Beaver funding request turned down
by BOCC at county budget meeting
BY TERRY SCHMIDA
County Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Beaver has seen his request for increased funding for his office rejected by the Board of County Commissioners at a recent budget hearing.
Beaver first asked for an additional $188,000 supplement to his existing $628,000 annual allocation at a July 27 commission meeting, where it was not well-received.
At that meeting Commissioner David Rice asked Mayor Danny Kolhage his opinion on the matter, to which the latter replied, “My opinion is . . . don’t waste your time.”
Commissioner Sylvia Murphy then chimed in, saying “That’s right.”
And Mayor Pro-Tem Heather Carruthers called Beaver’s desire for more cash “ridiculous.”
The commissioners’ reluctance to entertain Beaver’s request may stem from an ongoing audit by County Clerk Amy Heavilin’s office into the M.E.’s finances, initiated in late April following complaints from a number of residents and funeral home owners. Beaver was also pilloried for allegedly picking up bodies in an unmarked pickup truck.
“We have to get an update on where [Beaver’s] finances are, and a better understanding of the financial support he needs from the county,” County Administrator Roman Gastesi said on Sept. 8. “All of that will become evident after the audit is completed, and we will have a baseline from which to make further funding decisions.
Gastesi added that the rejection of Beaver’s appeal was not absolute and that the door was open to more cash down the road.
“The request will not be a part of the current budget negotiations for the fiscal year 2015-16,” he said. “The budget will be put together with the current level of support. We can always make budget adjustments, as needed, later on.”
Beaver, however, said that the biggest casualty of the funding rejection was likely to be himself.
“I might just have a heart attack and die,” he said. “I’m in this office seven days a week. I don’t go home most nights until 8 or 10 p.m. . . . Plus, I can get called out at any time. I can’t have a beer and hamburger at a Labor Day parade, because I can’t have alcohol on my breath if I get called in to work. There have also been at least three times when I didn’t take a paycheck, because I wouldn’t have been able to make payroll.”
Beaver, who earns $240,000 per year, called his request for increased funding “realistic and sufficient,” and added that he viewed it as a “starting point for budget negotiations next year.
“My contract with the county says that my budget can be adjusted, and the county asked me to submit a budget,” he said. “That’s what I did. I ran it by my accountant and submitted it. I’ve been able to cut costs by doing things like using cheaper scissors, and body bags, but things like transportation costs are fixed by the funeral homes, which have a monopoly. With toxicology labs I have a little room to maneuver, but not much.”
Many of the monetary concerns facing his office, Beaver said, relate to staffing issues.
“Where I have been able to take some time off, I’ve brought doctor’s down here to fill in, but that costs me $1,900 per day,” he said. “There are only 350 board-certified forensic pathologists in the entire country, and most of them don’t really have an interest in fishing. It’s not a big pool to choose from. Plus, this is a very technical, academic type of job. It’s very hard to find those kind of people, and even harder to keep them, because the cost of living down here is so high. I can’t afford to pay people what it costs.”
In addition to his own salary, Beaver pays out $187,540 combined, to his four full-time staffers.

 

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