Dec 3, 2025 By Mike Jones 3 min read

Facing questions about how the county’s opioid settlement grants are being distributed, the Washington County commissioners are considering forming a committee to help sift through applications and make recommendations on which organizations should receive funds.

During Tuesday morning’s agenda-setting meeting, Commissioner Larry Maggi asked whether the board planned to officially create the committee with a formal vote at Thursday’s meeting, but Commissioner Chairman Nick Sherman responded that they were still early in the process.

That led to a tense back and forth between Sherman and Maggi about the timeline to form the committee to review opioid settlement grants, along with the overall lack of communication between the two commissioners.

“We had this conversation last week (that) we were doing it after (Thursday’s) meeting,” Sherman said. “We would have a discussion this week to see who should be on it.”

“We’re not going to vote on it?” Maggi asked about putting the formation of the committee on Thursday’s meeting agenda.

“No, we don’t know who is going to be on it,” Sherman said.

There has been recent criticism about how Washington County has handled the disbursements after there have been four rounds of grants since last September totaling more than $4.7 million in funds. The county is distributing about $800,000 annually over nearly two decades from its portion of the Pennsylvania Opioid Misuse and Addiction Abatement Trust settlement.

Maggi released a statement Monday afternoon calling for an opioid committee with specific parameters on the issue and urging more transparency with how it is handled through the county’s Department of Human Services.

“Washington County has already distributed millions of dollars with only three county employees making these decisions,” Maggi said in a written statement, although the commissioners vote on the final list of grants.

A Dec. 1 memo from solicitor Gary Sweat outlined the tentative terms of the opioid committee that appeared to be poised to be placed on Thursday’s agenda, which Maggi said was pulled off at the last minute. The memo calls for five to seven members that include health care professionals, drug addiction experts and representatives from the county and from Peters Township and North Strabane. It’s unclear why only those two municipalities would have representation on the committee.

Sherman said the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, also known as CCAP, recently advised counties that they should form committees to review applications and recommend how to distribute the opioid settlement funds in an equitable and transparent manner.

“CCAP laid out how we’re supposed to do it,” Sherman said. “We’ve already had this idea and you came out with your press release.”

“That’s not true,” Maggi said, questioning when the commissioners discussed the issue.

“We’ve had that discussion last week,” Sherman said, although he said it mainly was brought up at a CCAP meeting in which Maggi did not attend.

“We don’t talk about anything,” Maggi said. “That’s the problem.”

Sherman said the next distribution will be in January, so he suggested that the commissioners still have time to form the committee working on a process to review applications. Sweat’s memo stated the committee will create a process to review applications and hold public workshops to assist applicants with their requests.

The commissioners are scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Thursday in the public meeting room on the ground floor of the Crossroads Center building in Washington.