Number of drug deaths in Franklin County leads coroner to ask for bigger budget
Naloxone is saving lives, but the opioid crisis continues to eat away at public resources.
Franklin County Coroner Jeffrey Conner has asked county commissioners to increase his budget. He wants to move an on-call employee to part-time in 2019 because of drug-related deaths. Cumberland, Dauphin and York coroners made similar upgrades last year, he said.
Conner figures he can hold the additional cost to $10,000 by making changes elsewhere in his labor budget. Half of the coroner’s $400,000 budget goes to labor. County taxpayers fund most of the budget. Autopsies cost the county about $120,000 a year.
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