle of grant recommendations.
Council members will meet downtown at 1 p.m., on the first floor of the Mississippi Supreme Court Building. An email from the office of Attorney General Lynn Fitch, the council’s chairwoman, to members said there will be a virtual video option but didn’t provide a link.
This year, the council has contracted with the Denver-based health consulting firm Steadman Group to assist with its review process. The company has previously contracted other statesto help with their opioid settlement management.
Dr. J.K. Costello, Steadman’s behavioral health and consulting director and someone in long-term addiction recovery himself, said the firm has been meeting weekly with Fitch’s office since early July. So far, he said, the firm has been reviewing the opioid settlement grants already awarded by the Mississippi Legislature and identifying what’s most needed for addiction response efforts of different parts of the state.
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
Of the roughly $430 million the state expects from the lawsuits through 2040, the advisory council is tasked with recommending how to spend about $300 million of that. The settlements say the council funds must be spent to address addiction. Mississippi was the only state in the country that hadn’t started spending this chunk of money by 2024, according to a KFF Health News investigation. Mississippi also didn’t spend any of it in 2025.
Last year, at the instruction of Mississippi’s Legislature, the council created an application process for the funds, reviewed and graded over 100 project proposals and recommended which ones state lawmakers should fund.
The council members had five months to accomplish those tasks, which some members said made it difficult to effectively determine which efforts would best address the state’s opioid epidemic. After its first 2025 meeting in July, the committee delayed launching the application a month after members identified missing material. Applicants then had six weeks to apply, a deadline some Mississippi organizations also struggled to meet.
Other issues arose later in the fall. Small groups of members initially graded the proposals, and the average application score varied significantly from group to group. Many of the applications that scored highly were authored by organizations affiliated with the council members, and members could advocate for applications they were tied to at meetings. The committee also didn’t review multiple applications that were turned in properly.
After receiving the council’s final 2025 recommendations, legislators didn’t strictly follow them. With the funds the council oversees, they chose to fund around $51 million for applications during the 2026 regular legislative session. Lawmakers left out several applications most recommended by the council and chose to fund some projects the council graded poorly, in addition to sending money to state agencies for purposes unattached to any advisory council application. Lawmakers identified two applications the council forgot to assess and tried to fund those proposals as well, but Gov. Tate Reeves line-item vetoed those applicants’ funds.
In addition, the Legislature adjusted many of the council’s recommended application funding amounts through power lawmakers gave themselves in a bill they passed in the spring. The new law also strengthened the council’s conflicts of interest laws, added new reporting requirements for state opioid funds and required the committee to contract with an outside consulting group that could assist members in their review process — a contract that ultimately was awarded to Steadman.
Organizations the Legislature awarded opioid settlement funds started receiving money after June 30, when Mississippi’s 2027 fiscal year started.
Michelle Williams, Fitch’s chief of staff, told Mississippi Today in May the two applications vetoed by Reeves were the only ones she knew of that the council didn’t review because of committee administrative errors. To the news outlet and other reporters, she has described the Attorney General’s handling of the council as building a system while also implementing it.
“The process may not be what we would have loved it to have been, but we’ve got a process now,” she said. “And we are going to do everything we can through this office to make it move.”
