Travis County Commissioners Court
August 21, 2007
Item 13
13 is to consider and take appropriate action regarding the following fee changes and information letter for the Travis County medical examiner's office, a, increase in -- and d, Travis County for autopsy services.
>> thank you very much. Judge and Commissioners, today we would just like to briefly highlight what we've already sent you as backup and that is your consideration in adopting an increase in the autopsy fee as well as the administrative fee schedule as well as approving an information letter to our contract counties. Each year we go through and during our budget process and examine where we are in regards to our overall costs, where we are in records to our workload and try to compare those to see if there is any changes that need to be made. You know over the last two years this court has been very abundant in providing the necessary personnel and equipment and resources in order to get this particular office ready for name accreditation. So along with that, we also need to look at our services and whether or not we're charging appropriately. Because as those increase, as our personnel costs increase, as the number of personnel increase, as the number of autopsies increase, then we examine that along with p.b.o. And we now have a pricing formula that establishes on autopsy fees exactly what we should be charging. So what you have before you is an increase in the autopsy fee from $2,000 to $2,300. We also have an increase in that we are adding some administrative fees that we feel like we should have been charging all along. In fact, all other medical examiner's offices, it is our understanding the state already are charging some of these fees. We worked with the county attorney's office to make sure that they are legitimate and that we can indeed charge for them. There were some fees of which we took off the list because of that. But these are in compliance and so therefore we feel like we need to go forward with them. You'll notice, though, that we protect the citizen of the family, the persons that's involved in regards to a lot of these fees. The Travis County taxpayer will not see some of these costs if they are directly doing business with the Travis County medical examiner's office. We feel like that's very important. We also feel like that as we come forward and look at an increase, that this information letter be something that is a must because you in the past years when we've done an increase, we've alerted our office of the outside counties that we were going to be doing this so we can kind of prep them for this. In fact, this fee would not go into effect until October because we have to look at the contract and amend that contract, but we also want to give them adequate notice, so that's why you see it all together is that we want to be able to after this particular -- yes, sir?
>> especially after the letter goes out if the court decides to do that and you have users where some of these fees will be looked at as far as information and a whole lot of other things, how would they be handled if someone objects to these fees? In other words, do they go somewhere else or what do they do? I'm just curious.
>> well, the history, Commissioner, that's a very good question. The history has shown that they don't go somewhere else, that they do come here. And we show usually when we have an increase, a little bit of a dip, but it settles right back out. So that's the other thing that is interesting about the history of the office. If you go back to 1998 through 2004, we've increased there in those years about 225%. We also increased the workload by 6.23%. So we've not really seen a dramatic, you know, change in people going elsewhere, Commissioner.
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, August 22, 2007, 18:30 AM