Whatcom County leaders this year will consider transitioning the medical examiner — now an outside contractor — into a county position, after an outsized budget request revealed inconsistencies in how new ME Dr. Allison Hunt and her predecessor, Dr. Gary Goldfogel, did their jobs.
This week Hunt, who was hired to investigate deaths for the county in 2022, asked for and received a 47% funding increase for 2023, from $605,000 to $890,820. The money will pay for a full-time investigator and some part-time staffing, Deputy Executive Tyler Schroeder told the Whatcom County Council on Feb. 7.
Hunt told the council on Jan. 24 she needs at least four more full-time death investigators to do her job properly, however.
Her office was “terribly understaffed and terribly underfunded” in 2022, when it had a budget of $588,000, Hunt said.
The ME said she originally based her proposed budget on the 168 postmortem exams Goldfogel had recorded for 2021. She ended up conducting 251 such exams in 2022, she said.
Hunt also said her costs mounted because she attended 262 death scenes last year, while Goldfogel’s office didn’t appear at any scenes in the prior year. Goldfogel denied this at a Feb. 7 council meeting, along with Hunt’s claim that he kept incomplete records.
“There are a number of allegations that are either misunderstandings or intentional misrepresentations, and that’s quite concerning to me,” Goldfogel said.
Hunt had requested a total of $893,449 in additional funding through 2025. The council agreed to provide additional money for this year only, to make sure she could do her work properly while county leaders discuss transitioning the medical examiner position from an outside contractor to a county employee.
Making the medical examiner a county employee would be more expensive, Schroeder said, but would provide consistency that is missing now.
“I think that would really help establish a certainty of what the standards are, so it’s not changing from one practitioner to another,” Schroeder said.
