Her and her Opioid $$ Operators.
If you haven’t already, read Cris Barrish’s story. Some choice excerpts:
Delaware prosecutors are investigating how nonprofit Code Purple Kent County spent $290,000 from the state’s opioid settlement windfall, spurring Attorney General Kathy Jennings to call for an immediate halt to grants from the multimillion dollar fund aimed at reducing overdose deaths from prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl.
Jennings is co-chair with Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long of the 15-member committee that since last year has allocated $14.4 million to dozens of agencies that presented plans to help remediate Delaware’s opioid epidemic.
(Omigod, some of the recipients raise a bleepload of questions in my mind. Click on that ‘dozens of agencies’ link. But, that’s a topic for another day…)
The question of how Code Purple has spent money has also become an issue in the 2024 governor’s race.
That’s because Lt. Gov. Hall-Long, who is in a three-way Democratic primary for the state’s top political post, accepted the maximum donation of $1,200 from Code Purple leader Ennio Emmanuel Zaragoza just days after the agency received the $290,000 whose use is now being investigated. (BHL officially got the donation from ‘Ennio Emmanuel’, and also got a smaller donation from ‘Ennio Zaragoza’. We now know that they’re both the same person. He’s donated more than the maximum allowable donation, Bethany. Just wanted to let you know so that you don’t run further afoul of campaign finance laws.)
The Prescription Opioid Settlement Committee that Jennings and Hall-Long co-chair operates within the Delaware Behavioral Health Consortium that is part of the lieutenant governor’s office.The consortium, which Hall-Long alone chairs, must give final approval to all recommendations for funding.
This is where I need to encourage you to read the entire story. Barrish recounts the spate of controversies concerning BHL’s use of campaign funds. He points out throughout the story that BHL has refused to comment on any of this and/or answer questions. To me, though, the key takeaway is that AG Jennings puts the lie to the claim by BHL and her staff that they discovered the misuse of funds and swiftly moved to address it:
Holloway also did not agree to an interview, but said in a written statement issued by Hall-Long’s office that the dozens of opioid settlement grant recipients are monitored by a staff member who “regularly communicates with grantees, conducts site visits, and assesses compliance. Funding is frozen if discrepancies are flagged and validated.”
Holloway’s statement said that in the case of Code Purple, her staff “noticed data inconsistencies, which triggered a manual review of the numbers. Unsatisfied with the review, funding was immediately frozen while staff conducted two site visits to gain more insight’’ from the agency.
“They were unsatisfied with their additional review and as a result, funding was then permanently frozen in December 2023, and the organization has not received money since.”
Hall-Long’s statement piggybacked on what Holloway said.
“The disbursement of funds occurs in phases after thorough data reviews and site assessments. Non-compliance with these standards results in an immediate cessation of funding for the recipient. In addition to having funds halted, an awardee would be referred to the proper state agencies for investigation, ensuring that violators are subject to the appropriate consequences. This process worked recently when issues were raised.”
Jennings, however, provided a different account of the workings of the commission and her efforts to safeguard what she referred to as “lifesaving dollars” for people at risk of drug overdoses.
The attorney general wrote that, for the last 16 months, she’s been vocal at the public meetings and “repeatedly expressed serious concerns” about how money is allocated and monitored.
Jennings wrote that in February 2023, she sought to postpone the next month’s meeting “to give the commission time to review applications more thoroughly” and that previously, her own staff “had to advocate for commission staff to remove clearly inadequate, incomplete, or unmerited applications from its grant recommendations.”
She also expressed concern about inaction on “adopting a strategic plan that would help ensure we base grants on impact, rather than rubber-stamping spending on a first-come, first-served basis.”
And now, 20 months after grants were first awarded, Jennings contended in her letter that “we still do not know where these funds will be most useful, how we will measure their impact, or even whether our grantees are compliant. This project is rife with potential for fraud, waste and abuse.”
I suspect we’ll soon learn learn that we can strike the phrase ‘rife with potential for…’ in the previous sentence, and substitute the phrase ‘riddled with’. (BTW, when the News-Journal presumably does its ‘second day’ story on this, they will most most likely continue to pretend that what they present is original reporting on their part. Our readers know, that were it not for Cris Barrish and Karl Baker, we’d have no stories on this in the News-Journal. Prove me wrong.)
The point is that BHL and her designated point person Susan Holloway did nothing to ensure that the grants went to the proper recipients and did nothing to ensure that the money was spent properly. Had the AG not screamed bloody murder, had someone like Kathy McGuiness been in charge of burying the non-compliance by grant recipients, this would be just another Delaware Way giveaway.
How many more examples does anyone need to realize that Bethany Hall-Long belongs in a courtroom somewhere, and not in the Governor’s Mansion?