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Work Continues On New State Crime Lab Despite Budget Problems

William Marcus

State lawmakers on Tuesday heard that there is a $300,000 problem with the state’s new crime lab. It’s set to open in Billings in May.

A typo in legislation passed last year gave Montana’s Department of Justice authority to spend the $300,000. But that money doesn’t exist. The wording mix-up never created an official appropriation of funding.

The bill did however appropriate over a $1 million for staff and operations for the new crime lab next year.

DOJ Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Milburn explained the situation before the Law and Justice Interim Committee.

"$310,000 of it, is quite a bit of it. So we had the dilemma of what do we do. Do we hold this off until the coming legislature so it is adequately funded, or do we go by the intent of what the legislature had promised?"

Milburn says the DOJ is moving forward with the lab and funding the project with its own budget.

The new lab is expected to ease the workload of the state crime lab in Missoula.

The DOJ will ask the 2017 legislature for a reimbursement of the funds that were supposed to be appropriated.

Until then, Central Services Division Administrator Christi Jacobsen says the DOJ will have to borrow against their future budget to absorb the unexpected costs.

"Right now, I think our plan is going to be to transfer budget from next fiscal year into this fiscal year to get us through this fiscal year.”

Jacobsen says the DOJ underestimated other costs in planning for the new crime lab.

“Unexpected costs of the salaries, the interim of shipping bodies, autopsy expenses out of state, transporting those bodies out of state, recruiting for the medical examiner position, travel involved in getting the applicants in and interview them in Montana. In addition to that we have a couple of autopsy assistants that were not planned for or budgeted. So, a combination of all those factors.”

In total, she says the DOJ is short around half a million dollars in funds for the crime lab this year. Jacobsen doesn’t expect Department of Justice services to suffer because of this budget shortage.

The Department also told lawmakers it had to raise the salaries for three new state medical examiners, beyond what they had budgeted, because of challenges attracting qualified applicants.

The state ended up hiring three full-time medical examiners. The chief medical examiner salary of more than $230,000 a year was around $50,000 more than originally advertised.

The move comes in the wake of last year's controversy over an associate medical examiner who came under scrutiny because of questions over autopsies he performed on six children.

The state's two medical examiners left their jobs last year and the state severed ties with its embattled associate medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Bennett.

For months, the state had to send corpses out of state for autopsies or temporarily bring in forensic medical specialists to conduct the work.

Tuesday's Law and Justice Interim Committee also listened to concern over a steep rise in child abuse and neglect cases.

Since 2010, the number of cases handled by the state’s district courts has more than doubled. District Court Administrator Beth McLaughlin told committee members that methamphetamine abuse is considered responsible for much of the rising caseload.

“And it’s a fairly frightening thing, the numbers in your local community are probably pretty startling, and I wanted to make sure that as policy makers you have access to this information.”

The number of cases in the state’s largest county, Yellowstone, more than doubled in the last two years.

Courts across Montana handled more than 2,300 abuse and neglect cases last year, up from 1,600 in 2014.

Copyright 2020 Montana Public Radio. To see more, visit Montana Public Radio.

Corin Cates-Carney is the Flathead Valley reporter for MTPR.