Coroner stakes out his ground

There was an unnecessary and unseemly tug of war Friday morning in the Mahoning County administration building as the county commissioners, Administrator and Budget Director George Tablack and Prosecutor Paul Gains pulled Coroner Dr. David Kennedy across the line that separates Kennedy’s personal comfort zone from his duty to serve the public.

During a one-hour meeting, Kennedy made numerous demands for “assurance” that he would not be held personally liable if he went over his budget in attempting to provide the public with the 24/7 level of service that most coroners consider mandatory.

He continued to maintain that the anticipated layoff of an investigator in his department on April 28 somehow made it impossible for anyone in his office — including himself — to respond to an accident in the early morning hours of April 22 in which three young people died.

Kennedy couldn’t be bothered to come out on a Saturday. He maintains that physical access to the bodies is what the family wanted, while a Campbell detective says what the families really needed was positive confirmation of the tentative identifications made at the scene.

It’s the law

The Ohio Revised Code makes it the responsibility of a coroner, his deputy or assistants “to be available at all times for the performance of their duties,” and it makes it the responsibility of the coroner to “make a reasonable attempt to promptly identify the body or remains of a deceased person.”

Kennedy simply cannot shift his responsibilities onto others.

The commissioners, who have cut their office staff from 28 people to five over five years, weren’t impressed by Kennedy’s claim that he was doing the best he could given a 6 percent cut in his budget. Gains, who cut his personnel costs by 15 percent by instituting unpaid days off, was at the meeting on his day off and wasn’t impressed by Kennedy’s claim that there “wasn’t a better way” for him to handle last Saturday’s multiple fatalities. And Tablack, who oversees the books for the entire county and took a 10 percent pay cut, wasn’t impressed with Kennedy’s inability to see that the budget he’s been given is sufficient to do a proper job, barring some catastrophic event.

Kennedy stood firm: The most important thing they had to do was to assure him that he wasn’t going to be held liable for overspending or “made to look like a free-spending idiot.”

They had the power to grant him half his wish.