The solution to the state crime lab’s budget deficit? Send the bill to speeders and drunk-drivers. There isn’t a conflict of interest in prosecutors and police scientists directly benefiting from guilty DUI verdicts, and speeding is there? Well there will be if the legislature gets it’s way.
In summary, in order to keep their jobs, the state crime lab will have to be sure that as many people as possible are found guilty as fine and penalties are rolled back to the lab as a funding source.
Original article posted here.
The state Department of Public Safety crime lab is running out of money, and unless legislators can come up with a new funding source, counties and cities may have to foot the $10 million bill to operate the lab next year.
It’s a prospect that has loomed large for local police chiefs and county sheriffs and prosecutors since last summer, but with the state’s budget crisis deepening and city and county governments continuing to make cuts, the situation is increasingly dire, a group of law-enforcement officials told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday afternoon.
Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, proposed a solution that could create a dedicated funding source for the lab: add a surcharge of up to 47 percent for drivers to attend defensive-driving school and take some money out of a drunk-driving abatement fund.
People pay surcharges on many other fees and fines, such as traffic tickets, but not on defensive-driving-school fees, which Pearce termed a loophole.
“It’s a matter of priorities,” said Pearce, who also is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “These are tough times, but this is a priority.”
That idea pleased law-enforcement officials, who came from around the state to push for a dedicated funding source for the lab, which processed more than 50,000 pieces of evidence in 2008, including conducting toxicology tests, running DNA profiles and analyzing fingerprints, among other duties.
Sen. Ken Cheuvront, D-Phoenix, said Pearce’s proposal amounted to accounting gimmicks to reallocate money, but added that the lab would get funded.
“We all realize why they’re important, it’s just who is going to pay for it: Whether it’s the cities or the state,” Cheuvront said.
Legislators are working on the fiscal 2010 budget, which includes a shortfall as large as $3.5 billion, but they have yet to unveil a draft.
Police chiefs and prosecutors faced the same fate last year, when DPS said that it would charge other agencies up to $7.8 million for lab fees. Officials were able to come up with about $5 million in grant funding to cover those costs, leaving local agencies to cover the remainder.
A handful of local agencies have contributed about $9,000 toward that total, leaving open the possibility that the DPS lab will have to curtail its operations if the money runs out before the end of the fiscal year.
“We’re still trying to figure that out,” said Todd Griffith, superintendent of the agency’s crime lab.
