Cities of Bluefield, Princeton get first opioid lawsuit checks
Jan. 10—PRINCETON — One after another, the cities of Princeton and Bluefield were presented Tuesday with over $1.5 million dollars worth of opioid lawsuit settlement money which will be use to address the local addiction crisis and the damage it has inflicted.
Representatives of the City of Princeton and the City of Bluefield attended a meeting of the Mercer County Commission for presentations of their first opioid settlement payments. Attorney Charles "Rusty" Webb first presented Mayor David Graham and City Manager Mike Webb of Princeton with $577,832.44.
A minute later, Webb presented Bluefield City Board member Peter Taylor, City Manager Cecil Marson and City Treasurer Danny Dillow with a $937,528.74 check. The checks are the first payments being made to both cities.
West Virginia State Auditor J.B. McCuskey came to the county commission for the check presentations.
"Rusty asked me to come to several of these. I was very, very honored to be asked to do that," McCuskey stated between presentations. "Our office has put together a resource guide for cities and counties who are receiving this money. So we have a billion dollars between the state and our local governments to spend to solve what is a generational problem, and the guys that are sitting here are seeing it every single day. This is the issue of our time and this money has to be spent in two ways. It has to be spent to remedy the financial crisis that this created in the past, but equally and probably more importantly, it has to be spent to make sure this doesn't happen again."
The settlement money from the JUUL lawsuit is aimed at stopping the opioid addiction pandemic from continuing.
"If I'm standing here or somebody like me is standing here in 20 years and talking about the same problem, we failed," McCuskey said. "It doesn't matter what we do to remedy what happened in the past. If this happens again, we have failed, and that is the true meaning of what this money is for, to accomplish those two goals."
The WV State Auditor's Office, associated with the West Virginia First Foundation, has created the West Virginia First Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to help municipalities and counties know how to spend their opioid settlement funds. McCuskey said this MOU is 500-pages long.
"We put together a bullet-pointed outline of the appropriate uses for this money in a broad and understandable way," he said. "And we've creating a tracking machine that parallels the MOU and allows to categorize your spending in a way so it is easily accessible to you, to the public and to the foundation, West Virginia First Foundation for Region 4."
"The foundation is going to play an absolutely key role in this particular meeting was so important to me was that Bluefield, Princeton and the Mercer County Commission set the gold standard for how local governments work together," McCuskey said.
Counties and cities are being encouraged to work together on spending their settlement money.
"The lines between the cities and the counties are completely irrelevant. Drugs don't care about lines," McClusky said. "Overdoses don't care about lines. The sheriffs have to go across lines. Police officers have to go across lines. First responders have to go across lines. All the lines mean nothing, which means this money needs to be spent as much as humanly possible together because $5 million solves a lot more problems than two if that makes sense."
McCusky said that the way Princeton, Bluefield and the Mercer County Commission have worked together is a good example for the rest of the state. He added that his office was ready to help all three entities decide how to spend their opioid funding.
"We're not here to help you not spend it. What we want to do is help you spend it confidently," he stated. "The biggest problem we have to avoid is paralysis in finances. This money is designed to fix a problem right now. It's not designed to be sitting in an account and be scared to spend and so we have a team of people on our side that can answer any questions that our cities and counties have about how and why they should spend this money, how to report this money, and the reporting sheet is importantly for the foundation because they're going to be asking for them.
"This will give you the ability to go with coalitions for projects that don't just have to do with Princeton, don't just have to do with Bluefield, just don't have to do with Mercer County but serve every single person in West Virginia," he said.
In December 2023, the Mercer County Commission was presented $1.9 million by attorney Truman Chafin of The Chafin Law Firm as the county's first opioid settlement payment.
— Contact Greg Jordan at gjordan@bdtonline.com
Contact Greg Jordan at gjordan@bdtonline.com
