Virginia Opioid Abatement Authority launches public dashboard for settlement funds

The Opioid Abatement Authority on the webinar introduced a new public dashboard that shows how much of Virginia’s opioid settlement revenue the agency expects to receive, how much it has received, and how much has been awarded to cities, counties and state agencies. "This morning, we're going to be talking about the OAA's newly launched public facing dashboard," said Tony McDowell, executive director of the Opioid Abatement Authority. "Anybody with an Internet connection ... can go to our website and look at all of the details about the amount of settlement funds that have come to Virginia." The dashboard includes a landing page with three “big number” charts (estimated OAA share of settlement revenue, settlement receipts to date, and total OAA funds awarded), an interactive city and county projects section (including a “gold standard” opt-in indicator and a geographic map), a state-agency projects section, and performance-measure tables. Matt Terrell, the OAA’s business analyst, demonstrated features such as hover breakdowns by individual settlements, searchable project lists, links to grant summaries and annual report PDFs, and filters by fiscal year and DBHDS region. Terrell said achieved performance measures will appear for fiscal year 2025 awards and later; awards from fiscal years 2020–2024 lack performance measures because they predate the OAA’s grants-management portal. The site also contains a section calling out the Commonwealth Opioid Abatement and Remediation Fund, which Terrell said the agency must track “by statute” even though the OAA does not oversee that fund. The dashboard shows a contact link (info@voaa.us) for questions and corrections. During the webinar participants identified display issues: a cooperative-partnership participation column showing “no” for some partners even though they contributed, and a missing gold-star marker for Bristol City on the interactive map. Terrell said the cooperative-participation column should show “yes” for partners as well as fiscal agents and that the OAA will investigate both issues; he also said the team is considering an enhancement to show cooperating localities and fiscal agents more clearly. McDowell asked grant recipients, cities, counties and state agencies to review the portal and report errors before the OAA makes a public announcement. Terrell said the agency is in the process of moving fiscal‑year 2026 individual and cooperative awards to “awarded” status and will refresh the dashboard when that work is complete, which will update the total awarded figure. He opened the webinar for questions at the end of his demonstration. Discussion versus direction versus decisions: the webinar presentation and Q&A were discussion and demonstration only; there were no motions or formal votes. Directional items recorded on the webinar included staff follow-ups to investigate the cooperative-partnership display, the missing map marker, and a potential enhancement to display partner lists; the OAA also directed stakeholders to review the dashboard and report errors to info@voaa.us. No formal policy or funding decisions were made on the call. Key technical and data clarifications from the webinar: the dashboard’s city/county profile shows both eligible direct distributions and amounts awarded, indicates whether a locality participated in a cooperative partnership (the column should read “yes” for partners and fiscal agents), the performance-measures tables separate estimated (set at award) and achieved (reported in the annual report) results, and the performance period for state-agency projects is October 1 through September 30. The dashboard exposes grant summaries and annual reports (PDF) where available and links to MOUs for some state-agency projects. The OAA asked users not to view the webinar as a public launch; McDowell said the agency has not issued a press release and wants stakeholders to help identify and correct errors before broader public outreach.