I made my first remarks off the cuff. I told the Pennsylvania Opioid Mitigation Board of Trustees over Zoom: “We don’t believe that this listening session is really welcoming.” Or that “the Trust administration really cares what we have to say.”
I wasn’t sure how many of the 13 Trustees were in the room at the Kalahari Poconos resort, where they had reassembled after lunch for only their second meeting dedicated to public comment in four years. I saw one Trustee logged in online.
“We did our best to offer to make this a productive session,” I said. But “unfortunately, the Trust wasn’t interested. It’s clear they’ve done their best to minimize participation.”
“Which is why I’m standing with the group of parent advocates, the next three speakers, who have decided to decline to participate in this public listening session.”
Then I read my colleague’s short statement and closed by inviting the Trustees and the public to attend our own speaker event, a 2 pm press conference.
No promotion, one announcement
With just about 24 hours of public outreach, we’d seen 92 people register for our program, and nearly 60 had signed in online.
Our press conference, announced with barely a day’s notice, drew many more attendees than POMAAT’s sparsely attended “Listening Session” on Zoom. That demonstrated to us that people are interested in opioid settlement fund oversight.
Yet the Trust administrator had rebuffed our offer two weeks earlier to help them increase participation in their session. The Chair’s claim that “they really do want to hear from the public” and “provide a platform” was clearly not sincere.
Why else would he insist on obstacles like the rigid pre-registration requirement that attracted few takers?
Why else would they do no promotion, issue no press releases, or send out no communications aimed at the public? They hadn’t even bothered to email the first year’s participants.
We decided we couldn’t legitimize this bad-faith effort. Genuine public participation matters.
(Video of my remarks to POMAAT at 2026 “Listening Session”)
[https://youtu.be/KEfCI8FPR_s?is=M4c0Pvq7cQM-FTnv]
(Full video of “Listening Session”)
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_hgZVuYVYw ]
(Coalition Press Conference recording) [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W2vQXRNj_sbpG6gzKQPf2bMvvj3zbWRH/view?usp=sharing ]
Highlights from the statement to the Trustees, from my colleagues Susan Ousterman, Marianne Minisi, and Pamela Keefe:
“After careful consideration, we have decided not to deliver our prepared remarks at this time…
For bereaved families, sharing our stories is not simply public comment. It’s emotional labor.
Every time we prepare our testimony, we revisit the most painful moments of our lives in the hope that our experiences might help prevent another family from enduring the same loss.
Last year, we showed up. We shared our recommendations in good faith.
Instead of meaningful dialogue, many of us left feeling dismissed, discredited, and unheard.
The recommendations we submitted received no substantive response. This year’s listening session received little public outreach, really none. And there’s been no meaningful effort to address the concerns directly impacting communities that have been raised about this process.
We believe meaningful public engagement cannot be reduced to a few minutes of testimony once a year after the most important conversations have already taken place.”
(Please read their full statement here.)
Some highlights from the Coalition Press Conference:
Individual prepared statements
Carla Sofronski characterized the coalition’s actions as “not a refusal to participate” but “a statement that meaningful public engagement requires more than five minutes at a microphone once a year.”
“Listening is not the same as engagement. Engagement allows for dialogue, context, questions, follow-up, and an opportunity for the public to influence decisions before those decisions are made.
Pennsylvania is expected to receive more than $2 billion through the national opioid settlements over approximately 18 years. Those dollars were intended to save lives, expand access to effective care, support recovery, and repair communities devastated by the overdose crisis.
We are calling for greater transparency, stronger oversight, meaningful public participation, clear reporting, and formal representation of bereaved families and people with lived and living experience.”
[Carla’s opening statement]
Susan Ousterman described the “moral injury” caused by the Trust’s lack of transparency and disrespect for her expertise and that of other coalition members.
“We aren’t asking to control this process. We’re asking to be treated as a resource rather than an obstacle.
And I need the Trust to understand something fundamental: those of us who buried our children do not automatically trust government systems. Those systems failed our families, and there is healing that needs to happen.
That begins with acknowledgment.
An honest willingness to confront what failed and what continues to fail. And it requires transparency, because trust cannot be demanded from people who have already been failed. It has to be earned.”
Marianne Sinisi cited the emotional toll of being unheard and called for collaboration.
“We have attended meetings, submitted proposals, offered
recommendations, and shared our lived experience with one goal: helping create meaningful solutions that save lives and strengthen our communities.
Instead, too often we have been dismissed.
At the last [POMAAT] meeting I attended, I left feeling humiliated rather than respected…
Today’s boycott is not the end of our involvement. It is a call for change. A call for decision-makers to recognize that families are not obstacles to the process—we are partners in the solution.
We will continue advocating for the individuals still struggling, for those we have lost, and for every family who feels invisible in this system. We will continue bringing forward solutions rooted in compassion, evidence, and lived experience.
We are not walking away from this fight.”
Valerie Finici called for a genuine seat at the table, transparency, and accountability. The same high standards that she, as a law enforcement officer and public servant holding our trust, is expected to meet. She said pointedly that public servants “cannot ask for that trust while shielding our decisions from scrutiny.”
“Oversight and enforcement are not attacks on institutions. They are how responsible institutions earn public trust.
When a Board holds responsibility for decisions involving billions of dollars and countless lives, oversight cannot be assumed. It must be visible, independent, and enforceable.
Families continue to ask reasonable questions and too often receive silence. That leaves people feeling exactly as my son once felt: unseen, unheard, and undeserving.
The people most affected by this crisis should not have to fight for a seat at the table. They should already be sitting there.
Pennsylvania families deserve answers. How are decisions being made? How are expenditures being evaluated? How much money is reaching the affected communities, and how much is being consumed by administration? Why are family-led grassroots organizations with demonstrated community impact so often overlooked?
These are questions every taxpayer, every grieving family deserves to have answered.
Pamela Keefe, a co-author of the joint statement to the Trustees, runs an overdose prevention program in Northeastern PA. She attended the press conference but was traveling and so did not make additional prepared remarks.
The press had questions:
Reporters Aneri Pattani of KFF Health News and Ed Mahon of PA Spotlight asked several questions, including examples of what “meaningful public participation” would look like. They asked coalition members if we could reply to Trustee responses to our dissatisfaction. We were asked about our “next steps.”
Next Steps? Our answers included: Communication. Outreach. Transparency.
- Public access to all Trust meetings and sub-group deliberations.
- Public comment in meetings at the time decisions are made or when recommendations are deliberated.
- Transparency: correspondence, emails, finances, and contracts should be available to the public, consistent with PA Right to Know Law guidance.
- Communication: Establish an email list, newsletter, and sign-up process to share information (Steps that are among “the most basic of things a public group does” to facilitate communication, I noted.)
Send notifications about upcoming meetings, newly posted reports, and new FAQ’s, to the email list.
Post their mailing address. Post email addresses for all Trustees.
Amendments to the Trust’s governing order:
The Commonwealth Court 2022 order was amended in 2024. More revisions can be requested to ensure national best practices are being followed in PA.
Susan Ousterman and other parents have recommended changes, including:
More inclusion and diversity in the Board of Trustees membership, including more community members with subject matter expertise.
A separate advisory board, including people with lived experience.
“Resolutions around interest money the counties are accumulating and spending on whatever they want”.
Be responsive to feedback:
Maybe a once-a-year public “listening” session will not be needed if transparency and accountability reforms are implemented. But if one is still scheduled:
- Incorporate suggestions and feedback from previous participants.
- Make locations, dates, and times accessible for working people with families. (Hint: not at a rural resort. Or in August.)
- Welcome participants as respected collaborators, providing the advance meeting details, professional AV equipment, and common courtesies that are standard at professional meetings.
Additional coalition recommendations for a genuine public engagement program are in our July 2026 letter.
Box-checking vs. Outreach
Reporter Ed Mahon asked about our response to Mr. VanKirk’s justification that “the session was duly advertised”.
Mr. VanKirk had responded to our criticism by stating that an announcement and application details were included in the May meeting minutes the Trustees had just approved. Of course, these minutes were not available to the public until after the August Listening Session!
Carla Sofronski explained that the window for accepting speaker applications was mentioned in only one public announcement, during that May meeting. People not at the meeting would need to find a 1.5-minute discussion at the end of a 2-hour YouTube video online. She characterized Mr. VanKirk’s claim of having “properly advertised this” as box-checking. She asked Trustees like Mr. Boosel to explain the lack of public outreach.
Susan Ousterman called the POMAAT Chair’s expression of disappointment about low Listening Session attendance last year, “so insincere” in light of “the fact that they did no outreach to promote this meeting.”
I stated that the tiresome repetition of: “we’re doing the minimum!” was baffling.
“They should stop pretending like the minimum that’s legally required is all they can do.
The Sunshine Act is a floor, not a ceiling. They’re not even following that…
They can choose to release the documents that they’re hiding.
They can choose to allow public comment like any normal government agency that’s spending [our] money.”
Trustee, Butler County Commissioner Kevin Boosel attended the virtual press conference while driving home. He expressed empathy with families who lost loved ones and the desire to be heard. But he drew pushback from members of the coalition after he theorized that they didn’t understand the role of the trust.
“The reality is the Trust is built as guardrails for counties. That’s all. We don’t approve a particular program per se. We say, look, it fits in Exhibit E. That’s all that they are doing. I don’t know that people realize that” Mr Boosel said.
Mr. Boosel echoed the position of POMAAT Chair VanKirk that the coalition members’ proper role in engagement is limited to the county level. He said that he heard the coalition members asking for “the Trust engaging with you on a personal level” but “the reality is they can’t” referencing “ a lot of legality” in the Trustees’ communication that “people do not understand.”
Mr. Boosel also claimed that the closed working groups are “not secret meetings” and that members of the Trust had “a lot of lived experiences” that they “don’t express,” and we should not make assumptions.
Valerie Felici thanked Mr. Boosel for being the only Trustee to attend and be open to a discussion but criticized his “assumption” that “we don’t know… when we do.“
She added: “For you to sit here and just dismiss us as if we don’t know or we don’t understand, I feel, is really just doing what that whole board does to us, and it’s victimizing victims all over again, and that’s shameful.”
Susan Ousterman said, “We do understand the legalities involved. You would be surprised at how much knowledge we have… We do understand the limitations and the process and the role. Where I think a lot of us have a real hard time is that it doesn’t make sense.”
She described the “very flawed process” of the Trusts’ review of local allocations and expenditures and back and forth with counties with compliance guidance. “Exhibit E is not law. It is not set in stone. There’s discernment there, and that discernment and those deliberations are the things that are [happening] in your working groups.” Decisions that should not be hidden from public scrutiny, with “massive amounts of expertise missing from conversations.”
Gina DeMaria, spoke about problems with waste and abuse of settlement funds. She said government agencies at the county level are supplanting agency budget lines with settlement funding instead of supporting community-based organizations addressing the root causes of the opioid crisis. She described counties with conflicts of interest and transparency problems at the local level. She manages a nonprofit, Anthony’s Way Foundation, in York, Adams and Frederick Counties.
Best practices and POMAAT’s leadership gap
Our coalition believes POMAAT should set an example for local policymakers by adhering to national best practice recommendations for transparency and public inclusion in fund oversight, a core principle of opioid settlement guidance.
In fact, POMAAT Trust administrator Brie Anderson led a session at a recent national conference (a closed session–the irony!) in Denver this summer. The conference goals included elevating equity, lived experience, and accountability for opioid settlement fund administration. I suspect the discussion did not address their decision to not only ignore transparency, public engagement, and the inclusion of affected communities and families, but also to actively obstruct these efforts.
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