Ohio won billions of dollars from the companies that fueled its overdose crisis. That money was supposed to go toward repairing the damage, and the public was supposed to be able to watch it happen. One of those two things is true. The state made sure of it.
The settlement dollars flow mostly through a private body called the OneOhio Recovery Foundation, and the story of how that foundation got walled off from public view is a compact lesson in how transparency dies. It does not usually die in a dramatic vote. It dies in a budget, quietly, on a line most people will never read, after a court had already said the money belonged in the open.
Public money, private container
Start with the setup, because it is the crack everything else fits into.
The opioid settlements produced a river of money owed to Ohio and its communities, dollars extracted specifically to address a public-health catastrophe that killed thousands of Ohioans. Rather than run all of that through ordinary state channels, where it would sit under the usual public-records and open-meetings rules, much of it was routed through OneOhio, a private foundation created to distribute the funds.
That structure is where the tension lives. The money is public in every way that counts. It came from a legal action taken on the public's behalf, to remedy a harm the public suffered, and it is meant to be spent on the public's recovery. But the container it moves through is private, and private bodies do not have to open their books or their meetings the way a government agency does. Public purpose, public origin, public stakes, poured into a vessel built to keep the public out.
The court saw through it
Someone challenged that arrangement, and in 2023 the Ohio Supreme Court agreed there was a problem.
The court ruled that OneOhio was the "functional equivalent of a public office." That phrase does a lot of work. It means the court looked past the private label and at what the foundation actually is: a body spending public money for a public purpose under public authority. And it means the logical consequence followed. If you are functionally a public office, you are subject to public-records law. The books open. The meetings open. The people whose crisis produced this money get to see how it is spent.
That should have been the end of it. A court had looked at the dodge and named it, and restored the default that public money moves in public view.
The budget did the rest
It was not the end of it, because a court ruling on what the law requires can be undone by changing the law, and the General Assembly had a vehicle ready-made for doing it quietly.
The legislature used the state budget to exempt OneOhio from open-records and open-meetings rules. Read that sequence back slowly. The court said the foundation had to be transparent. The legislature responded not with an argument that the court was wrong, but by writing an exemption into a massive spending bill, where it would pass as one provision among thousands and draw a fraction of the attention a standalone transparency rollback would have drawn.
A budget is the ideal place to hide a decision like this. It is enormous, it must pass, and almost no one reads it line by line. Attaching the exemption to it meant the reversal of a Supreme Court ruling could ride through on the momentum of a bill that does a hundred other things, most of them unrelated. The daylight the court had let in was closed off in the dark.
Why the timing is the tell
The thing to hold onto is what this money is for and when it is being spent.
The opioid crisis is not a closed chapter. Ohioans are still dying, still cycling through treatment that may or may not be there, still living in counties deciding how to use their share of the settlement. This is the exact moment the public has the strongest claim to see the ledger, because the spending is happening now, in real time, on a problem that is still killing people. Transparency is not a courtesy you extend after a crisis ends. It is the mechanism that lets the public tell, while the money is moving, whether it is going where it was promised or somewhere else.
Removing that visibility right now, over a court's objection, is a choice about who gets to check the work. With the books closed, the people spending billions in public-health money answer to a much smaller audience, and the residents whose overdose crisis generated the settlement in the first place are on the outside of a decision they have the deepest stake in.
That is the accountability question underneath the paperwork. A court ordered the books open, and the Statehouse used a budget to close them again. So when the next report says a chunk of Ohio's opioid money went somewhere, the honest thing to ask is simple: who is actually allowed to check whether that is true, and why did the legislature work so hard to make sure it was not you?