Jefferson County Coroner Dr. Greg Davis compared moving into the new coroner’s office to a family having grown out of its rental residence.

“It’s like if you were moving from an apartment to a house that allowed your family of five to have room not to step on each other all the time,” Davis said at today’s committee meeting of the Jefferson County Commission. “That’s what we’re getting. We’re going to a space that was designed for the volume of work that we must do, instead of one that was designed for about a third or a quarter of the volume of work that we must do.

“Now we’ve got what we need to do our job,” Davis said. “We’re elated. It is fabulous, fantastic.”

County officials were on hand Monday for the ribbon-cutting of the new facility at 100 Leaf Lake Boulevard off of Lakeshore Parkway. Plans for the new 32,000-square-foot office were born when construction of the new Cooper Green Medical Clinic began.

The coroner’s office has long been in the basement of the old Cooper Green facility and needed to be relocated.

“We expect that by the end of July we’ll be able to work in that space,” Davis said. “With the administrative offices, if (contractors) come in with a ladder and they’re working, we can still do our work. But we can’t have bodies out while they’re trying to work. They don’t want that. We don’t want that.

“We’re continuing to work in our old space to examine bodies until they complete the morgue and the … port there you drive through to drop off bodies or pick them up,” the coroner said. “When that’s completed, then we’ll move all operations there.”

During the committee meeting, commissioners moved to the agenda of Thursday’s meeting their approval of hiring Dr. Sarah Anderson as associate coroner.

In other action at the committee meeting, commissioners sent a revision to the county’s credit card policy to Thursday’s agenda.

“If I made purchases as a director, currently I was the one signing off on those purchases,” County Manager Cal Markert said. “(The revision) stipulates somebody else has to look at it.”

That review doesn’t have to come from outside county government.

“It just puts in place good checks and balances to prevent anything in the future from being a problem,” Markert said, adding that the revision was reviewed by the county’s auditors.

The revised policy says if an individual accidentally swipes the credit card for a personal expense, that person has five business days to reimburse the county.

The commission also sent a resolution for additional support for the 2025 World Police and Fire Games that begin this week. The county is set to pay no more than $500,000 to assist with funding the operation of the games, including public safety and certain marketing and advertising of the county at the games.

The commission exempted the World Police and Fire Games from taxes during its meeting in April 2024.