Wyoming nonprofit receives $3.4M of Nebraska’s opioid settlement funds to build Nebraska clinic
By DESTINY HEBERS/Flatwater Free Press
Flatwater Free Press
When Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services announced its plan to divvy up millions in opioid settlement money, one recipient stood out: The Central Wyoming Counseling Center.
The Wyoming nonprofit is the only out-of-state organization slated to receive some of Nebraska’s Opioid Treatment Infrastructure Cash Fund, receiving $3.4 million to build a crisis stabilization center in Kimball County, which borders Wyoming.
The Central Wyoming Counseling Center’s former acting CEO: Steve Corsi, now CEO of Nebraska’s DHHS.
The state agency declined to release any application materials from the Central Wyoming Counseling Center and other grantees, citing state laws allowing “proprietary or commercial information” and “examination records” to be withheld from public records requests.
Corsi had no involvement in the grant review or selection process, said DHHS spokesperson Jeff Powell. He also has had no involvement with the Counseling Center since leaving the organization in 2023, Powell said in a written response to Flatwater questions about the proposed project and Corsi’s former employer.
In total, 23 organizations applied for this round of opioid funding, Powell said. Two of those applicants were from outside Nebraska. The Central Wyoming Counseling Center’s proposed project was the only such project in the Nebraska Panhandle, Powell said.
“If this project wasn’t chosen, it would have meant Western Nebraskans in crisis and in need of immediate services to begin stabilization would need to be hospitalized or travel hundreds of miles to receive those services,” Powell wrote in an email. “It would mean law enforcement who are faced with someone in a mental health crisis would potentially have to transport that person hundreds of miles or spend hours finding an alternative.”
He reiterated that Corsi had no role in the selection of any recipients of the opioid settlement funds.
More than $50 billion in funds for opioid remediation are being distributed across every state in the country as a result of nationwide legal settlements in 2021 and 2022 between state attorneys general and opioid manufacturers and distributors, including Johnson & Johnson, Walmart and Walgreens.
How those states and local municipalities choose to use that money varies, and states are not required to make spending reports public. As a result, opioid settlement funds around the country have been used for everything from concerts to Tasers.
“What we have is like if you’ve seen one state, you’ve seen one state. Everybody’s trying to make sense of it and evaluate it and hold everybody to account, but it’s very, very difficult,” said Robert Pack, director of East Tennessee State University’s Addiction Science Center.
Over the next decade or so, Nebraska will receive more than $150 million from the opioid settlements, with the majority of the money coming between 2021 and 2028, then slowly tapering off closer to 2038.
In Nebraska, money designated for the state from opioid litigation settlements goes into the Opioid Recovery Fund, to be managed by DHHS’s Division of Behavioral Health. The fund currently has $32.6 million, John Meals, DHHS’s chief financial officer, said at a September advisory committee meeting.
Some of those funds are distributed to the state’s behavioral health regions, and another part is set aside for infrastructure projects in the Opioid Treatment Infrastructure Cash Fund, established by the Nebraska Legislature in 2024.
This year’s grants, the first distributed through the infrastructure fund, will total around $10.5 million.
Other grants awarded in this round are: $4.4 million to Heartland Counseling Services for a crisis stabilization center near South Sioux City; $2 million for Centerpointe, which operates in Lincoln and Omaha, to expand short-term residential treatment; $350,000 for Bryan Medical Center in Lincoln; and $276,000 for ARCH in Omaha.
At the December Opioid Settlement Remediation Advisory Committee meeting, Thomas Janousek, director of DHHS’s Division of Behavioral Health, said officials have identified a need for crisis stabilization and withdrawal services in the western and northern parts of the state, where the projects from the Central Wyoming Counseling Center and Heartland Counseling Services will operate.
“Law enforcement needs somewhere to drop people off, hospitals need a place to maybe send somebody if they’re full,” Janousek said.
The goal of the new crisis stabilization center will be to get individuals stabilized and routed to other community-based services in the Nebraska Panhandle, Powell said.
There’s a notable shortage of both short-term crisis centers and longer-term resources like residential treatment centers and methadone providers in the western half of Nebraska.
Short-term programs like crisis stabilization centers are vital, but just step one, because the brain takes 18 months to heal from a substance use disorder, said Jeremy Kourvelas, substance use program coordinator with the University of Tennessee’s Institute for Public Service.
“If you don’t have integration with long-term care, you’re not going to see long-term reductions in overdose rates, presentations in the ER, crime, so on and so forth related to drugs,” Kourvelas said.
People who need crisis stabilization services, “the hardest hardcore” of opioid users, are generally a small group at one end of the bell curve, Kourvelas said. Many more people fall in the middle, where they can recover through a variety of pathways.
“The need is so great, just about any strategy is helpful, any funding spent is helpful,” Kourvelas said.
The new crisis stabilization center will serve Nebraskans in Kimball and surrounding areas, Powell said. He did not clarify whether people using the center will be able to access resources through the Central Wyoming Counseling Center’s main location in Casper, Wyoming.
According to 2024 IRS filings, the center has over $18 million in assets and $13.8 million in revenue, almost entirely through contracts with the Wyoming Department of Health’s Behavioral Health Division.
The opioid infrastructure grant from Nebraska, $3.4 million, will be used for construction in Kimball. DHHS also did not specify if Wyoming residents will be able to use the services.
All applications for the infrastructure grant were scored based on objective criteria, Powell said, and members reviewing the applications were not employed by nor did they have any vested interest in the agencies submitting the applications.
When explaining the projects to the advisory committee in December, Janousek did not mention that Corsi, DHHS’s current CEO, formerly led the Central Wyoming Counseling Center.
The document announcing the five awardees does not provide further information on any project, including the center’s.
Corsi’s association with the center should be immediately publicly disclosed, said Pack, director of East Tennessee State’s Addiction Science Center, calling it “a no-brainer.”
“If they don’t do that, they’re inviting scrutiny, negative scrutiny, that’s going to be problematic for them in the long term, I would think,” he said.
When asked if Corsi’s prior role had been disclosed to any oversight body or the advisory committee, Powell said that DHHS has complied with all legal requirements, and that Corsi has provided required accountability and disclosure statements in accordance with law.
During his confirmation hearing in February 2024, Corsi faced questions from lawmakers about another former employer, Utah-based consulting firm Epiphany Associates, which entered a $10 million no-bid contract with Nebraska while Corsi was working there, before joining DHHS.
With the opioid settlement funds, it’s inevitable that the people at the table have direct stakes in the outcomes, Kourvelas said, because many run treatment centers or are involved in law enforcement or faith communities.
Part of Kourvelas’ work has been helping communities set up bylaws and parameters to reduce the risk of conflict of interest, he said, by abstaining from discussion and votes and also by transparently disclosing those processes.
Transparency in opioid settlement funding is essential, Pack and Kourvelas agreed, because people lost their lives to the opioid epidemic, causing the litigation that led to the billions in settlement funding. That money, they say, should be transparently spent to save as many lives as possible.
“It’s blood money,” Pack said. “These resources are the result of extreme cost. Extreme suffering. Psychic, emotional, familial, otherwise. It’s absolutely imperative that we do our best to ensure that none of these resources that we use are used in vain.”
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This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
