State law does not ask the county to investigate sudden deaths, violent deaths, deaths in custody, overdose deaths, and deaths with no known cause. It requires it (RCW 68.50.010). Every one of those cases belongs to a family waiting for an answer. And under RCW 36.16.070, the Coroner cannot hire the staff to do that work without the Commissioners’ consent — which means the staffing level in that office is the Commissioners’ decision, and the consequences are theirs to own.
They have made their decision. Two positions gone from an office that was already stretched thin — part of the 94 county positions eliminated across 2025 and 2026.
Here is what I want the public to weigh against that.
In April 2025, the Commissioners voted unanimously to put $100,000 of public money down on an option to purchase the Haller property — a roughly $12.5 million acquisition, with the option extendable in six-month increments at additional cost. That was a choice. It was legal. It was also discretionary. Nobody’s statute required it.
So the question isn’t whether the county is broke. The question is what the county buys first when money is tight.
I don’t accept that the answer is: option payments on land we don’t yet have the money to buy, while a mandated office loses the people who do death investigations.
This isn’t a call to raise your taxes. Property tax growth is capped at 1% a year, and no levy is going to outrun a spending problem. It’s a call to fund the mandatory before the optional, and to stop treating the offices that can’t say no to the work as the easiest place to cut.
Fund the Coroner’s Office to the level the law and the caseload require. Cut the discretionary spending that got in front of it.
That’s what I’m running on.