Oct. 9 -- MOSES LAKE -- County infrastructure includes a lot of different things, including attention to the end of life. To that end, a new county morgue is projected to be finished by late 2026 or early 2027.
Tom Gaines, director of Grant County Central Services, said the new facility will be on Kittleson Road, not far from the new Samaritan Hospital. It will be 8,000 to 10,000 square feet to better accommodate the recommendations of state authorities that provide accreditation for a morgue.
Among the upgrades is additional space for coroner's office employees to talk to families, he said.
The building is projected to cost about $6 to $8 million, Gaines said.
The project to build a new morgue started because there's a new Samaritan hospital. The morgue was located in a section of the old hospital, and for a while, county officials expected the new hospital to have room for a new morgue. Gaines said that didn't work because there's only so much space at the new hospital.
Originally, county officials were planning a morgue of about 5,000 to 5,200 square feet, Gaines said, but that was before the morgue was awarded reaccreditation, and county officials looked at recommendations from the accompanying report.
"That's when we first started to discover that it might not be big enough," Gaines said.
Grant County Craig Morrison said part of the accreditation process was an analysis of the existing space and the existing caseload.
"Our caseload does exceed what our square footage is currently at," Morrison said.
The accreditation team suggested that, given the coroner's caseload, it needed both more space and more personnel.
Gaines said county officials did talk to the architects and construction managers at Samaritan, and the space they could spare, the original estimate of about 5,000 square feet, wasn't enough.
"We just couldn't get the space on the hospital side," Gaines said.
In addition to cases in Grant County, the morgue is used by some neighboring counties, including Adams, Kittitas and Lincoln counties. Grant County does charge other counties for the facility's use.