SPOKANE, Wash. — Spokane's Regional Opioid Task Force will stay alive after it was announced mid-December it would dissolve due to funding issues.
The task force links together more than 60 agencies and organizations as a united front against the opioid epidemic.
A since-deleted Facebook post announced the group would end its work effective Dec. 29, 2023.
"If we lost that, there wouldn't be a lot of information networking, collaboration, data and trends being shared at the regional level," said Sarah McNew, coordinator for the West Spokane Wellness Partnership.
When McNew and the wellness coalition got the news in a task force email, she immediately turned to the leadership team for the wellness partnership.
"So we heard about it when everyone else did when it was made public. We were shocked," she said.
Her ask: can the coalition step in to help?
The immediate answer: yes.
The wellness partnership has now taken over leadership of the task force, even hosting the first virtual monthly meeting Thursday afternoon. McNew says around 30 people attended, as interest in the continued future of the group's work was evident.
"We're still very much in the midst of an opioid epidemic and so this work is still very meaningful and needs to happen," she said.
The Spokane Regional Health Department's (SRHD) opioid dashboard shows, of Spokane County's 215 overdose deaths in 2022, around 3/4 were due to opioids.
The numbers for non-fatal overdoses and drug seizures collected by Operation Engage and posted on the task force website highlight even more starkly the region's opioid crisis.
Fentanyl-related overdoses increased 186% in 2022, while fentanyl seizures by DEA agents in the same year were up 1098%.
McNew says the wellness partnership's work closely mirrored that of the task force, and in fact she and some other members were part of the monthly meetings. Though she says the coalition knew it could help in another way.
"We have local, state and federal funding sources for substance prevention," she said.
Lack of funding was the reason given for the expected demise of the group's work.
Kelli Hawkins, SRHD spokesperson, tells KREM 2 News the health department supported the task force by providing a grant-funded administrative employee. She says grant funding was "greatly reduced," meaning SRHD had to make tough budgeting decisions and cut the position.
"SRHD leadership and the Spokane County Board of Health do not govern nor approve decisions and activities taken by the collaboration. They operate independent of SRHD, and the collaboration isn’t an SRHD program. We do not have the authority to end the Task Force," Hawkins wrote by email.
Hawkins said the task force does great work to prevent opioid addiction and overdose and SRHD will continue to be involved.
"Our inability to provide a grant-funded, full-time employee does not have to change this," she wrote.
McNew says the task force helps centralize the work of various agencies and groups, like the West Spokane Wellness Partnership, into a regional approach. The first steps in the new life of the program will be to identify how to move forward.
"Maybe doing an assessment in the task force and identifying priority areas for us to focus on," she said.
Though the overarching mission, to reduce opioid use, overdose, and deaths, isn't going anywhere.
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