DPS lab plan has agencies scrambling
Law enforcement chiefs rush to revise budgets to handle new fees.
Law enforcement agencies across the state are scrambling to come up with additional funding after the Texas Department of Public Safety on Thursday announced it would start charging for crime lab services beginning Sept. 1.
Several police chiefs and sheriffs throughout the Central Texas area told the American-Statesman on Friday they had no idea they were going to be charged for the services, which include DNA, drug and alcohol analysis.
Manor Police Chief Ryan Phipps said an email he received from the DPS on Thursday was the first he’d heard of the change. He said his budget is due next week, so he only has a few days to dig through department records and come up with a figure to request from the city to cover the added expense.
“It is going to have a big impact,” Phipps said. “This is going to be DWI-related, sexual assault-related (and) drug cases. There’s quite a bit of stuff that we take over there to them.”
In its Thursday announcement, the DPS included preliminary charges for several of its services.
Alcohol and controlled substance analysis will come with a $75 price tag, quantitative controlled substance analysis and toxicology will cost $150, and DNA analysis will go for $550 per case.
The policy change is outlined in rider 58 of the DPS budget. The rider — an explanation of where funds will come from or where they should be spent attached to the budget passed by the Legislature — requires that $11.5 million be charged and collected to make up the total authorized budget of $74.5 million for the 201819 fiscal year.
DPS spokesman Tom Vinger told the Statesman on Friday that the agency informed law enforcement as quickly as it could.
As soon as it developed a plan, it issued a letter to agencies across the state to inform them, DPS officials said.
“DPS was not consulted on Rider 58, which was added late in the session as part of the General Appropriations Act that was finalized only about a month ago,” Vinger said in a statement. “As with all legislation passed by our state leaders, we diligently began the process of reviewing this new legislative requirement (once we became aware of it) to determine the specific impacts to the department in order to take the necessary steps to comply.”
The DPS said it plans to use state appropriations to provide agencies with a voucher to cover some of the services they need, but the value of that waiver hasn’t been determined.
“We understand that they have costs,” Phipps said. “But at the same time, the citizens are already paying taxes that fund the DPS. It’s like they are being double taxed to pay out of our tax base to have these tests done.”
A DPS statement said it would finalize pricing and the voucher value later this summer, but in the meantime, agencies that rely upon those services have to make sure they can pay for them.
“We have not determined what we are going to have to budget for on this, and what we are going to have to do is compare what we had last year for an example of what we are going to have to spend,” Phipps said. “It is definitely going to have an impact on us.”
Kyle Police Chief Jeff Barnett said his department is in the same boat.
“We found out about the announcement” on Thursday, Barnett said. “It certainly caught us off-guard. Our budget is in solid draft form and has already been sent to the city manager. ... I wouldn’t say (it’s) too late because our budgets are not finalized, but it certainly did not give us advanced warning or time for preparation.”
Barnett said law enforcement agencies will probably need to spend the next few days trying to decide what kinds of evidence require analysis and the costs involved, adding that the new charges could lead agencies to prioritize cases to send out for testing in the future.
“We send a lot of DWI, blood tests and our more serious crimes — homicides and death related offenses — to DPS,” Barnett said. “It’s significant.”
The Austin Police Department runs its lab in conjunction with the DPS, and won’t be subject to the fees, Austin police spokeswoman Anna Sabana said.
“We already fund the lab that is run in our facility so there are no additional charges,” she said.
Other law enforcement agencies in the region — including the Round Rock police, San Marcos police, Williamson County sheriff ’s office and Fayette County sheriff ’s office — couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.
Phipps, whose department is made up of 27 sworn officers and three civilians, said Texas’ smaller law enforcement agencies, the “little guys,” are the ones that will be hit hardest by the change.
“We are smaller agencies, and we are the ones who have to watch our pennies closely,” he said. “Ultimately, it comes down to us.”
Comal County Sheriff Mark Reynolds said a little more notice would have been appreciated, but he isn’t angry or irritated with the DPS, even though the move was unexpected.
“For years, since I’ve been in law enforcement, you just knew that there was evidence you could send to DPS for analysis,” he said.
Reynolds said the sheriff ’s office is going to continue to use DPS services, but seeking out a contractor could be an option in the future if prices get too high.