Background
Somerset County reported an expenditure of Pennsylvania Opioid Trust funds for “Movement Outdoors,” an after-school program providing outdoor activities for 9th through 12th graders the County identified as “at-risk” students — youth who do not typically participate in sports or extracurricular activities. The County categorized the program under Exhibit E, Schedule B, Section G(9) of the settlement consent order, which covers “school-based or youth-focused programs or strategies that have demonstrated effectiveness in preventing drug misuse and seem likely to be effective in preventing the uptake and use of opioids.” The County argued Movement Outdoors is “evidence-informed” through its alignment with the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention’s Healthy Alternative Activities strategy and the Pennsylvania Youth Survey’s identification of pro-social involvement as a protective factor against substance use.
After a working-group recommendation of noncompliance, the Board voted to disapprove the program on June 20, 2024. The Board’s dispute resolution process proceeded through a public hearing at which the Somerset County Substance Abuse Administrator confirmed the program is not evidence-based in the strict sense and acknowledged the absence of opioid-use-disorder counseling or risk assessments. The Board confirmed its disapproval by email on September 9, 2025, without further elaboration. Somerset County petitioned the Commonwealth Court for specialized review under Section VIII(G)(2) of the consent order, arguing the Board misread Exhibit E by effectively requiring programs to be “evidence-based” while improperly discounting “evidence-informed” approaches, and separately arguing the Board’s retroactive review structure is prejudicial and that pre-approval procedures should be ordered.
The Court’s Holding
Remanded. Judge Dumas, writing for the same three-judge panel that decided Chester County DA v. PA Opioid Trust (1386 C.D. 2025), also decided the same day, reached the identical conclusion: the Board’s September 9, 2025 email does not constitute a reasoned decision suitable for appellate review, and the court cannot conduct any review — including evaluating deference or standard of scope — without one. The Board is directed to issue a decision within 30 days that (1) identifies the Exhibit E section(s) at issue; (2) explains why the program does not qualify; (3) provides specific findings of fact with record citations; (4) reflects credibility determinations; and (5) defines terms of art, specifically including “evidence-based” and “evidence-informed,” if relied upon in the denial.
The court declined to address the County’s pre-approval argument. The consent order requires retrospective annual reporting, and the court found no basis to order the Board to establish a formal pre-approval regime inconsistent with that structure — though the court noted the Board has a technical advisory group (TAG) to assist counties in planning compliant expenditures, and that counties may report “committed” funds in advance. The court also flagged a question it did not resolve: whether a participating subdivision must expressly document all relevant modes of Exhibit E compliance when submitting its annual report through the online form, or whether the Board must evaluate all potential compliance pathways regardless of how the county checked the form’s dropdown options.
Key Takeaways
- As in the companion case Chester County DA v. PA Opioid Trust, an email confirming a vote result without any explanatory reasoning does not satisfy the Pennsylvania Opioid Trust Board’s obligation to issue a reasoned decision susceptible to appellate review. Both denials were remanded on the same grounds.
- The distinction between “evidence-based” and “evidence-informed” programs is central to the Trust’s Exhibit E compliance determinations, and the Board’s failure to define these terms creates a basic reviewability problem. On remand, the Board must supply definitions and apply them to the record, or the court will again be unable to conduct any meaningful review.
- Counties whose programs do not strictly qualify as “evidence-based” may still be able to establish compliance under an “evidence-informed” theory, but they must build a clear record at the Board level — including alignment with federal prevention strategies, recognized risk-assessment tools, or peer-reviewed literature — that gives the Board something concrete to evaluate and explain.
- The Trust’s retroactive review structure — counties spend first, the Board reviews later — remains in place. The court declined to order pre-approval procedures, but the existence of a Technical Advisory Group (TAG) provides counties a practical mechanism to seek informal guidance before committing funds to programs of uncertain eligibility.
- An unresolved procedural question from this case: whether a county’s failure to select all applicable Exhibit E categories on the online annual-report form waives alternative compliance theories. The court noted the issue but did not decide it — an important point for counties drafting their annual reports.
Why It Matters
Decided the same day as Chester County DA by the same panel, County of Somerset confirms that the Board’s reviewability problem extends across substantively different programs — from drug treatment court prosecutorial positions to outdoor youth activities — and is a systemic issue in the Board’s decision-making process, not a one-off error. For the dozens of Pennsylvania counties administering Trust-funded programs, the takeaway is that the Board’s decisions on remand in both cases will be the first real look at what Exhibit E requires when it comes to prevention-oriented, youth-focused programming and treatment court support functions.
The court’s identification of the unresolved form-completion question also deserves attention from county counsel drafting future annual reports: when the online submission form limits a county to a fixed number of Exhibit E category selections, counties should consider whether to select all potentially applicable categories for each program — and should document that reasoning — to preserve the broadest possible compliance arguments if the Board later raises noncompliance. The risk that a county’s failure to check a box might later be construed as waiver of a valid compliance theory is real, even if the court declined to decide it in this case.