By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
The Wood County Alcohol, Drug Addiction, and Mental Health Services Board plans to revamp its allocation process for distributing mental health funds to local service providers.
A new ad hoc committee was established to review the board’s allocation process for the coming fiscal year. The need for the process change comes on the tail of proposed changes at the state level. Agency staff have been trained about the changes, and board members are required to watch a training video on the new processes that addresses ethics and budgeting.
“I applied the training to some of the things we’ve done in the past, and I wondered how we may have reconsidered some of the things we’ve done or did historically 20 years ago,” said board Vice President Frank McLaughlin.
“We’re hoping the ad hoc committee can really get into the details with us, looking at our missions, visions and values to make sure that we feel like it really does put us in that position of being the payer of last resort,” WCADAMHS Executive Director Amanda Kern said. The process will be important to affirm the board’s priorities “to work with the folks who need us the most.”
The committee will also look at all the funds to ensure they are being appropriately placed into the four buckets that the Ohio Revised Code requires the agency to fund—treatment, prevention, crisis and recovery services. “How will we weight our dollars out into those four buckets?” Kern said.
The committee will help determine the priorities and target populations within each of the different categories. “By the time we get to next year and Fiscal Year 27 allocation, we will be able to really look at starting to score the applications based on our priorities and then how much funding we are allotting in each of those categories.”
They hope to have the process ironed out by January. The local providers have been informed about the vision for the allocation process.
“We want it to be very public facing for everybody to see the logic as the providers prepare allocations,” Kern said.
McLaughlin voiced concern about what’s going on with the (county) tax levy, state taxes and the state budget. The topic was included in Kern’s Director’s Report.
“As I read through your wrap up, I started to consider how much it really does frustrate our lives,” McLaughlin said. “We’ve had a lot of elected individuals who’ve been very proud of cutting state taxes, but what that means is that if we want to have libraries or mental health services or schools, we have to ask for it with levies. I don’t know what we are going to do to replace that (county levy), because it looks like it (the state legislation) is on a fast track.”
Kern pointed out, the state legislature is still considering a few different pieces of legislation. “Some of it conflicts with another and some are duplicative, so there’s a lot of moving pieces and parts,” she said. “I think advocacy is hoping to come up with a singular vision so we can still access levies but identify what levy reform looks like.”
ARC contract expires; WCADAMHS may need to return funds to state
The contract between the county mental health board and the Addiction Response Collaborative (ARC) expired at the end of September which could result in the county board returning $76,000 to the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.
According to Kern, ARC has other funding sources that are sufficient for the agency’s immediate future.
“It doesn’t mean that in the future dates at allocation seasons they may not come back and seek funding through us,” she said. “They were our sole source for State Opioid and Stimulant Response (SOS) funding, which will put us in the position that if they do not require that funding, we may end up sending those funds back (to the state).”
The state may require that the funding must be used for the original project, which was in year two of the funding cycle.
Because the $76,000 grant was written specifically for ARC and they no longer require the county board’s funding, “We’re not sure that we’re going to be able to reallocate it to something different,” she said. Kern is in contact with the state for a final determination.
Local artist creates provider appreciation art
Each September, WCADAMHS thanks the agencies that provide county mental health and addiction services. In the past, staff members have showed up to the agencies with food gifts and other appreciation items. This year, the appreciation gift was a piece of commissioned artwork created by local artist Christina Snuggs.
The series of Snuggs’ artwork is titled “Rise Up.” The woodburning series “is about struggles. It’s about what breaks us and what does not,” she said.
After Snuggs participated in the 2025 Resilience Through Art Behavioral Health Art Show, the WCADAMHS commissioned her to create the artwork for September’s appreciation month.
The animals depicted in the artwork, “aren’t pretty animals. In the pretty forest, there is pain burned into the wood. Depression, trauma, anxiety and days when simply standing is a victory,” Snuggs said. “Yet even here, light persists. You may not see it, but you’re already standing inside of it because fire doesn’t only destroy, it transforms.”
The 11 animals she burned into the wood each took approximately six hours. The idea is to show that none of the animals were not erased by fire; instead, the fire left marks, but the marks mean survival.
“You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to be healed. You only have to keep going,” she said.
Her artwork, which can be seen on her Facebook page, comes from a lot of personal trauma, she explained. “I’ve known good friends who experienced trauma, and even though we have different traumas, we can still connect when we’re honest and we’re all working to heal and get understanding,” Snuggs explained.
The message she shares in words and in her artwork is the need to be positive and to find the light. “There is good all around us. We just can’t give up.”
All the art she produces “has a part of me in it,” she said. “My art expresses peace, beauty and nature.”
During the meeting, the board also:
- Welcomed Christina Christensen to the board. She is a licensed social worker who oversees criminal justice programming in Hancock County and serves as an adjunct faculty member for Bowling Green State University.
- Approved a contract with Cocoon for Oct. 1 through June 30, 2026, for $144,900 using local levy funds. In May, the board delayed approving the contract until the Cocoon submitted its certification application to the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. The application has been submitted, but Director Kathy Mull is awaiting the final determination about certification.
- Was reminded about NAMI Wood County’s annual fundraiser, AfterBurn, on Friday, Oct. 3, from 4:30-7:30 p.m. at the Wood County Junior Fair Building. There will be trunk or treat, a chili cookoff and a hog raffle.
