Augusta Releases $510,013 in Opioid Settlement Funds to Six Groups

Richmond County commissioners voted on Oct. 20 to release $510,013 from the Augusta-Richmond County Opioid Abatement Trust Fund to six organizations, the first awards made from a local settlement account that had been collecting money for years without spending it.

The grants, recommended by the county's 10-member Opioid Settlement Advisory Board, went to programs covering residential treatment for mothers, recovery housing, street outreach, school prevention, naloxone distribution through emergency departments and a musical about prescription painkillers. Twenty-four groups applied. Six scored above the 70-point threshold the board set, and about $89,987 of the $600,000 available will roll into a future round.

Who received money, and what it buys

The largest award, $200,000, went to 143 Ministries for housing, employment and recovery support. Hope House Inc. received $65,000 — the top-scoring application at 91.5 points — to hire a licensed professional counselor dedicated to its program for pregnant and postpartum women and to buy essentials for newborns.

Augusta University's Project 3 received $82,533 for overdose prevention kits, including naloxone, distributed through emergency departments. Project 7 received $64,544 for street outreach, overdose prevention, health screenings and connections to treatment for unhoused residents, and Project 5 received $51,736 to run Generation Rx prevention education in five Richmond County schools. The Augusta Players received $46,200 for six school performances and one public performance of "Painless: The Opioid Musical."

Hope House illustrates what the money changes at a small scale. The program houses up to 42 families at a time on its campus and serves about 100 families a year residentially, plus another 100 to 120 through outpatient services, all free, with apartments, child care, counseling and employment support attached.

"Hope House is a residential program that serves women in the state of Georgia suffering from substance use disorder and untreated mental illness," said Baylee Ready, the organization's human resources and community engagement coordinator. "They're here for about six months, and we help them with their substance use disorder, mental health, but then also all of the life skills that they need to become self-sufficient."

Ready said the grant pays for a counselor specific to the program who "will specialize in what pregnant women in early recovery need," freeing other funds for goods the babies require. She described the model in one sentence: "How we help mothers stay mothers."

She also named the barrier the money does not remove. "There's not a lot of services in the state for mothers with substance use, because it's a stigma," she said. "It's hard for them to not be looked at as, 'Why did you choose this for your child?'"

A fund that sat untouched for years

Dr. Marshall Bedder, an associate professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine at the Medical College of Georgia and a board member, told commissioners the account had been idle before Mayor Garnett Johnson appointed the advisory board.

"I was sort of the one instigating this after realizing the money had been sitting there for a number of years not utilized," Bedder said.

The delay is a familiar pattern in the national opioid settlement, which has sent billions of dollars to state and local governments since 2022 with widely varying speed. Some jurisdictions built dashboards and disbursed in months; others let balances accumulate while they argued over process. Bangor, Maine, took three years to make its first allocations. Augusta's first round is small — six grants averaging about $85,000 across a county where more than 60 people a year die of overdose — but it establishes a mechanism the county did not have.

The conditions attached to the checks

Bedder told commissioners that applications had to address opioid prevention, treatment or aftercare, serve Richmond County residents and include measurable outcomes.

"How were we going to judge success?" he said. "Because we are not just going to give them money and say, 'Bye-bye.' We want outcomes."

Recipients must sign formal agreements, file quarterly reports on spending and outcomes, take part in an annual review and return any unspent money. County law and finance staff said the agreements will likely mirror the quarterly reporting used for the local sales tax program, with disbursement possibly tied to reimbursement of expenses already incurred.

Commissioners questioned the vetting during committee discussion, and the board's rules left marks on the outcome. The Richmond County Sheriff's Office applied but did not meet the criteria for funding. Applications seeking to buy real property were not considered, and applications that would have replaced existing funding received no further consideration.

That last exclusion matters more than it sounds. Supplanting — using settlement money to cover costs a county budget already carried — is one of the most common criticisms of settlement spending nationally, and the rule here closes the simplest version of it.

What the county's numbers show

Bedder's briefing included provisional overdose death data for Richmond County residents: 65 deaths in 2025, down from 92 in 2024 and 111 in 2023, a decline of about 41 percent. The county's rate remains roughly double the state rate, and Richmond County ranked in Georgia's top five for emergency department overdose visit rates in 15 of the 24 months spanning 2024 and 2025.

Both facts can be true at once, and together they describe the problem the fund is meant to address. A 41 percent decline is progress measured against the county's own peak. A rate twice the state average is the reason the money exists.

The limits of a first round

Six organizations and half a million dollars will not change a county's overdose curve, and nothing in the awards is designed to prove that it did. The reporting requirements track spending and self-described outcomes, not mortality, treatment retention or reversal counts — the measures that would show whether a counselor in a maternity program or a naloxone kit in an emergency department kept someone alive.

What the round does establish is a spending channel and a scoring rubric, both of which will be tested again when the rollover money and future settlement payments are allocated. The board has now published what it funds and what it rejects. Whether the next round is larger, faster and measured against overdose data rather than quarterly reports is the question the county has not yet answered.