Like millions of other Americans, I have a loved one who faces substance use challenges. I can still remember the gut-wrenching feeling early in the pandemic whenever I encountered headlines describing rising rates of overdoses and fentanyl poisonings.
But around 2022, some of that news coverage contained hope. Millions of dollars from a national legal settlement with drug makers, distributors and pharmacies was headed to communities reeling from the opioid epidemic, with the potential to help families like mine.
I was immediately curious about how communities would spend the money. I’m from Nebraska, which has no public reporting requirements for opioid settlement funds, leaving the public in the dark. When I moved to Wisconsin last year, I was excited to see significantly more transparency.
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How are Wisconsin’s local governments spending millions in opioid settlement payouts?
Three years into disbursements, strategies vary — and so does transparency. Some governments submitted required reports only after a reporter asked. Others have yet to spend anything.
Within my first few days at WPR and Wisconsin Watch, I pitched a story on how local governments were spending these dollars. My editors were interested, but that idea got buried under other pressing reporting — from seniors getting kicked out of nursing homes, to people losing health coverage.
May offered a fresh opportunity to revisit the settlement story. That’s when a legislative committee published a fresh batch of spending reports from Wisconsin counties and municipalities that received payouts.
A 2021 state law requires Wisconsin governments to report basic information about their opioid settlement accounts each year. But when I started looking at those reports, they weren’t easy to digest. They are published in massive PDFs. Some included handwritten responses, with occasional missing or incorrect information.
An assignment I thought would take a couple of weeks to report and write, lasted well over a month.
I used a tool called Google Pinpoint to scrape information from three years or reports submitted by 87 different local governments. It took multiple late nights to check, edit and combine information from each report into a set of spreadsheets. I spent hours each day calling county and municipal offices, listening to hold music as I tracked down missing or corrected spending numbers.
As a self-proclaimed “words person,” the toughest part was calculating each government’s total earnings, spending and interest from settlement payouts.
In response to my questions, seven governments filed reports that had been missing. Others corrected mistakes I identified on reports they had filed.
The exhausting process was worth it. We did our best to create a place where people can easily learn — without sifting through meeting minutes or long PDFs — how their county or municipality is spending dollars intended to address a crisis. Or in the case of nearly 30 governments, that they have yet to spend any of it.
I’m not done with this reporting. If you have questions about my process or findings, please reach out. I hope to hear from anyone with opinions about how their local government is spending these dollars, whether positive or negative. You can reach me here: acostello@wisconsinwatch.org.
Addie Costello is WPR’s 2024-2025 Mike Simonson Memorial Investigative Reporting Fellow embedded in the Wisconsin Watch newsroom.
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