A.G. Gancarski
Tuesday evening saw the Jacksonville City Council approve $206,000 for temporary storage and office facilities at the overburdened medical examiner’s office.
The opioid overdose crisis, coupled with population growth, has created overcrowding, compelling bodies to be laid on the floor before processing, as well as delays in processing.
The bill is intended as a stopgap. Temporary facilities, to be installed in the next 90 days, will encompass the portable refrigerating unit for 40 additional bodies, and a mobile unit will accommodate six additional staffers to handle the case load.
A new facility is slated for a future capital improvement plan, though cost and timeframe has yet to be determined.
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.
A facility built in Orlando in 2009 cost $16 million — a cost that would be a sizable chunk of a given year’s capital improvement budget.
The 2017 budget — the most ambitious since the recession of 2008 tanked housing valuations — saw a capital improvement budget of $131 million.
But that budget was passed in the euphoria after pension reform halted enrollments to the city’s defined benefit plan, re-amortizing pension debt to be paid off with a future sales tax; the defined contribution plans for new hires were bargained in exchange for pay raises for city employees.
As raises kick in over a three year period, the expectation is for dwindling budget relief.
Nonetheless, the concurrent position of Council members is that the current facility has become obsolete and that a capital investment is necessary.
The question is when that investment can be made. It will, asserted a Mayor’s Office representative, be pushed up to at least the fourth year of the five-year plan.
Design and property acquisition are prerequisites to the build; the Medical Examiner seeks to build near the courthouse downtown.
The Mayor’s Office would apply a scoring matrix to this over the next few months, with recommendations to be firmed up ahead of the introduction of the budget this summer.
