Forget Oakhill; build a new morgue, commissioner says

YOUNGSTOWN

Mahoning County Commissioner David Ditzler said the county would be better off spending millions of dollars to build a morgue for the coroner’s office than to spend hundreds of thousands retrofitting Oakhill Renaissance Place with a new morgue ventilation system.

“The morgue made sense there when it was a hospital,” Ditzler said of Oakhill, which is the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center.

“Now that it’s an office building and the ventilation is so poor, to try and clear up the issues when we have bodies come in there that are decaying, you literally have to evacuate the building,” Ditzler said.

“Instead of spending hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on

retrofitting new air-control systems into your facility, which is already too small and too outdated, it only makes sense to spend the new money on a new facility,” Ditzler said at Friday’s commissioners meeting.

“It’s not conducive to where we are in today’s science,” he said of the former hospital morgue, which has 1970s-vintage equipment. “We have to explore all options.”

Read what other officials think in Saturday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.