May 29, 2026 By Mike Jones 3 min read

Washington County’s newly formed opioid settlement review committee is scheduled to meet next week to recommend to the commissioners which applicants should receive a share of the final round of 2025 grant money.

The seven-person committee met for the first time Tuesday, but it lasted about two hours, prompting the meeting to be continued to 9 a.m. Monday in the small conference room next to the ground-floor public meeting room inside the Crossroad Center building in Washington.

During the meeting, the members are expected to make decisions on which of the eight applications should receive the remaining $829,000 available from last year.

Once the committee makes its recommendations, the list will be forwarded to the Washington County commissioners, and they plan to hold a special meeting at 12:30 p.m. Thursday in the public meeting room in Crossroads to approve the recipients. The special meeting is needed because the last round of the 2025 grants from Pennsylvania’s opioid settlement trust fund must be authorized by June 15, which comes three days before the commissioners’ regularly scheduled monthly meeting.

“Our first committee meeting allowed the table to be set for a transparent review of applications,” said John Tamiggi, who is the county’s Human Services director and chairs the opioid review committee. “The committee utilized an open discussion format to best understand each proposed project. These efforts have been employed to develop meaningful benefits to the community while also working to ensure compliance throughout the process.”

In addition to Tamiggi, the committee includes Court Administrator Daniel Buzard, Charleroi Area Superintendent Ed Zelich, Washington Teen Outreach Community Coordinator Amy Podgurski-Gough, Washington County Community Foundation President and CEO Aliesha Walz, Peters Township police Chief Joe Glover and Teresa Cypher, who is a certified advanced alcohol and drug counselor and operator at Washington-based Turning Point II.

The commissioners formed the review committee in February after there were concerns raised about how the county’s opioid settlement money was being distributed.

Four grants from Washington County were deemed non-compliant by the Pennsylvania Opioid Misuse and Addiction Abatement Trust’s dispute resolution committee during its March meeting, leading county officials to appeal that decision. The appeal hearing will be held from 2:15 to 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, giving county officials the chance to persuade the statewide committee to reconsider its rejection of those four grants.

The rejected grants were $350,000 for the Shawn Patrick Recovery House; $80,000 to WHS Teen Outreach’s Common Ground Teen Center; $75,000 for The Childcare Group Solutions Center by Direct Consulting Solutions; and $25,000 for training and continuing education for the county’s Department of Human Services.

The state review committee rejected four other appeals from Washington County during a separate March meeting, although it reversed course on three other grants and allowed them to proceed.

Wednesday’s meeting will be streamed on the internet and the link can be found on the trust fund’s website at www.paopioidtrust.org.

The county has allocated $4.7 million in opioid settlement grants over four rounds since September 2024. The county will be able to allocate grants annually for 18 years as part of the nationwide opioid settlement, with the money being sent to individual states and then filtered to the counties to determine how it should be used.