Changes, including new name, coming for Lorain County Crime/Drug Lab

Some changes are coming to the Lorain County Crime/Drug Lab, including new equipment and a new name. State funds totaling $425,000 will help the lab buy a new piece of testing equipment and add a fourth analyst to its staff, its director said Wednesday. Plans also are in motion to change the name to the Lorain County Forensics Lab, Director Gillian Camera and Commissioner Jeff Riddell said Wednesday. State officials announced Friday, March 8, that the lab will receive $425,000 in additional state funding through the Ohio Crime Lab Efficiency Program. Camera said that money will go toward purchasing a liquid chromatography-mass spectrometer, an instrument that she said "will allow us to continue working through our backlog" of testing and develop faster tests of materials submitted to the lab. Why is this important? In another form of testing, called gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, the heat involved in the testing process can affect compounds in the testing samples, Camera said. Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry doesn't have that issue, she said. Some of the state funding also will go toward hiring a fourth analyst in the lab, which currently has three. The funding has yet to be officially accepted by the commissioners, but Camera said the board "has been very supportive in approving grant funding for the lab and putting new equipment in and getting the lab where it needs to be." Another $250,000 award from the state Crime Lab Efficiency Program in 2022 allowed the lab to buy a second gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer. The first and only one the lab had prior to that was 18 years old, Camera said. The Crime/Drug Lab tests materials and does fingerprinting services for Lorain County courts and law enforcement. Its annual budget is approximately $600,000, two-thirds of which comes from the county's general fund and one-third of which comes from fees and grants. Several attempts to pass levies to fund the lab or move it out of the basement of the County Administration Building on Middle Avenue in Elyria have failed in recent years. Most recently, Issue 22 — a 0.25-mill, five-year additional levy benefiting both the Crime/Drug Lab and the county Coroner's Office — was defeated at the polls in November. It would have raised $2.2 million every year and cost the owner of a $100,000 home an additional $9 per year. Some lab work has had to be sent to state forensics labs like the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification or in Columbus, resulting in longer backlogs for investigations and court cases, Riddell and Camera said. Riddell said the name change will be worked in without a lot of fanfare. Voters, he said, didn't seem to connect with the "Crime/Drug Lab" name. The county was able to fully fund the lab for the 2024 budget year, "but we're trying to dress up the lab to get the service that everybody expects," Riddell said. "At the end of the day, to help law enforcement in Lorain County, we asked (Camera) what was needed to meet expectations and she gave us a strategy, so that's the direction we're heading," Riddell said. The lab is "a very integral part of the law enforcement team." The local lab is "beneficial to the judicial system and for the entire community," Camera said. It helps fight the opioid epidemic in the area, identifies compounds quickly and gets that information back to local law enforcement agencies and the courts. "We want the citizens to be proud of our lab," she said. Contact Dave O'Brien at (440) 329-7129 or dobrien@chroniclet.com.