The remainder is distributed directly to city and county governments, with Albuquerque and Bernalillo County seeing the largest shares, according to a Legislative Finance Committee report. Some local governments began putting their money to work right away when the checks started rolling in. Others, like the city of Santa Fe, have been slow to develop spending plans, even as deaths and emergency room visits due to opioid overdoses continue to rise.

As the state moves forward with long-awaited regional behavioral health plans, in large part to ramp up access to critical substance misuse treatment, critics contend there is no way to follow the flow of settlement funds and ensure they are making an impact.

Santa Fe officials, who so far have $9.7 million available to divvy, have defended their inaction.

“Our goal is simple: to make every settlement dollar count,” Mayor Michael Garcia said in a statement Thursday. “Rather than committing these resources without a long-term strategy, we are taking the time to ensure investments are data-driven, impactful, and aligned with the City’s greatest needs.”

During the recent Mayor’s Homelessness Summit, Youth and Family Services Director Lia Azul Salaverry said the city is exploring allowable ways to direct some of the opioid settlement money toward services for homeless people.

“If we can pair shelter and housing with real recovery support, we can make meaningful progress on two of our community’s most interconnected challenges at once,” she said.

Anger over how hard-hit New Mexico has been by the opioid crisis resurfaced in recent weeks following explosive allegations by a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency official that the federal agency responsible for protecting the nation from drug trafficking allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to flow into the state while agents sought high-level drug dealers.

As state officials seek accountability in what could become a showdown with the federal government, the state and local governments’ spending on settlement money on efforts to remediate damage from the opioid crisis remains hazy.

The spending is tough to track.

Unlike other states that saw a share of what became multibillion- dollar settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors, New Mexico doesn’t have a central dashboard to track spending.

In fact, the state ranks near the bottom when it comes to transparency for settlement spending, according to the Opioid Settlement Tracker, a national database on how much money each state has received and who gets to decide how it’s spent.

Patrick M. Brenner, president of nonprofit think tank Southwest Public Policy Institute, said the lack of transparency is concerning.

With the exception of individuals filing public records requests to try to track spending, “there’s no accountability mechanism to ensure that these monies are being spent properly,” he said.

There are guidelines surrounding the management and spending of the settlement money. The funds must be spent on abatement of the opioid epidemic, which includes training for overdose prevention, medication-assisted treatment, expansions of recovery services and housing, transportation and job training for people suffering from opioid use disorder.

Brenner said he believes the limitations around how the money can be spent is too strict, which is leading to problems in getting it out the door quickly enough.

“We’re hamstrung by inaction, we’re hamstrung by the prohibitive nature of what the funds are being earmarked for, and we’re hamstrung by the public not even being able to know how the funds are being spent,” he said.

Santa Fe County moved quickly to allocate its portion of settlement funds on medication-assisted treatment at the jail.

County spokesperson Shawna Graves said in a statement 163 inmates received such treatment in 2025.

Bernalillo County and the city of Albuquerque contracted with New York-based Vital Strategies, an organization that sought public input over several months in 2024 with five town hall meetings, 15 focus groups and surveys with about 700 people with opioid use disorder, according to a report provided by the county.

The plan says the vast majority of survey participants advocated for increased funding for better housing services. Many of those surveyed were homeless, the report notes, and “they deemed existing shelters and temporary housing inadequate and emphasized the need for more options and improved conditions.”

Survey responses also indicate a need for an expansion of harm reduction programs and treatment services, the plan says.

Among the more than two dozen recommendations for Albuquerque and Bernalillo County was the creation of a joint advisory committee to oversee spending in the coming years and ensure accountability.

Wayne Lindstrom, Bernalillo County’s deputy county manager for behavioral health, described the challenges of planning to spend funds disbursed over a long period of time.

“The challenge became, how do we make some one-time investments over the course of the next three years that will enhance sustainability, while at the same time not incur recurring funds that we couldn’t sustain beyond year three?” he said in an interview earlier this year.

Lindstrom spoke of a “need to get much more upstream of these issues,” which is included in the strategic plan.

“If we could basically increase our investments in early prevention and early intervention, that would be money much better spent, and we’d see much better outcomes for our populace as a whole,” he said.

Bernalillo County and Albuquerque both made investments of opioid settlement funds to support expanding Albuquerque Public Schools’ counseling and clinical services to middle schools.

“APS really saw an important investment in expanding what’s available to high school students to their middle schools,” Lindstrom said.

David Morgan, a spokesperson for the New Mexico Department of Health, wrote in an email the agency has received $3.5 million annually for four years — or a total of $14 million — in opioid settlement funds, with at least $1 million per year set aside for addressing the needs of tribal communities.

The money has been used to expand medication-assisted treatment and overdose prevention through five contracts with tribal entities; to increase staff at department facilities offering substance misuse treatment; to expand the agency’s Harm Reduction Section; and to help direct patients toward medication-assisted treatment and public health care, particularly following incarceration.

It’s unclear why the city of Santa Fe has delayed creating a spending plan.

Then-Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber declined an interview late last year about the settlement funds through a spokesperson, who said in a statement the spending restrictions made utilizing the funds “complex.”

“At this point there is not a plan in which to discuss,” the spokesperson said.

However, a former city official told the Santa Fe Reporter in 2023 work was underway to determine how to spend the money and she expected to present a proposal to the City Council in early 2024.

Community Services Director Sandra Emory, who joined the city in 2025, said she couldn’t speak about why the previous plan didn’t materialize. But she said the city must be strategic about how it uses the funds.

“Taking the time to figure out how to use them appropriately and really direct them toward where they can make the most impact I’m hoping will be time well spent,” she said.

Emory said the city is working on a “rapid landscape analysis” with Vital Strategies and hopes to move quickly to start deploying money when the analysis is complete.

The effort likely will include some type of community engagement opportunity, she said, though she was not aware of any specific plans.

The city has not added any positions to help manage the settlement funds, something Emory said might need to happen in the future.

While the city’s allocation seems substantial, when weighed against the damage addiction has caused in the community, Emory said every dollar will count.

“There’s a lot of intention being put into how we’re going to spend the money,” she said, “because … the overall cost of addiction and the opioid epidemic just so far surpasses the amount of money that we are going to ever see from this fund.”

Staff writer Nicholas Gilmore contributed to this report.

They played basketball for the Thunderbirds. They spoke in their Indigenous languages in a crowded dormitory. Overseen by a faculty largely made up of nuns, they cleaned the chapel floors and recited the rosary, sometimes in their traditional Native regalia.

“Him and I joined the service together,” said Dasheno, 79, a former Santa Clara Pueblo governor, pointing out a former classmate in the photo, a boy from San Ildefonso Pueblo. “He went into aviation, and I became a radio man.”

A raging fire that ripped through the historic St. Catherine Indian School campus last week — claiming the iconic main building, the girls dormitory and the chapel — was painful for Dasheno and many other former students. Officials have not determined what caused the July 2 blaze at the long-vacant property north of downtown Santa Fe. A partial demolition began Friday to provide investigators with safer access to the building where they believe the fire ignited.

St. Catherine, which served students in grades 7-12, was a private boarding school for more than a century before its final graduation ceremony in 1998. Named for St. Catherine of Siena and founded by a woman who would later be known as Mother Katharine Drexel, it was run for decades by women who joined Drexel’s religious order and focused on educating Indigenous youth.

The Catholic school, founded in 1886, had a complicated history, entangled in part in the legacy of trauma caused by federal and church-run boarding schools for Native children and teens in the 19th and 20th centuries — institutions designed to culturally assimilate kids who were forced to enroll. But many former students of St. Catherine, especially in its last several decades of operation, speak of cherished memories and defend the school — known to some as St. Kate’s — as a beloved community.

The July 2 fire dealt a devastating blow to the campus, which housed storied buildings bearing priceless murals, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe’s Love for the Indian Race by Edward O’Brien — which showed the Virgin of Guadalupe surrounded by images of Native people.

The Historic Santa Fe Foundation describes St. Catherine Indian School on its website as “a remnant of a contested system of Indian boarding schools, run by missionaries of various Christian religious orders, first developed in nineteenth century New Mexico to educate, assimilate, and ‘civilize’ indigenous children into Euro-American culture.”

Others remember it as a different kind of Native boarding school. While the nuns could be strict and the campus environment was rigorous, former students have noted, they felt their culture was respected by school officials, and they look back at their time there with fondness.

Some Native people who attended the school also have long pointed out — at least in their experiences from the 1960s forward — their enrollment was a choice made by them or their parents rather than the federal government.

Michael Peacock, a member of Laguna Pueblo who graduated from St. Catherine in 1975, described his experiences at the school in overwhelmingly positive terms, saying it helped shape him.

His mother attended the school in the 1950s before him, and many of his classmates had family legacy ties to the school as well, he said.

“St. Catherine’s was a unique school and a wonderful, wonderful experience, I believe, for me and a majority of the people who went there,” Peacock said. “It was nothing compared to the Albuquerque Indian School or any other schools throughout the United States that abused their kids or brainwashed their kids and institutionalized their kids.”

Still, documents archived in the University of New Mexico’s digital repository show some administrators with the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, which operated St. Catherine, were bent on converting Native students to Catholicism and seemed to hold attitudes dismissive of Native religions.

Take, for example, a letter penned in 1946 by an administrator with the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to Archbishop Edwin Byrne of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.

“There has been so little done by the Church as well as the government for the bettering of these poor wandering Navajos, the greater number of them pagans, that we have felt concerned,” the letter states, lamenting the closure of some government-run Native schools.

The letter, citing the potential construction of a new high school for Navajo youth, outlines an effort to “win as many Souls as we could through the mission of God and His glory.”

Jean Marquardt, who was president of St. Catherine for two years in the mid-1990s, said she sees the school within the context of Catholic boarding schools that “ravished” aspects of Indigenous culture.

When she was president, she said, about 80% of the 200 students were Native American.

“In terms of academics, I think they did a very good job, but in terms of acknowledging the history of Indian boarding schools, they were very neglectful,” added Marquardt, who now lives in California.

“They did not acknowledge the trauma that generations of Pueblo and Navajo people went through in the early 1800s because of the policy of Manifest Destiny, and kids were kidnapped from their homes and brutally taken to these Indian schools,” she said.

Former congresswoman and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland of Laguna Pueblo, the Democratic nominee for governor, led the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to investigate the troubled history of Native boarding schools. The effort led to a historic apology by former President Joe Biden for the federal government’s role in such schools.

Haaland in January 2025 wrote about listening to Biden’s apology months earlier at the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona. In the same reflection, still posted on the Department of Interior’s website, she also wrote about her grandmother’s experience at St. Catherine.

“I remembered my grandma Helen recount the story of when she was taken away to St. Catherine’s Indian Boarding School in Santa Fe, New Mexico,” Haaland wrote. “She told me about the day a priest from the Pueblo of Laguna came to our village of Mesita, ‘gathered up the kids,’ put them on a train, and sent them away. She was 8 years old at the time.”

Haaland said in a statement to The New Mexican last week the recollection was an accurate description of her grandmother’s experience. She went on to describe the impact the boarding school had on her family.

“Because my grandma’s dad only had a horse and buggy, he was only able to visit my grandma once in the 5 years that she was at St. Catherine’s,” Haaland said in the statement. “Many parents were forced to be without their children for long periods of time, and all children are impacted when that happens. My grandma was always deeply religious, and she said the rosary every night.”

Haaland’s grandparents met at the boarding school, she said.

“I know the school changed a lot over the years, so it’s important to recognize that the fire and loss of part of this school is felt differently across the community,” she said. “Losing a part of history is always difficult, because we must learn all of that history in order to grow and build better communities.”

For those who treasured their days at St. Kate’s, memories are flooding back of raucous basketball games where the Thunderbirds played hard and established rivalries with Pojoaque Valley and Los Alamos schools.

They remember the pleasure in beating teams from larger schools with taller players.

Walter Dasheno unfurled a school sweater with “Thunderbirds” on the back. It had belonged to his late wife, Judy Dasheno, a former St. Catherine student who died from COVID-19 during the pandemic.

He enrolled at St. Catherine as a seventh grader.

“It developed a cadre of young men and young women who went on to become successful in their lives, some of them becoming lawyers, doctors, attorneys, tribal leaders for their communities, health program directors,” Dasheno said. “And then, of course, others became successful in the arts and then, in a traditional sense, going back to their communities and becoming traditional people.”

He was in rock ’n’ roll bands that sprang up on the campus, including one called the Thundertones, influenced by surf rock and the Beatles. Dasheno played saxophone and clarinet.

He recalled the music’s echoes in the old school gym and the merriment of his high school years.

Peacock also arrived as a seventh grader. Though he was homesick in the early days, he grew to love St. Catherine so much he didn’t want to leave as a graduating senior.

He recalled his first couple of stays in the dormitory, a crowded room filled with bunk beds, hearing the voices and languages of Native students from around the Southwest. Some of his good friends were from the Navajo and Apache nations.

“Those first nights, I remember the soft murmur of conversations in many languages and the feeling that I had joined something bigger than myself — a community woven together by tradition, learning, and shared experience,” he wrote in a reflection posted on a website devoted to the preservation of St. Catherine Indian School.

Downtown Santa Fe was his second classroom, he wrote: “The plaza was our playground and history book all in one — the Palace of the Governors standing proud, the smell of food drifting from La Fonda, the friendly chaos inside Tiano’s Sporting Goods, and the unbeatable taste of a Woolworth’s frito pie.”