The Haines Borough is revising plans for a CARES Act-funded morgue again. The change means roughly $22,000 in CARES Act funds will go to waste.
The original morgue plan, approved in June, involved using $200,000 to build a permanent structure next to the current public safety building. Last month, responding to public feedback and more pressing facility needs, the assembly scaled back the project, choosing, instead, to use $100,000 to turn a refrigerated shipping container purchased this winter into a temporary, two-room morgue.
Public facilities director Ed Coffland has proposed scrapping the proposal to build a new structure in favor of using a small portion of CARES Act funds to upgrade the borough’s current morgue, a refrigerated room in the public safety building with a myriad of problems including porous walls that make it difficult to clean biohazards like blood, carbon dioxide risks when the refrigeration unit is running, and very limited space for viewing and storing bodies.
Under this new plan, upgrades to the existing morgue will include improvements to the ventilation system to address the carbon dioxide issue and the purchase of a metal table to use for dressing bodies. Coffland estimates the improvements will cost somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000.
Coffland said as planning for the modified shipping container morgue moved forward, it became clear that it would be a more involved process than anticipated.
“The roof on the container is not designed to carry a snow load. In order to insulate it properly, you’ve got to build a frame on the inside. It gets to be more than it makes sense to do,” Coffland said.
As of Oct. 8, the borough had spent $22,062 of the total $100,000 allocated for the morgue. The funds went toward planning for the first and second iterations of the project. Coffland said the previous planning work won’t transfer to the morgue improvement project.
If Coffland’s cost estimate is accurate, the borough will have roughly $63,000 CARES Act funds leftover after the morgue improvements are complete. Coffland said it will be up to the assembly’s CARES Act ad hoc committee to determine what happens to the leftover funds.