GOP lawmakers to unveil opioid settlement plan rewrite while Evers demands PFAS cleanup funds

Joint Finance Committee hearing room. (Photo: Legislature website)

As the state Legislature’s budget committee prepared to meet and vote on a 2025 opioid settlement spending plan, Gov. Tony Evers renewed his campaign Monday to try to force the lawmakers to release funds already budgeted to combat PFAS chemical contamination and bolster health care in western Wisconsin.

Neither the PFAS money nor the health care funds are on the agenda for the Joint Finance Committee when it meets at 1 p.m Tuesday. Instead, the highlight of the committee’s agenda is how the lawmakers will redirect the $36 million that Wisconsin is to receive for the 2025 fiscal year from a national fund created by the multi-state legal settlement with opioid producers and distributors.

On Monday, however, Evers issued a formal call for the panel to meet and authorize spending $125 million set aside in the 2023-25 state budget for PFAS chemical cleanup and $15 million for Chippewa Valley health care providers in a separate bill enacted in February. It’s the second time in less than a month Evers has sought to set the finance committee’s agenda.

Wisconsin state statutes include language that says the Joint Finance Committee “shall hold special meetings upon the call of the governor or upon call of the cochairpersons…” In an April 9 memo requested by the committee’s Republican co-chairs, however, a member of the Legislative Reference Bureau staff wrote that nothing in the law gives the governor power to require the committee co-chairs to convene a meeting, require any committee member to attend or require the committee to take up any particular matter.

The committee’s Republican majority ignored Evers’ call for a special finance committee meeting to be held April 16. GOP lawmakers similarly ignored Evers’ call for a special meeting of the committee in 2019.

Evers’ attempt Monday to redirect the committee’s agenda was the first of a  double-barreled confrontation of the finance committee Republicans. The second was an announcement by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and Democratic leaders in the state Legislature of a campaign targeting Republican lawmakers on the Joint Finance Committee.  

How the state will spend its $36 million in opioid settlement money for the 2025 fiscal year is the last item on the finance committee’s agenda Tuesday.

The state Department of Health Services (DHS) submitted its 2025 plan April 3. Under the department’s proposal nearly one-third of the funds — $15 million — would be allocated for community, education and after-school prevention programs; support and resource centers for the families of people with opioid addiction; and peer support services in opioid treatment programs.

The state law that enables Wisconsin to collect its share of settlement funds each year and spend it on programs to combat opioid addiction requires DHS to annually submit its plans under a two-week “passive review” procedure.

During that two-week window that committee can block the plan and revise it, which it has done for the first two opioid settlement plans for the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years. The committee’s Republican co-chairs announced April 22 that the 2025 DHS plan had been blocked, but didn’t say why.

In rewriting the first annual plan for $31 million, submitted in 2022 for the 2023 fiscal year, the finance committee’s Republican majority directed money to law enforcement agencies and to some specific nonprofits not previously named in the DHS plan.

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