Editorial: Westmoreland commissioners should be open about settlement money

Watch movies or television shows with cartels and kingpins, and you come away with one message pretty quickly:

Drug money can make things go bad in a hurry. A lot of money plus little trust equals suspicion.

It’s not just a fictional truism. You can see it in criminal court all the time. People sell drugs for the money. They steal, launder and smuggle for the money. They assault for the money. Kill for it. Go to war over it.

And so it makes one wonder why the Westmoreland County commissioners have so much faith in the ability of a large pot of money from a drug settlement to make things go smoothly.

The county will get $3 million this year as part of a settlement with drug manufacturers over the opioid epidemic. But it isn’t just for the county. It gets shared with Westmoreland’s 11 largest municipalities, which also shared heavily in the burdens caused by addiction to prescription pain medication.

The Westmoreland share of the $26 billion national settlement is $22 million. But nowhere in the settlement does it say how much goes to Greensburg, Lower Burrell, Murrysville, New Kensington, Derry, Hempfield, Mt. Pleasant, North Huntingdon, Penn, Rostraver and Unity. That was left up in the air, to be decided by the commissioners.

Last year, the plan proposed was for a special committee with representation from all 11 municipalities. That is no longer on the table.

Instead, the commissioners will meet privately with the Drug Overdose Task Force to carve up the monetary pie.

“Rather than having a committee, we decided, wherever the money goes, they can decide on their own. They are all so different. Some have a police force, some do not, so whatever that number is (they will receive), we will let them decide,” Commissioner Gina Cerilli Thrasher said.

This is true. Hempfield’s needs and New Kensington’s might be very different. But those differences don’t require a behind-closed-doors approach to distribution of funds.

We can’t ignore that a county government should be doing everything in the bright, unflinching sunlight of public scrutiny. That’s just fact.

But, in this case, there’s an additional factor. The municipalities in question have a right to be part of this process. They should get to advocate for themselves, to advance the needs of their communities and to push for ideas and proposals that could benefit broader swaths of Westmoreland County by cooperation.

Doing this in private — especially after previously announcing a more public process — sets up an atmosphere of distrust. That’s no way to fight addiction.