(Radio Iowa) – The state has more than 58 MILLION dollars sitting in a fund for opioid addiction treatment programs and, for a third year, lawmakers are trying to come up with a plan on how to spend the money. Representative Gary Mohr, a Republican from Bettendorf, is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

“It’s taken a long time, but I think it took us that long to figure out the best way to go about it,” Mohr said, “and that’s the bottom up approach.” Companies that made. marketed and sold the powerful painkillers agreed to a national legal settlement. Legislators are required — by law — to come up with the distribution plan for what eventually is expected to be over 345 million dollars in payments to Iowa over nearly 20 years.

The chairman of the Appropriations Committee in the Iowa Senate has introduced a plan that primarily would give the Iowa Department of Heath and Human Services authority to distribute 75 percent of the settlement funds and the Iowa Attorney General’s Office would decide where most of the rest goes. Mohr says that’s a top-down approach and House leaders are considering distributing the money to the state’s seven behavioral health regions.

“The differences between Spencer and Burlington are vast,” Mohr says. “The regions need to be the ones that make these decisions and, if there are shortfalls in services, they need to be the ones that need to say: ‘Here’s something that we really need.’ I can’t tell that from sitting here in Des Moines.”

About half of the opioid settlement money paid to the State of Iowa is to go to local programs. State records indicate 238 Iowans died in 2023 from opioid use.