City Council and the County Commission agreed to enter into a strategic planning process for the use of opioid settlement money that will be coming to both jurisdictions.

That process has now reached its conclusion, and the consultant is ready to make uh its recommendations known.

So with that, I'm going to turn over to Dante Martin to do the introduction to the of the consulting team.

Thank you, Manager Layton.

Uh, good afternoon, Mayor, members of city council.

Glad to be here with you today, Dante Martin, assistant.

Dante, can you speak to the into the microphone?

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Um, glad to be here with you this afternoon, as the manager said, this has been a long time coming.

Um, in the way of background, I just want to take you back to 2021 when the Kansas legislature enacted the Kansas Fights Addiction Act.

Um, that provided regulations for the distribution of opioid settlement funds.

Subsequent to that, the League of Kansas municipalities as well as the Kansas Association of Counties entered an MOU with the Kansas Attorney General.

Basically, the MOU lays out a process to streamline the distribution as well as the utilization of opioid settlement funds.

As the manager mentioned, uh, in our community, City of Wichita, Sedgwick County recognize that this truly is a community problem.

It's a shared problem that's going to require community solutions, shared solutions.

So in 2023, we issued an RFP, City of County, City of Wichita, Sedgwick County, looking for a consultant to help guide us through a strategic planning process.

We had eleven proposals in 2023.

So I've had the pleasure of working with Stadman group over the last twelve months.

Last twelve months, excuse me.

And then we'll also spend some time talking about next steps.

Is that up to us?

Is it our turn?

Okay.

Apologies for the delay there.

We can hear y'all, but it's a little bit echoey.

So if we are asking folks to repeat questions, I'll I'll let you know if we need a double down.

But hello everyone.

Dante, thank you for the warm welcome and the introduction.

My name is Rihanna Strait, and along with my colleague Burke Fishburn, who you will get to hear from shortly, we have the great pleasure of leading the city of Wichita and Sedgwick County in a really collaborative effort, ultimately to create for you all a strategic plan that is effective and feasible alongside subject matter experts from your community that outlines recommendations for opioid settlement spending in the city and the county.

Now we are gonna dig into a pretty robust agenda, and while we're working through this together, we welcome questions throughout the presentation.

If you all have them, please come off mute and share.

But we will try to save at least 15 minutes at the very end for final discussion and any remaining questions.

With that, let's go ahead and dig in.

This is the agenda that we've laid out for you all today.

We've broken up our work really into three different parts.

First, we're gonna talk about the background and kind of the historical context that you need to be able to understand the strategic plan in its entirety.

Then we'll dig into the strategic plan itself.

We'll talk about vision, mission, guiding principles, and show you the final strategy and goal recommendations from the consortium.

We'll also talk about specific funding allocations for those strategies.

And then the third portion of our presentation, we will dig into the other deliverables, what we're calling other strategic plan recommendations that get a little bit more at the nitty-gritty details about how you all might be able to implement this plan, including governance structures, communications, evaluation, and some community partners that we think will be really helpful for you all.

One thing that I really want to hammer home before we get started is that this work and everything that you will see from us today is really the product of the Wichita Sedgwick Opioid Settlement Consortium.

We are very proud of this advisory body that was established, and they've been real uh involved stand this up.

So while we can make edits and some adjustments as requested by you all today, we're not gonna make any substantive changes to the strategy so that this remains a community co-created document.

Okay, so what did we actually create?

We have provided these four deliverables or documents to city, and so you all have access to these to dig in a little bit deeper.

But we're calling the strategic plan spreadsheet, really kind of the main living body where all of the meat of what we're gonna share today is located.

We've also created a narrative report, so just a written report that outlines everything in the sheet.

Conducted a needs assessment in early 2024, so you'll have access to that full report, and then the presentation that you have in front of you today, you'll you'll get all of the slides following this as well.

All right, so let's dig in.

First up, we are gonna talk a little bit about the opioid settlement context.

In Sedgwick County specifically, we wanted to give you a little bit of the lay of the land of the behavioral health situation.

So Sedgwick County actually has one of the highest rates of overdose-related emergency department visits in the state, and the majority of those visits occur among uninsured folks.

They also have a fatal overdose rate in Sedgwick County that's nearly double the state rate in Kansas.

There are also a lot of socioeconomic barriers to care that when you kind of look at concurrently, really speaks to the need for comprehensive interventions that address the interconnected challenges related to substance use disorder and things like poverty, housing instability, and other social determinants of health.

And so this strategic plan takes all of this data into account when we wrote it.

In addition to some behavioral health-related data, we wanted to give you the lay of the land when it comes to the opioid settlement itself.

So, starting kind of up high, really broad, this is a national settlement, and currently estimates for the 18 year settlement duration are reaching just under 50 billion dollars distributed across states in the nation.

Kansas specifically is set to receive about 190 million, and Kansas has a MOU that is specific to the state that outlines that 75% of the state share will go to what they call the Kansas Fights Addiction Fund.

This is run by the Sunflower Foundation, and we'll talk a little bit more about this later.