Every county department has a breaking point. When the road crew is overwhelmed, potholes wait. When the permit office is short-staffed, applications queue. When the parks department is cut, the grass grows.
One office doesn’t get that option. Under Chapter 68.50 RCW, the Skagit County Coroner’s Office must investigate every sudden, violent, or unexplained death in this county, at whatever volume death arrives, on whatever day it arrives. The law contains no clause for “we’re at capacity.” No case can be declined, deferred to next quarter, or handed to another department.
That is what makes the decision taking effect this January worth every voter’s attention: on January 1, 2027, the Coroner’s Office is slated to lose two of its roughly six positions, a third of its staff.
This post is about what “a third of the staff” means for an office whose workload is set by fate, not by the budget office.
The “Normal” Week Is Already a Record
Start with what an ordinary year now looks like. In 2025, Skagit County set a record it never wanted: 55 drug overdose deaths, the most in county history, fentanyl involved in 78% of them. Add 34 suicides, 5 homicides, 64 fatal falls, 14 traffic deaths. The office reported to 263 death scenes, ordered 229 toxicology tests, and handled 74 full autopsies through contracted forensic pathologists.
All of it on a rotation the county’s own job posting describes plainly: “a 24 hour per day, 7 day per week rotating on-call basis.” The phone is answered at 3 a.m. because someone is scheduled to answer it, every night, all year.
Four people can perhaps carry a normal year, with nothing to spare. And that’s the problem, because normal years are not the ones that matter most.
The Abnormal Week Lives Next Door
On March 22, 2014, a hillside collapsed above the Stillaguamish River near Oso, one county south of us. Forty-three people died, the deadliest landslide in American history. The Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office spent weeks identifying victims and returning them to their families.
Remember that name, because it matters twice. Snohomish County’s Medical Examiner is one of the offices Skagit contracts with to perform our autopsies. When the regional system surges, our surge partner is the first office to be consumed by it.
The Surge
And Skagit has had its own brushes. There was the mass shooting at Cascade Mall in Burlington on September 23, 2016. When the I-5 bridge dropped into the Skagit River in 2013, this county got lucky — everyone came out of the water alive. The Skagit River has flooded this valley for as long as anyone has kept records. Luck is not a plan. Then there was the Oso Landslide, March 22, 2014. A mass-fatality event here, a flood, a multi-vehicle collision on the busiest I-5 freeway corridor, an earthquake, a disease outbreak, would land on whatever staff we have that morning, with the same legal mandate: every death, investigated, no exceptions.
A six-person office has a very thin surge margin. A four-person office has none.
Why “Just Work Harder” Isn’t Available Either
There are three quiet backstops people assume exist. None of them do.
There is no pathologist to hire. The country has roughly 500 to 850 practicing forensic pathologists against a need several hundred higher, and about 40 new ones finish training each year. When disaster strikes a region, every county’s contracted cases queue behind it.
There is no slack in the timeline. Toxicology already takes 30 to 60 days; most cases close in 45 to 90. Those clocks are what grieving families live inside, waiting to bury someone, settle an estate, or simply learn what happened. Fewer investigators doesn’t pause the clocks. It lengthens them, for every family at once.
There is no cheap recovery. The people in this office are state-trained, nationally certified, and recruited by every county in a country that is desperately short of them. Burn them out with a doubled on-call load and they will have somewhere to go. Replacing them, recruiting, training to the state’s 12-month statutory standard, certifying, and re-earning the accreditation this office holds, costs far more than keeping them ever would.
The Part That Should Bother the Budget Hawks Most
If cutting this office saved real money, that would at least be a trade-off to debate. But as we detailed in our last post, state law runs the other way: RCW 68.50.104 reimburses Skagit up to 40% of contracted pathologist costs, and directs the State Treasurer to withhold 25% of that reimbursement if the office falls out of the accreditation Washington requires it to “maintain… thereafter” (RCW 36.24.210).
A cut that weakens a mandatory office, erodes a required accreditation, risks a state penalty, and leaves the county with no surge capacity for the disaster everyone hopes never comes, that is not a savings. That is a deferred bill with interest.
What You Can Do Before January 1
The commissioners face a real $10 million problem, and they deserve residents who engage with it seriously rather than shout. So engage seriously:
Attend a Board of Commissioners meeting before year’s end, or write to them, and ask three specific questions. What did Skagit receive in state death-investigation reimbursement in 2024 and 2025, compared with the savings of these two positions? What staffing level does the Coroner’s Office say, in writing, is required to keep its accreditation? And what is the county’s plan for a mass-fatality event with a four-person office?
Those are not gotcha questions. They are the questions any of us would ask before signing off on this cut, and if the answers are good, we should all be glad to hear them.
The Coroner’s Office answers the worst phone call of a family’s life, every night of the year, no matter how many come at once. The least the county can do is make sure someone is there to pick up.
Watch the video where Candidate Fussell warns the Skagit commissioners that staffing and funding the Skagit Coroner is a lawful mandate, not an arbitrary choice — “Earthquake”.
Truth. Transparency. Trust. Dignity for every family. Honest answers for every community.
Sources
Chapter 68.50 RCW, Human remains; jurisdiction · RCW 68.50.104, reimbursement and withholding · RCW 36.24.210, continuing accreditation