Millions meant to battle Utah’s opioid epidemic are going unused – including in Davis, Weber counties
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- Mindy Vincent holds a Narcan kit at the Midvale office of the Utah Harm Reduction Coalition on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025.
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- Mindy Vincent holds a Narcan kit at the Midvale office of the Utah Harm Reduction Coalition on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025. The life-saving medication is used to reverse opioid overdoses.
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- Mindy Vincent poses outside the offices of the Utah Harm Reduction Coalition in Midvale on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025. She founded the nonprofit to serve people with substance abuse issues.
Editor’s note: The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with the Standard-Examiner.
The opioid epidemic has had a profound toll on social worker Mindy Vincent.
First, she buried her sister, who died from an opioid overdose in 2014. During the next decade, over 40 of her clients would die from the epidemic. Those tragedies have fueled her professional legacy, including founding Utah Harm Reduction Coalition, a nonprofit whose services include substance misuse treatment and syringe exchanges.
Lately, though, those tragedies have also fueled something else: Vincent’s frustration over how funds meant to combat Utah’s opioid crisis are — or aren’t — being spent.
A review by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project of account ledgers, budget documents, funding proposals and other public records found that a majority of counties in the state have spent little to none of the opioid funding they’ve received.
“It is disturbing to me that the money is just sitting around,” Vincent said. “My sister lost her life for that money and so did a lot of other people’s family members.”
Utah counties have received a combined $56 million, but only 14% of the funds have been spent.
Davis is among the dozen counties that have yet to spend any settlement funds, while Weber has spent less than 5% of its funds. They received $5.2 million and $5.9 million, respectively.
The funding comes from national legal settlements with drug companies that have resulted in billions flowing to state and local governments. Additional money will be dispersed over the next decade.
Advocates worry counties are sitting on money that could save lives. The most recent data from the Utah Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) estimates that an average of 400 Utahns die each year from overdoses.
In the Davis County Health District, there was an average of 12 fatal opioid overdoses per 100,000 residents. While the Weber-Morgan Health District saw an average of 20 fatal opioid overdoses per 100,000 residents each year.
“There’s people dying right now today,” Vincent said. “When someone says we’re just going to sit here and wait for it to build up, what I hear is we’re just going to let people die while we sit around and decide what to do.”
Rep. Raymond Ward (R-Bountiful) isn’t surprised many counties have not spent their funds. Ward sponsored legislation on opioid settlements and has worked as a family physician with patients with opioid addiction.
“Each county got a little portion of that settlement. … In many cases, for an individual county, that would turn into an amount that wasn’t super easy to start a new program up,” he said. “I hope they figure out a way to put the money to its good use. The settlement wasn’t meant for the money to just come sit in the bank somewhere and not be helpful.”
‘A county-by-county strategy’
A nonbinding statewide agreement outlines over a hundred uses for the funds.
They include more obvious options — like buying opioid-overdose antidotes and funding treatment and recovery services — as well as more holistic solutions like providing housing and employment training or researching non-opioid treatment of chronic pain.
Deciding which to spend the money on, though, has been a sort of “choose your own adventure.”
“It’s really a county-by-county strategy,” said Evan Done with Utah Support Advocates for Recovery Awareness (USARA). He added, “the process has been more opaque” in some counties.
“It’s alarming to me — both as a professional in this space and as a person in recovery — to hear that there are opioid settlement funds coming to our state that aren’t being used,” Done said.
USARA has recovery community centers across the state, including in Ogden. The nonprofit has received settlement funds from the state and Salt Lake and Grand counties for its recovery centers and peer recovery coaches.
Although counties began receiving opioid settlement payments over two years ago, some counties don’t yet have a concrete plan.
Some counties are pointing fingers at restrictions on how the funds can be spent. Two bills passed in 2023 and 2024 prevented funds from being used to reimburse counties for expenses and programs they were already funding — a practice known as supplanting.
“If you only ever supplant, then the net effect would be that the new money that came in just got spent on something else,” said Ward, who sponsored the bills. He added that he’s open to changing the rules if necessary.
The Utah Association of Counties is pushing to remove counties from the legislation, claiming the state wrote it without counties’ input.
The association argues the statewide agreement already lists out approved uses and that the restrictions and additional reporting measures in the legislation make it more difficult for counties to spend their funds.
Davis County planned to use its funds to recoup costs from building and operating a medical wing in its jail and for a jail medication prevention program. However, it claims recent legislation stopped that plan in its tracks.
Davis County Clerk/Auditor Curtis Koch canceled an interview with the UIJP and did not respond to attempts to reschedule.
Davis Behavioral Health CEO Brandon Hatch said he supports the county’s cautious approach, especially since the county has already put other funding toward providing treatment in jail and supporting Davis Behavioral Health’s services.
“Davis County was pretty proactive years ago in putting some things in place before the opioid settlement dollars came this way,” he said. “They’re a good partner, so we trust them with what they’re doing. We’re OK to wait as long as it takes for them to get their answers.”
Weber County has created a county coalition to decide how the funds are used. So far, the county has spent money on creating a forensic social work department within the Weber Public Defender Group. They also have allocated funds for Weber Human Services.
The forensic social work department bridges the gap between the legal system and behavioral health. They make sure factors like mental illnesses, disabilities and homelessness are considered in the legal case and connect clients to resources like treatment programs.
“A lot of our clients who’ve been in and out of the justice system and have never really been super effective at adulting are going to need more hand-holding to get a job, to find a place to live, to learn how to manage setbacks as they occur,” said Daniel Lancaster, the department’s director. “If we can minimize the opportunity for someone to falter from their goal of engaging in and following through with treatment, then it’s going to be more successful and reduce future crime.”
The impact of the opioid epidemic has been far reaching, but Bryce Sherwood of the Weber-Morgan Health Department said there are some bright spots.
“I think we can get lost in these data of rates and overdose deaths. But there’s a lot of really good things happening in our area,” he said. “There’s a lot of efforts from the Weber County Commission, from our collective community agencies, there’s a lot of support.”
He encouraged people who want to get involved to volunteer with Bonneville Communities That Care, a local coalition that focuses on reducing risk factors and creating healthier communities.
Unclear reporting requirements
Counties’ reporting of the funds appears to be hit or miss.
Ward’s 2023 bill, Senate Bill 155, designated DHHS as the reporting agency for county opioid funds.
Records obtained through a request to DHHS suggest that only two-thirds of counties reported how they used the funds in 2023 and that only a quarter did so in 2024. Davis County submitted both reports, while Weber submitted neither.
That picture is complicated by the involvement of the Utah Association of Counties, a private nonprofit that acts as an advocate and service provider for the counties. In practice, it is acting as the reporting agency for the funds.
Katherine Rhodes, the association’s legislative policy analyst, said the counties appointed the association as its reporting entity based on a nonbinding statewide agreement that was signed prior to the 2023 legislation. She said the association and DHHS worked it out so that the association sends the state the reports “as needed.”
The group said it has received more reports than obtained through DHHS but did not offer a corrected count. Unlike the state agency, it is not subject to public records laws.
Rhodes said there isn’t yet a specific format for the reports. One was a short email. One was a bulleted list of the amounts the county received. A third was an eight-page report, including detailed account ledgers.
The association does require counties to report annually on their proposed uses of the funds and actual expenditures and to publish online how much they received and spent.
Ward argued the counties should report to the public how the funds are used. However, he said he was unsure “who ought to rightfully report to who and what ought to happen to them if they didn’t submit a report.”
On one hand, Ward said he sees the concern of counties reporting to a private nonprofit. On the other, he said the legal settlement did not give the state permission to decide how the counties spend their funds.
“I’m open to the discussion,” he said. “I don’t know that it would be simple to settle that out.”
