Mississippi’s Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council will meet Thursday in Jackson to discuss which awarded grant applicants can rearrange their payment plans.  Tasked with recommending how the state Legislature should spend hundreds of millions of lawsuit dollars to address the addiction cr isis, council members said at their July meeting that some awardees would not be able to move forward with their projects with the default arrangement — reimbursements for work done every three months.  To address that, council members voted in July to let organizations request monthly work reimbursements. The council will review requests on a case-by-case basis on Thursday. In late July, Mississippi’s Attorney General’s office sent emails to granted applicants that instructed them to say why the default arrangement would not work. With that information, the council could decide if the payment change is necessary.  The meeting will be held at 1 p.m. on the first floor of the Carroll Gartin Justice Building. 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 Council members raised other concerns at their last meeting about how their committee reviews project applications. Sen. Nicole Boyd, a Republican from Oxford, said without a comprehensive report to show where the state’s addiction responses needs are greatest, the Legislature wouldn’t know which efforts to fund. “We need a strategic plan from y’all,” she told the other council members. The council and Legislature awarded $100,000 for Mississippi’s Department of Mental Health to create that type of report, but it’s not completed yet. Boyd also said the entire committee, including herself, could benefit from training on the addiction crisis from a health perspective.  “There are experts in this, in public health, that really can talk through what the science is,” she told the council members. “If it’s something that we tape, that we watch — at night, at home, whatever — I would encourage us to have somebody really do some presentations on what this looks like.”  Shari Veazey, executive director of the Mississippi Municipal League, said it wasn’t clear to the council where in the state this year’s opioid settlement abatement funds would be going. She suggested the council create a map that could show where last cycle’s funds went, and which parts remained underfunded. James Moore, a Hattiesburg recovery advocate and member of the council, applied for funds himself. Like people who submitted grant proposals, he said he never heard from anyone about why his application was graded poorly and ultimately not funded by the Legislature.  Moore asked that in the future, the council send all applicants their proposal scores and some explanation of why members graded them the way they did. “I don’t know what to do to improve, should I apply again,” he told the members.  The council ended its July meeting and did not vote on a plan to address Moore’s concerns. ...read more read less