Niagara County Got $3.7 Million to Fight Opioids. It Reported Spending Nothing.

The resolution took a few minutes and closed a three-year gap. On September 22 the Niagara County Legislature approved $2.43 million in opioid settlement spending: $350,000 over two years for a jail reentry program run by Peaceprints Project Blue, and two three-year contracts totaling $2.08 million for the county mental health department's PATH program and for Community Missions. It was the largest commitment the county has made from the money since the first installment arrived in 2023.

What the county reported to the state before that is a zero. New York's 2025 Opioid Settlement Report, filed under Mental Hygiene Law §25.18, lists every county's abatement receipts by fiscal year alongside the amount each county reported spending through the end of 2024. Niagara's row runs $1,781,642, then $1,424,865, then $537,289, for a total of $3,743,796. The spending column reads $0.

That is not a rounding artifact and not a reporting slip. Three other counties also reported nothing, and the state's own table shows a statewide pattern in which the money moved out considerably faster than the spending did.

What the State's Ledger Actually Says

OASAS had disbursed $137,616,022 in regional abatement funding through March 31, 2025, according to the report's summary table. Counties received $119,560,717 of that, the five large cities $15,367,344, and named towns and small cities the remaining $2,687,961.

The same subdivisions told the state they had spent $31,939,130 through the end of 2024. Set against the $110,308,278 disbursed in the two fiscal years completed by then, that is roughly 29 cents on the dollar.

Regional abatement is the slice of the settlement fund that flows to local governments rather than to state-run initiatives. According to OASAS, $185.8 million is designated for it across fiscal years 2023 through 2027, with $161.3 million of that assigned to nine regions. The money can only be spent on the approved uses listed in Schedule C of the state's settlement sharing agreement, which covers treatment, recovery, harm reduction, housing, transportation and related supports. It arrives at the county's mental health department, gets vetted by a community services board, and requires legislative approval before a contract exists.

That chain of approvals is the reason a county can hold millions and report spending none of it without breaking a rule. It is also the reason the numbers lag: a county that signs a three-year contract in September books the commitment, not the expenditure.

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Three Years, $3.7 Million, Zero

Niagara County joined the litigation against opioid manufacturers and distributors in 2018, two years after it formed a task force called OASIS to coordinate its response. By the time the settlement money started arriving, the county had a structure in place to spend it and no program to fund.

Laura Kelemen, who directs the county's mental health department, told Investigative Post that the county received no proposals meeting its qualifications in 2023, when the funds first became available. She said the county discussed funding a program at Mount St. Mary's Hospital in Lewiston, but the conversations stalled; a Catholic Health spokesperson told the outlet the program never materialized because of cost.

Investigative Post began requesting interviews on the subject last October. Kelemen and the county's public information officer declined to sit for interviews. The outlet reported that as of May the county had spent 2.5 percent of the regional abatement money, and that county officials had refused to provide an accounting of a separate pot of direct share funds — $3.8 million received, of which Kelemen said $3.4 million had been spent or assigned to multi-year projects.

During those three years, at least 217 Niagara County residents died of overdoses, according to CDC data cited in the same reporting.

The September resolution, CS-044-26, shows what finally moved the county: a request for proposals, numbered 2026-43, aimed specifically at people leaving the county jail. The resolution's preamble lays out why that population was the target, citing substance use disorder, co-occurring mental health conditions, housing instability, transportation limits, and the difficulty of reaching treatment after release. Peaceprints gets $350,000 for two years of jail-based reentry case management. The PATH program and Community Missions split $1,006,067 and $1,075,946 over three years.

It Is Not Only Niagara

Monroe County, the state's third-largest outside New York City, received $11,329,696 across the three fiscal years and reported spending $20,000. Syracuse received $2,331,039 and reported spending nothing. Onondaga County, which surrounds Syracuse, received $7,573,499 and reported $228,262. Warren and Washington counties, which share a community services office in the North Country, reported zero against $630,695 and $565,670.

County or city	Received, FY2023–FY2025	Reported spent through 2024
Monroe	$11,329,696	$20,000
Onondaga	$7,573,499	$228,262
Niagara	$3,743,796	$0
Syracuse	$2,331,039	$0
Chautauqua	$2,264,620	$54,572
Saratoga	$2,156,529	$18,646
Sullivan	$1,438,489	$12,554
Livingston	$816,776	$606,923
Chemung	$1,318,701	$826,909
Dutchess	$4,468,484	$2,324,991

The fast movers cut against any easy theory about which counties struggle. Livingston, with $816,776, reported spending nearly three-quarters of it. Chemung reported 63 percent, Dutchess 52 percent, Westchester 40 percent and Erie 36 percent. Montgomery, a small county east of Utica, reported spending 81 percent of $625,381. There is no clean urban-rural or rich-poor line in the table; some counties with a single mental health director and no grant staff moved money faster than counties with entire departments.

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What the Money Bought Elsewhere

The spending column is where the argument gets concrete. Investigative Post reported in December that Buffalo had spent less than a third of its $6 million allocation, and that the purchases included lawnmowers, snowblowers and speakers for the city fireboat. In March it found that five of Erie County's largest municipalities had spent less than half of the $417,990 they received, and that the towns of Tonawanda and Lancaster reported spending nothing at all.

The bigger risk is not odd purchases. It is the money being absorbed somewhere else. Interest accruing on unspent settlement funds statewide passed $35 million by December 2025, and in Nassau County officials moved $13.7 million of that interest into the county's general fund before returning it in May under pressure from legislators and residents.

Niagara's direct share spending, by contrast, reads like a list of small, specific bets: $183,133 to New Directions Youth and Family Services for family support, $148,753 to Northpointe Council for prevention work with adults over 50, $50,000 to a pet resource center to board animals while their owners entered inpatient treatment. Five grants, $844,636 in total, approved in 2025. The county's own opioid task force has been meeting since 2016.

The Audit That Started in 2025

New York does audit this money, at least the regional abatement portion of it. The settlement report describes an audit program OASAS began in early 2025 to check whether recipients spent funds on approved purposes and complied with reporting requirements. The initial phase samples 19 local governments and other entities. Fieldwork was still underway when the report was published.

Niagara is in the second cohort. The county's own community services board minutes from February 23, 2026 record that the state agency is auditing counties' use of abatement dollars and that the director would keep the board informed of any findings.

Where Oversight Stops

The audit does not reach the other half of the picture. Direct share money — the funds counties and municipalities received as co-litigants, including New York City, Nassau and Suffolk — carries no state oversight. Counties are required to post annual reports, and that is the extent of it.

"There's definitely a patchwork of ways that counties are and are not reporting on the use of funds," Toni Smith, state director of the Drug Policy Alliance, told Investigative Post. The difference matters for anyone trying to check a county's claims: regional abatement generates a state table with a row for every county, while direct share reporting varies by jurisdiction and often amounts to a PDF posted without context.

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Why a Zero Is Not Always a Scandal

It would be easy to read the zeros as indifference, and the record in Niagara does not support a defense of the county's pace. But the mechanics explain part of what happened, and they explain why the state's ratio is a floor rather than a final grade.

Counties had to build programs from scratch, and 2023 was the first year the money existed. A county that issues a request for proposals, evaluates bids, negotiates multi-year contracts and clears legislative committees can easily lose a year to process. Kelemen's account — no qualifying proposals in the first cycle, one hospital program that fell apart over cost — is a description of that machinery failing to engage, not of money being hidden. When it finally engaged, the contracts were large and specific.

The spending column also stops at December 2024 while the receipt column runs to March 2025, so the ratio compares a longer period of deposits against a shorter period of withdrawals. Kelemen told Investigative Post that $3.1 million of the $4.2 million received is now spent or committed, a figure that would not appear in the state's 2025 report at all.

What remains true is that a county can hold settlement money indefinitely without penalty, and that the interest on unspent funds creates a quiet incentive to wait. New York has not built a deadline into the system.

What It Means If You Are the One Waiting

Niagara County's overdose burden is not abstract. In 2023 the county recorded 549 opioid overdose deaths and nonfatal opioid-related hospital events, a combined crude rate of 262.1 per 100,000 residents, sixth-highest among New York's 62 counties on that measure in the state Health Department's opioid report. Among counties with at least 30 opioid overdose deaths, Niagara's death rate ranked eighth in the state. That same year, 1,514 Niagara residents were enrolled in OASAS-certified treatment programs for opioid use, a rate of 827.6 per 100,000 that put the county in the state's highest quartile for treatment penetration.

Statewide, the picture has improved. New York counted 42,758 opioid-related overdose events in 2023, a crude rate of 218.5 per 100,000 and a 5.7 percent decline from the year before, driven by the collapse in fentanyl deaths that the Governor's office has highlighted repeatedly. The decline is real and it is the strongest argument that the treatment system works when it is funded.

The jail reentry contracts Niagara signed in September put money where the risk is highest. The weeks after release from custody are among the most dangerous in a person's life, and a case manager who meets someone at the door of the jail is a different intervention than a phone number on a pamphlet. The county's own resolution says as much, listing housing, transportation and treatment access as the barriers that push people back out of care.

Whether that arrives quickly enough is the only test that matters. The money has been in Niagara's account since 2023. The first contracts were signed in September 2026, with a budget modification effective October 1.

New Yorkers looking for treatment can call the OASAS HOPEline at 1-877-846-7369, or search for a licensed program through OASAS. Care is available regardless of insurance status, and same-day appointments exist in most counties.