Jan. 15, 2026
By TIM HUNDT
VIROQUA, Wis. – Vernon County officials continued to shape how they will use opioid lawsuit settlement money as members of the Opioid Prevention and Abatement Steering Committee weighed new funding requests Tuesday.
The county expects to receive about $1.3 million dollars over 17 years from national opioid settlements. Staff told the committee the county has taken in a little more than $437,000 dollars so far and committed about $280,000 dollars to community grants and projects leaving a substantial balance and many years of payments still to come.
“Since we started receiving settlement payments in 2022 through 2025 we had received about $437,000,” said Community Development Director Amy Oliver. “Two hundred eighty thousand of that right now is allocated so we have money sitting in this account.”
The county formed the steering committee to make decisions on how to best allocate that funding. The committee is made up of public health officials, school officials, citizens and members of law enforcement. The committee meets quarterly to discuss initiatives and applications for funding. Since starting the committee they have funded a number of public initiatives to help deter opioid use and addictions.
Committee weighs county needs and community promises
Vernon County’s Opioid Prevention and Abatement Steering Committee wrestled Tuesday with how to divide settlement dollars between growing county needs and existing community programs, ultimately backing a three year package of internal and external projects.
Human Services representative Jill Bender laid out the scale of child welfare cases tied to opioids and asked for a five year funding plan for county services and public health. She said the money would help pay for gaps such as residential treatment and housing for pregnant women and parents struggling with addiction.
The health department and Human Services used a mix of child welfare numbers and funding gaps to justify their opioid settlement requests.
From January 1 2022 through December 2025 Child Protective Services recorded:
- 9 unborn child abuse reports involving pregnant women using drugs
- 21 caregiver drug abuse cases
- 4 drug affected infants who tested positive at birth
- 45 cases of children exposed to controlled substances
- 66 children removed from their homes with 25 removals tied to caretaker drug abuse
“In that time we’ve had nine unborn child abuse reports received when we have an unborn child abuse report that means that we have a pregnant mom who is abusing drugs,” said Jill Bender. “And we’ve had forty five cases of children exposed to controlled substances.”
Bender said Human Services also documented 13 positive opioid or fentanyl drug tests since October 2023.
“Since October of twenty three within our drug testing within human services our results for opioid and fentanyl we had thirteen different positive case results during that time,” said Bender.
To match those needs Bender asked for a five year commitment of 45 thousand dollars a year for Human Services plus 5 thousand dollars a year for the public health department.
“Our ask today is a five year plan of allocating forty five thousand dollars per year over the next five years,” said Bender. “And our second ask of today is a five year plan for our public health department and we’d be asking for allocating five thousand dollars per year over the next five years.”
Public health officials noted they have no dedicated opioid funds and had been relying on temporary federal COVID relief.
“Currently there is no specific funds allocated within the health department to support the work that they do with opioid education and prevention,” said Bender. “Since COVID they have used ARPA funding to support outreach needs and that funding did expire in December of twenty twenty five.”
The combined proposal was framed as a way to keep families together reduce costly out of home placements and maintain outreach such as Narcan distribution and test strip access.
“Our ask today is a five year plan of allocating forty five thousand dollars per year over the next five years,” said Bender. “This would expand and it would fill in the gaps of services for our families.”
Committee members pressed for clarity on how much of the long term settlement would be consumed if they backed the full request and renewed all current grants. Member Duane Koons cautioned against shifting too much money into county programs.
“You could rationalize all of the money going to the county through county programs,” said Koons. “I just think we have to put some value of some sort on the non-county part.”
Mary Henry said she strongly supported Bender’s proposal but did not want to shortchange school based prevention work already underway.
“Prevention is a big part of the picture,” said Henry. “If we want to prevent we’ve got to touch as many as we can.”
After hearing another proposal later in the meeting Henry moved to approve Human Services opioid related programming for three years instead of five to leave room for other projects.
“I’m gonna say three,” said Henry. “After three years you’re gonna have a good idea what’s up there.”
The committee approved that proposal on a voice vote.
Hospital mental health training wins backing
The committee also endorsed a request from Vernon Memorial HealthCare to start a Mental Health First Aid training program using about $25,000 dollars in settlement funds for the first year.
Dr. Martha Karlstad framed the Mental Health First Aid proposal as a way to strengthen how local providers and community members respond to crises tied to addiction and mental illness.
“I would really love for all of my colleagues within my health system to have better mental health first aid,” said Karlstad. “I think we can be such a boon to the services that we provide.”
She pointed out that people in crisis often show up in emergency rooms even though hospitals are not built to be the front line of mental health care.
The emergency department is “not the place that’s designed for mental health crisis,” said Karlstad. “But it is where mental health crises are happening.”
Karlstad said the hospital’s behavioral health staff are already being asked to do trainings on top of their clinical workload and that the grant would let Vernon Memorial train other staff as instructors while keeping therapists focused on direct care.
“Part of this comes out of our department getting asked to do the trainings and us getting the feedback,” said Karlstad. “Our main mission as behavioral health employees is to see and prepare options and it is hard to internally block a bunch of our time in order to do this.”
She said that Mental Health First Aid is designed so that non clinicians can teach and use it making it a better use of limited professional staff time.
“The way that this system is set up is you don’t have to be a master’s level mental health professional to be able to do this training,” said Karlstad. “It is a much better utilization of the resources keeping the therapists doing therapy and having this other batch of folks doing this training.”
Koons praised the hospital for proposing a broader community effort rather than billable clinical services.
“To actually see Vernon Memorial Hospital looking like they want to be out in the community without money coming back in that transaction I think that’s also positive,” said Koons.
The committee approved the proposal for the first year of funding at roughly 25,000 dollars with the understanding that the program would report back and reapply in future years.
Grant extensions tightened but allowed
The committee granted a final six month extension to an existing community grant that had spent slowly and agreed that future first time six month extensions can be approved administratively by Oliver.
Oliver said a limited delegation would speed up responses while still bringing repeat or problematic extensions back to the committee.
“I just would love to recommend that you put a deadline on it,” said Oliver. “It encourages and kind of motivates them to keep on it and spend those funds.”
Add comment