Where Walla Walla’s opioid settlement funds are going

Call 911 in Walla Walla, and you might get an ambulance or a police car. Or you might get Cody Maine.

Maine is a paramedic on the city’s  Community Assistance Referral and Education Services team, known as CARES. The program started with just Maine in 2021. It now has an EMT, a nurse and a social worker, too. 

CARES is a “mobile integrated health care” unit, which means it can provide assistance — both preventative and on-demand — at a patient’s location. The team mostly responds to calls involving nonemergent medical and mental health needs. 

Many of the team’s calls involve people who are homeless or struggling with substance use disorder. Rather than shuttling these patients to the hospital, CARES can connect them to local resources. That helps reduce strain on the emergency room and on EMS workers.

The majority of CARES’ funding comes from grants. But when its calls involve people using opioids, the CARES team can bill its services to the city’s opioid settlement fund. 

So far, the city of Walla Walla has received around $443,000 of the state’s $1.1 billion in opioid settlement money. As some of the settlements pay out in installments, the city will receive over $1 million more in the coming years.

Walla Walla County has also received opioid settlement funds. According to the state attorney general’s office, the county will receive more than $2.8 million, minus legal fees. 

Cassidy Brewin, who works for the county’s Department of Community Health, said that none of its settlement funds have been spent so far. 

“We need a little extra time to figure out next steps and work through internal hiccups,” she said. “Hopefully by the new year, we’ll have a more definitive response about where and when these funds will be going out.” 

In the city of Walla Walla, around $45,000 of the opioid settlement fund was spent in 2024. In 2025, that amount is expected to more than double. 

Thus far, that money has gone entirely toward the CARES team’s opioid-related work. Because the state has strict guidelines for how settlement money can be spent, Liz Moeller, the city’s finance director, said that will likely be the case in future years, as well. 

The settlement money funds things like the CARES team’s purchases of Deterra, a compound that deactivates opioids and other drugs, and buprenorphine, a medication that can curb cravings and withdrawal symptoms.

Though the CARES team receives naloxone, a drug that reverses overdoses, for free from the state Department of Health, the team can use the settlement funds to cover the time it spends distributing that medication. 

Because of that work, Walla Walla’s first responders are dealing with fewer opioid-related cardiac arrests, according to Fred Hector, the city’s deputy fire chief. 

“If this program wouldn’t have been proactive in getting Narcan in the street, we would have seen significantly more deaths,” he said. 

The settlement money also funds any time that the CARES team spends with patients with opioid-use disorder. 

“We have a lot of resources here in town to help these people, but sometimes it’s really difficult for them to get plugged into the necessary programs,” Hector said. He noted that CARES “is good at maximizing the community resources and knowing exactly what’s going to fit for different people.” 

The CARES team doesn’t only show up when there’s an emergency, either. Maine, the paramedic, said his team spends time in the community: visiting with people, handing out sandwiches or water bottles, and offering a listening ear. 

“The unique thing about us is that we build rapport within that targeted population a lot,” Maine said. 

So, when 911 is called, it might not be the first time that the CARES team has interacted with an individual. “We know that person, and we know a little bit of their story,” Maine said. “So they’re able to trust us a little bit quicker.” 

The services that patients receive are different, too. If someone calls an ambulance for an overdose, that unit will likely transport the patient to the emergency room. 

But the CARES team can give that patient a ride somewhere more appropriate, like the nonprofit Blue Mountain Heart to Heart, which offers needle exchanges, opioid treatment and case management. 

By responding to nonemergent calls, the CARES team also frees up an ambulance, EMS workers and possibly an emergency room bed. 

“The traditional services that we’ve had for a long time just can’t keep up with the call volume,” Maine said. “So we have to allow people to leverage some outside-the-box thinking when it comes to these types of things. The opioid settlement funds certainly allow us to do that.”