Last updated: October 2026
Price County gave its opioid committee five meetings. The committee used four, stopped, and handed a $285,050 spending list up the chain. On Oct. 14 the Health and Human Services Board approved the resolution behind that list.
Chair Paula Hodek read the four spending lines aloud from the packet. “Support people in treatment and recovery, $65,000,” she said, according to the auto-generated meeting transcript. “Address the needs of pregnant or parenting women and their families including babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome, $50,950. Prevent misuse of opioids, $92,500. Prevent overdose deaths and other harm reduction, $76,600. So the total is $285,050.”
Then the room moved on too fast. The chair declared that the motion passed before anyone had voted, realized the mistake, and took the roll. Nobody objected. No dissent appears in the record.
Quick Answer: On Oct. 14, 2026, the Price County Health and Human Services Board approved an opioid remediation resolution covering 2027 through 2038. The list totals $285,050 across four eligible-use categories, with the largest share, $92,500, for preventing opioid misuse. The resolution authorizes payment of $250,050 from the county’s opioid abatement fund and lists a fiscal impact of $0. Any request over $25,000 requires County Board approval, so the plan now goes to the supervisors.
Here is the number that matters most: the county is committing $285,050 against a 20-year settlement stream it expects to total about $286,000. That is not a surplus. It is the entire payout, allocated in one afternoon.
The resolution authorizes $250,050 out of the abatement fund and lists a fiscal impact of $0. No levy, no borrowing, no budget amendment. The remaining $35,000 on the list has to come from checks that have not arrived yet.
What did the HHS Board actually approve?
The resolution is titled approval of opioid remediation funded initiatives. It approves a list of funding requests for 2027 through 2038, labeled Exhibit A in the packet, and directs that the money come from the opioid abatement fund the county has been building since the national settlements began landing.
The four categories are the national settlement’s eligible-use buckets, not local inventions. Counties spend on treatment, prevention, education, support, and training, and they have to document which bucket each dollar lands in. Price County’s committee sorted every idea into one of them.
Where the biggest line goes
Prevention of misuse takes $92,500, the single largest slice. That is the eligible-use category the settlement calls prevention: the upstream work that happens before anyone needs a bed. In Price County’s plan, most of it points at schools.
The spreadsheet the committee reviewed in August listed assembly speakers on opioids and youth support programs across the three districts. Trimner described it as money going to the schools to do programming, with a speaker series preferred and grant-matching options left open.
Rachel Hoffman, who sits on the committee for the schools, raised the practical problem in August. His House of Hope’s preferred curriculum is faith-based, and she wanted to know whether the secular parts could be separated out before any district touched it. The committee kept the school money in the plan anyway and left the curriculum choice to the districts.
Overdose response gets the second slot
Harm reduction and overdose death prevention draw $76,600. That is the category that funds naloxone, testing supplies, and the unglamorous work of keeping people alive long enough to enter treatment.
It is also the category with the strangest local context. Marshfield Medical Clinic in Park Falls logged no opioid overdose visits at its emergency department between July 2025 and July 2026, according to the report filed with the ad hoc committee and covered here in August. The county is spending heavily on overdose prevention in a year its largest ER recorded none.
What the county says about that mismatch
Committee members did not treat the zero as a reason to cut the line. The case made across the summer is that the visible crisis in Price County has shifted toward methamphetamine and mental health, and that the settlement money can reach both under the same buckets. The fund pays for substance use response broadly, not for opioids alone.
Why is the county paying out less than the list totals?
Because the list runs to 2038 and the cash arrives in pieces. The county is not writing one check for $285,050, and it never claimed to.
The resolution authorizes payment of $250,050 now and reports a fiscal impact of $0. No new tax levy, no borrowing, no budget amendment. The money comes out of the abatement fund the county has been accumulating since the first settlement checks arrived.
What fills the rest of the list
Future settlement checks. County Administrator Nick Trimner told the HHS Board in September that Price County expects roughly $10,000 to $15,000 a year for another 14 to 15 years, with the payout window running to 2038. That is the tail that funds the back half of a 2027-to-2038 slate.
It also means the plan is front-loaded by design. The categories are approved for twelve years, but the cash arrives in small annual increments after the initial balance is spent. If a program wants $30,000 in year four, the county has to have banked it.
Who is on the list?
His House of Hope is the only county organization that came forward with a formal request. The recovery home in Phillips houses eight men and wants to adopt the Genesis Process, a structured recovery curriculum, with staff already in certification to run it on site. It also raised roughly $30,000 at a September color run while the county weighed its request.
Mark Distin, who presented for the home, told the committee in August the facility could double its capacity to sixteen or twenty residents with more space. The plan funds the curriculum and program needs, not an expansion.
The women’s program that does not exist yet
$50,950 is set aside for pregnant and parenting women and their families, including babies with neonatal abstinence syndrome. Price County has no residential treatment for women. The committee held the money anyway, betting that a regional provider eventually steps forward.
If nobody does, the funds get reallocated. That is the committee’s stated position, and it is the softest commitment in the entire resolution.
The schools
School districts were in the room from the start, and the school-facing dollars sit inside the prevention line rather than in a bucket of their own. At the Sept. 15 County Board meeting the question came up directly: why was Chequamegon not listed alongside the other districts? The answer from the committee side was that the district already runs something comparable and the two efforts would coordinate.
That answer was spoken, not written into Exhibit A. It is the one place in the plan where a reader has to trust the meeting record over the document.
Why did the committee stop at four meetings?
The ad hoc committee was created by county resolution with a five-meeting allotment. It met in May, June, July, and August, then declined the fifth.
“The Opioid Committee, we have not met anymore,” Hodek told the board on Oct. 14. “We are at that point where we are going to look at the resolution that you have in your packet.”
Four meetings was enough because the hard part was never the list. It was the sorting. County Administrator Nick Trimner and finance staff built a spreadsheet mapping every request to an eligible-use category, and that spreadsheet became the resolution. By August the committee had a document it could defend. A fifth meeting would have reopened arguments it had already settled.
What happens next?
The resolution goes to the Price County Board of Supervisors, which must approve any opioid spending above $25,000. The board last met Oct. 13, one day before the HHS vote, so the item could not make that agenda. The full timeline of the settlement story runs back to the first county check.
Nothing in the Oct. 14 record shows a supervisor objecting to the plan. County supervisors sit on the HHS Board itself, and the ones present asked no questions before the vote.
Supervisor Robert Copish pressed hard on a separate stack of child placement vouchers earlier in the same meeting, asking whether roughly $100,000 in monthly charges sat on top of what the county had already spent. He did not raise a comparable question about the opioid list.
The first money moves after County Board approval, and the county has not published a disbursement schedule. Payments run against Exhibit A, the request list attached to the resolution, which has not been posted publicly.
Frequently asked questions
How much opioid settlement money is Price County getting?
Price County’s 20-year settlement share is roughly $286,000, per the briefing county staff gave the HHS Board in September. Beyond what the abatement fund already holds, the county expects roughly $10,000 to $15,000 a year for another 14 to 15 years, running through 2038.
Who decides how Price County spends opioid settlement funds?
Three bodies, in order. The ad hoc Opioid Committee built the recommendation list. The Health and Human Services Board approved the resolution on Oct. 14, 2026. The County Board of Supervisors must approve any request over $25,000, which covers the entire plan.
What can opioid settlement money legally be spent on?
The resolution lists five approved uses: treatment, prevention, education, support, and training. Price County’s four categories map onto them, covering prevention of misuse, overdose death prevention and harm reduction, support for people in treatment and recovery, and the needs of pregnant or parenting women.
Is His House of Hope getting county money?
Yes, through the Genesis Process curriculum and program needs rather than as a lump grant. It is the only Price County organization that submitted a formal funding request to the committee. The recovery home also brought in roughly $30,000 on its own at a color run in September, which committee members cited as evidence it is not waiting on the county.
When does the County Board vote?
At its next regular meeting. The board meets monthly at the County Board Room, 126 Cherry St. in Phillips, and the opioid resolution was not on the Oct. 13 agenda because the HHS Board acted the following day.
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Sources
- Price County WI, Government — Health & Human Services Board Meeting, Oct. 14, 2026 (video and auto-generated transcript)
- Price County — Meeting Calendar and Agenda Center
- Price County WI, Government — Meeting Video Archive
- National Opioid Settlement — Eligible Uses and Distributor Framework