Dane County Executive Parisi Announces Proposed Regional Medical Examiner's Partnership for Dane and Brown County

October 16, 2015
Stephanie Miller, 608-267-8823
County Executive

 

Dane County Executive Parisi announced today that Dane County will provide medical examiner services to Brown County if a new intergovernmental agreement is approved. The agreement will increase Dane County’s development of regional service and help save taxpayer money. The resolution to approve the intergovernmental agreement will be introduced to the Dane County Board tonight and is currently in front of the Brown County board.

“The Dane County Medical Examiner’s Office continues to innovate to provide quality, professional work that benefits families and law enforcement in Dane County and in many counties throughout Wisconsin,” said Parisi.  “This new agreement will allow our office to maintain that service in the face of rising caseloads and save taxpayer money.”

Dane County converted to a professional Medical Examiner’s Office in 2011 and since then has performed death investigation and autopsy work for a number of Wisconsin counties, providing a regional network for the specialty work of forensic pathology. 

The office, led by Dr. Vincent Tranchida, will continue that work in the brand new state of the art Dane County East District Campus currently under construction. The new facility will greatly expand the ability of the Office to coordinate even the most complicated death investigations and include the most state-of-the-art forensic technology to ensure work is both thorough and conducted in a timely fashion.  This will greatly aid local law enforcement and prosecutors in resolving the most complex cases.

“Dane County is known as the gold standard in medical death investigations,” said Brown County Executive Streckenbach. “Regionalizing their expertise will provide greater level of services for our area and long term taxpayer savings by cost sharing resources.”

Revenue from the proposed  intergovernmental agreement will help pay for the cost of 4.5 new positions for the Dane County Medical Examiner’s office.  Currently, Dane County is contracted to do all of the death investigations for Rock County.  In addition, Dane County also provides autopsy medicine and forensic investigative services to 12 other Wisconsin counties and one county in Illinois.

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