After years of delays and cost escalations, plans are advancing for a standalone regional Oregon State Police crime lab/morgue/medical examiner’s office on Chad Drive in Eugene.
The state expects to begin construction of the 58,800-square-foot facility next March, with a January 2029 opening, an OSP spokesperson tells Eugene Weekly.
The place, next to the former Register-Guard offices, will be something of a criminology Taj Mahal, newly submitted plans show.
It comes under the Oregon State Police budget, but it won’t have much to do with OSP’s best-known activity: traffic enforcement by troopers. The Chad facility’s crime lab will provide services for local law enforcement agencies across OSP’s Lane County/Central Willamette Valley region. The facility’s medical-examiner office, part of the state medical examiner’s office, will provide autopsy, morgue, death-certification and other related services for a similar region.
The design and construction budget for the two-story building is $71.6 million, on top of the $3.79 million OSP paid for the 6.5-acre site in 2023. That total is up from $61 million OSP estimated in 2021.
Plans filed with the city show a facility packed with CSI-type features: 1,750 square feet of floor space with coolers and freezers to store bodies; 2,200 square feet of autopsy rooms; a dedicated lab for fentanyl testing; a fingerprint lab; 5,000 square feet of toxicology lab space; a firearms lab and a firing range; property and tissue storage rooms; a gas chromatography instrument lab. The list goes on.
The building “will be the most modern and technologically advanced facility within OSP,” says agency spokesperson Jolene Kelley. It will have two firsts for OSP, says Kelley: a special room for storing decomposed bodies — a “decomp cooler” — and one for examining decomposed bodies — a “decomp autopsy” room.
The place will generate unique traffic. Besides the facility’s staff, “most visitors are expected to be law enforcement officers dropping off/picking up evidence from various jurisdictions, and the families of deceased individuals,” the plans say.
Rent-a-morgue
OSP’s regional crime lab is currently co-housed with OSP troopers at OSP’s Springfield Area Command on Gateway Street. OSP has complained for years the lab is cramped and insufficient, prompting the Legislature to ante up money for the new building. OSP’s deputy medical examiner for the region is based at the morgue at PeaceHealth’s RiverBend hospital in Springfield, where Lane County rents morgue space.
OSP will move the deputy medical examiner and the 23-person Springfield-based crime lab staff — but not OSP troopers — to the Chad building, says Kelley.
Lane County will stop renting the RiverBend morgue space and shift to using the morgue at the Chad facility, says Lane County District Attorney Chris Parosa.
“We are really excited that OSP is opening up a major morgue in our community,” Parosa says. “It’s going to be a top-notch facility.” Bodies from across the local OSP region “will be coming to this facility,” he says.
All this may sound a bit morbid. But OSP’s medical-examiner and crime-lab services are vital to local law enforcement.
The state medical examiner division oversees the investigation of sudden or suspicious deaths, determines the cause and manner of death and performs autopsies. Counties fund and carry out the actual field investigations and research into deaths. In Lane County, Parosa says that’s done by a seven-person county Death Investigations Division in the Lane County District Attorney’s Office. The RiverBend morgue is adequate but “limited on space,” he says, adding that the investigations unit is housed in county offices in downtown Eugene and won’t move to the new OSP space.
Five labs
OSP’s statewide network of five crime labs does much of the lab analysis work for local law enforcement around the state. The labs are in Springfield, Portland, Pendleton, Bend and Central Point, each serving a region. Due to crowding at some of the labs, OSP may shift some medical examiner staff to the Eugene facility, Kelley says.
OSP’s consultant is working with the city on landscaping, traffic flow and the like for the Chad site. The new facility will sit behind the medical office now being constructed on Chad by Eugene Endoscopy.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.