Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott outlined plans Thursday morning — including the creation of an advisory board and two new leadership roles in his office — for how the city will manage and determine how to spend money received from settlements with major opioid manufacturers and distributors.

Already, the city has received more than $240 million through settlements with drug companies — most recently a $152.5 million deal with the drug distributor Cardinal Health and previously smaller deals with CVS and Allergan — and officials say they expect to receive hundreds of millions of dollars more by the time ongoing litigation is resolved.

The trial in the city’s lawsuit — which argues drugmakers and distributors flooded Baltimore with millions of opioid prescriptions, while downplaying the drugs’ addictiveness — is set to start Sept. 16.

On Thursday, Scott announced that $20 million from the settlement funds already won will go to the Baltimore City Health Department to strengthen its efforts to mitigate Baltimore’s overdose crisis.

Among other programs, that funding will benefit the SPOT Mobile Clinic, a public-private partnership between the health department and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine that provides buprenorphine treatment for opioid use disorder, among other low-barrier-to-access health care services.

“We have an unprecedented opportunity today to serve the people of this city,” said Bobby Harris, medical director of mobile clinical services for the city health department, at Thursday’s news conference. “We look forward to working together to lift up the city’s narrative in becoming a leader in addressing the opioid syndemic [the epidemic and the factors contributing to it] through tireless work, dedication and urgency in serving our people who so rightfully deserve to be well.”

As a part of the settlements, $42 million had already been promised to several organizations and service providers working to address the crisis, including Baltimore Safe Haven, Charm City Connection and the peer navigators program at the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

Baltimore chose to go its own way about two years ago, opting out of a massive global settlement with several major opioid companies that the state of Maryland and most local jurisdictions decided to join. So far, Scott and other city officials have said that decision has paid off — if the city had joined the global settlement, it would have gotten about $7 million over the course of seven years.

“Every community has been inflicted with the pain of the opioid overdose epidemic, but here in Baltimore, we have been disproportionately impacted — particularly due to the actions of reckless bad actors in big pharma,” Scott said in a news release Thursday morning.

“We made the decision to see our litigation against these companies through until the very end, foregoing the global settlements that were offered along the way, because we knew how impacted our community has been and how important it was to see adequate financial accountability from these companies. But it isn’t enough to win the funds — we need to put them to work.”

Moving forward, Scott said, community engagement through town halls, focus groups and an online survey will be a key part of the city’s process for determining how to use the settlement funds.

He announced an executive order Thursday that fleshed out the process for managing the money. The order established an opioid restitution fund where the settlement dollars will be deposited and listed guidelines for how the dollars may be distributed — including for substance use prevention, treatment, recovery and harm reduction programs, and services mitigating other harms caused by the opioid epidemic.

To steer more specific decision making on how the money should be spent, the city plans to create a Restitution Advisory Board that will include city employees, such as the health commissioner and fire chief, as well as non-city employees like a peer recovery specialist, licensed social worker and at least four Baltimoreans with lived experience with substance use.

Board members will review grant applications and make funding recommendations that will be reviewed by the mayor’s overdose cabinet and get final approval from the mayor, city officials said in a briefing Wednesday night. Non-city employee board members will receive $15,000 per year for their participation.

Scott’s executive order also created two new positions in his office: an executive director of overdose response, who will coordinate the city’s response to the epidemic, and an opioid restitution program manager, who will support the advisory board, among other duties.

The order also established a trust — which officials at Wednesday’s briefing compared to a large university’s endowment — to sustain the money for at least 15 years. Interest earned will be used only for substance use mitigation and won’t be returned to the city’s general fund, unless otherwise approved by the Board of Estimates.

The city also intends to publish several documents to better ensure the funds are appropriately used to address the opioid crisis, including an overdose reduction strategy and a substance use community needs assessment, as well as plans for community engagement and transparency.

It plans to launch a dashboard providing information on programs receiving funds and submit an annual report to the mayor and city council about the funded programs. The Mayor’s Office of Recovery Programs willmanage funding availability notices and monitor the performance of organizations that received grant money.

Sara Whaley, a senior practice associate for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, advised the city while it crafted the executive order announced Thursday. Whaley, the lead author for a list of best practices for how jurisdictions should use opioid litigation funds, is considered a national expert on the subject.

“This order is based on best practices from around the country,” she said in Thursday’s news release, “and lays a foundation to ensure funds will have the greatest impact by protecting the dollars and ensuring their longevity, thinking holistically about the role of restitution funds as part of a broad overdose response, and rooting decision-making in the expertise of a diverse set of voices.”