On Tuesday January 12th, Prince William County’s Board of Supervisors (BOCS) convened for their first meeting of the 2021 calendar year. The agenda included a number of resolutions pertaining to organizational matters and several appointments by supervisors to various boards and commissions.

The consent agenda included Resolution 6-G. Its stated purpose is to “accept, budget, and appropriate $265,313 in one-time federal state opioid response revenues to reconcile the fiscal year 2021 community services board’s county budget to anticipated revenues and reallocate $89,993 in contract funds.” As a part of the county’s ongoing effort to manage the opioid crisis.

There was a brief discussion of the resolution, started by Supervisor Pete Candland, R-Gainesville, who asked county staff to clarify what exactly are the budgetary implications of statements in the resolution.

Executive Director of Community Services, Lisa Madron answered Supervisor Candland’s questions. Madron stated “There [are] two pieces to this. One is a continued grant through the department of behavioral health and development services and that is for two temporary positions. You may recall that they had funded us for some peer positions previously that were supposed to end and we did not know if the funding would be continued and the county did fund those positions. And then the grant came through and offered to fund us for two temporary positions to continue the work. So that is strictly for that. They would be temporary, we would not be looking to move them to permanent positions.

The other piece relates to, we are the administrators of a regional crisis stabilization grant and the department allows us to take administrative cost for overseeing that grant and those administrative costs [are] what we would be looking to fund ongoingly, the quality position.”

Supervisor Candland asked a series of follow up questions regarding how the position will be funded, what budget it will come out of, how it will be funded on an ongoing basis, and whether or not it was previously in the community services budget. 

Madron clarified that the funding is coming from the community services budget and that funding it was “a recent decision that we were informed [of] by the department, of the administrative fee that we were allowed to get, we’ve overseen this for many years and that was not a piece. So this is new and we wanted to use it for this.”

Supervisor Candland concluded his questions by saying “I think the opioid crisis that we have in our country and in Virginia is extremely significant and one that’s unfortunately, because of the pandemic, has been lost a little bit, yet there’s still a lot of people out there struggling and succumbing to this. So what we can do to help that out I’m all in favor of that.”

In a unanimous vote, Resolution 6-G passed, with Supervisor Jeanine Lawson, R-Brentsville attending and voting remotely.