A.G. Gancarski
2017 ended with bodies piling up in Jacksonville’s morgue.
2018 brings something approaching a solution via Ordinance 2018-005.
A bill slated to be introduced at Tuesday’s City Council meeting on an emergency basis will offer what Medical Examiner Valerie Rao called last week a “proposed space solution,” which includes “office and refrigerator space”: a walk-in cooler that would give 40 spaces, and a “modular office on site.”
$206,000: the cost of the complete proposal.
Chief Administrative Officer Sam Mousa described the temporary facilities as getting the ME “over the hump” to mitigate the current crisis, with a building in a future capital improvement budget.
There will be an “in and out” bill Tuesday in Jacksonville City Council, Mousa said last week, to encompass the portable refrigerating unit for 40 additional bodies, and a mobile unit for six additional staffers to handle the case load.
Equipment is also needed, Mousa said, “for stacking the bodies in the cooler. They’re referred to as racks, I believe.”
“This will give her sufficient capacity for today,” Mousa said, adding that a new facility may be moved up in the CIP.
The “programming phase” — an antecedent to moving the facility up in the capital improvement plan — would take six or seven months, which would allow the administration to mull hard costs of the facility.
Mousa noted that, though a new facility was originally outside the five-year plan, reports of bodies on the floor spurred the Mayor’s Office into “immediate action.”
The next budget would allow for the programming phase, and before the summer budget hearings, a funding source would likely be identified for this capital need.
Councilman Danny Becton expressed hope for a deep dive into decedent data, so that the Council would have a better understanding of the corpse inflow and output into the extant facility.
“The programmer of the facility will definitely look at all the statistics that are available — trends, capacity, future needs,” Mousa said.
Administration members said in December that a permanent facility build could take two years; a building in Orlando cost $16 million in 2010, and given increases in commodity costs and the ever-weakening dollar, that may be an optimistic estimate for a cost.
Duval’s medical examiner serves 1.3 million people in six counties.
