Kentucky coroners struggle amid minimal salaries and county budgets
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Coroner Corey Watson spent four days and four nights at his office in late July after historic flooding ravaged Knott County, killing 16 people.
He’d known at least one of the victims his whole life. His office’s three-person morgue wasn’t nearly big enough. When a nearby coroner in Eastern Kentucky loaned him a four-person mortuary cooler, people twice tried to steal the generator keeping it cold.
And after retrieving and identifying the dead, it was Watson who was tasked with notifying their families.
His pay over those four nights: about $9.81 an hour.
The historic flooding made his already strenuous job far more difficult, though the lack of resources he’d been given ahead of time left Watson still reeling three weeks later.
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“It’s more than I just run out here, pick up a dead body and go home,” said Watson, who went through a two-year supply of body bags for his office after the flood.
“I believe as a community and as a region we need to have resources made available to us,” he said. “We need to be ready. This is a prime example.”
As Kentucky coroners like Watson struggle to keep up with deaths caused by COVID, drug overdoses, murders and even disasters, they are often doing so at minimal pay because of county budgets and a state statute that hasn’t been updated in decades that outlines their wage rates.
And even in larger communities like Jefferson County − where coroners are paid more to handle a far higher rate of cases − these officials are not allowed to earn overtime or receive benefits like all other local government employees.
“Police get time off, they get cars and I can’t offer any of that to my deputy coroners,” retiring Jefferson County Coroner Barbara Weakley-Jones told the Louisville Metro Council in July. “They don’t work every day … but when they’re off, they’re not really off.
“I’m not sure why anyone would want to be a coroner in Jefferson County,” she said.
That’s a question that may apply across the state. Trying to get higher wages for the state’s coroners has always been an issue, said Jimmy Pollard, executive director of the Kentucky Coroner Association.
“We always get pushed back from the county governments − they say ‘Oh, we can’t give them any more money,” he said. “Every time we’ve tried to approach it, we’ve run into roadblocks.”
‘They don’t understand that we are dealing with their loved ones’
There are 120 coroners throughout the state, each elected by their county to find the cause and manner of most deaths in the community – a gunshot wound being a cause, homicide being a manner. Unless a death is suspicious, coroners and their deputies don’t respond when patients die in hospice or at hospitals.
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They do respond to all homicides, suicides, fatal vehicle crashes, pedestrian fatalities, drug overdoses, natural home deaths and several other forms of unnatural deaths, such as drownings. When it comes to COVID-19 deaths, coroners respond when people die at home from the virus.
Additionally, coroners are responsible for approving all cremations in the county — a timely endeavor that involves multiple steps.
Hiring requirements include a high school diploma, completion of basic training and at least 18 hours of annual training courses approved by the Cabinet for Health and Family Services. Many of the state’s elected coroners are funeral directors or have physician experience, and many of the deputies come with some form of criminal justice or public safety background.
All are deputized sworn peace officers, meaning they are legally approved to perform the same duties as police.
Their pay scale is set by a Kentucky statute, and while county governments can choose to pay more than the minimums outlined by their population size, many do not.
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In counties with less than 10,000 people, deputies must be paid $200 a month. In the state’s largest counties with 150,000 or more people, deputies are paid a minimum of $1,100 a month.
“In my county, the dog catcher got paid more than me,” Pollard said of his time as coroner of Henry County.
“The problem you have when you approach your fiscal courts or your local government, the bottom line is people don’t want to talk about death and don’t want to talk about what you do,” he said. “They don’t understand that we are dealing with their loved ones.”
The effort to raise salaries has been made just at the local level thus far.
Sen. Ralph Alvarado, R-Winchester, who sponsored a bill last year requiring additional training for coroners and their deputies when it comes to notifying the families of descendants, said he was unaware of their wages when contacted by The Courier Journal.
“It hasn’t been a topic of discussion by the assembly,” he said.
That is set to change though, said Pollard, who has plans to take the fight to legislators once he outlines his proposal to the coroner’s association and gains approval from its board. His hope is to double the minimum salary rates, as well as lower the population requirement for additional deputy coroners, he said.
While coroners in some larger counties are paid far higher wages than the statute requires, there are still discrepancies in what one office receives versus another. Fayette’s deputy coroners, for example, receive overtime pay and paid time off, just as all other local government employees do.
Yet in Jefferson County − where more than 2,500 deaths were handled in 2021 − deputies regularly work overtime without pay and receive no benefits. If a call comes two hours before their shift ends, they still have to process the scene, the body, determine if an autopsy is needed and notify the next of kin, among various other steps.
Unreasonable budgets create restraints for coroners
Besides the salary issue, a general lack of funding for some of the offices makes an already stressful and emotional job that much harder to get done, Pollard and multiple Kentucky coroners said.
“Some of them can’t even afford to buy body bags and gloves,” Pollard said.
The government has gotten lucky with several funeral homes picking up those costs given many of the state’s coroners double as funeral directors, he said. But Pollard added that fact has led county government officials to underestimate how expensive dealing with their community’s dead can get.
Even before the flood, Knott County’s Watson had been asking for more resources, he said. While he’s content with the $20,400 annual salary he’s allotted by the county government, he thinks the approximately $300 a month his deputy coroner receives “is kind of a slap in the face.”
Together, in a normal year, they process about 120 cases.
Kentucky’s statute says the county government also “shall pay all reasonable expenses incurred by the coroner and his deputy in carrying out his responsibilities.” But several coroners said their jobs aren’t understood nor prioritized by those setting their budgets.
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The Shelby County Coroner’s Office, serving a population of about 48,000, receives close to 360 calls a year, Coroner Jeff Ivers said. He is paid $27,000 a year for leading the office, and his two deputies receive about $9,000 a year each.
Ivers asks the deputies to work 24 hours each week − meaning their hourly pay is just under minimum wage. He works five 12-hour shifts each week − meaning there are several shifts each week when the office is unstaffed.
“A lot of people don’t understand the coroner’s job and what we have to do,” he said. While the coroner is not technically working every minute of a shift, they are responsible for handling whatever comes up just like a firefighter or EMS worker would, he said.
Referring to one recent case, Ivers explained the steps taken after responding to the scene of a man’s death. His investigation report involved interviewing the man’s wife and offering to stay with her until family could arrive; calling the man’s employer to see when he was last seen on the job; calling his doctor to learn about his medical conditions; then beginning the actual processing of the body back at the office.
From there, he filed his paperwork, notified the funeral home, approved the death certificate, and if sought, will need to approve the man’s cremation. Those steps are for natural deaths, though − others can be far more extensive. Child deaths are extremely timely due to the required testing and paperwork that is involved, and in vehicle deaths each injury has to be recorded for insurance purposes, Ivers said.
Determining the cause and manner of death, he said, is similar to investigative work.
“Yes we’re dealing with the deceased, but we’re also dealing with those families,” Ivers said.
He asked that those in charge of their pay would try to gain a better understanding of coroners’ work.
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“Come and meet with us to see what we have to do − to know what it’s like going and knocking on the door to tell a family member that your child has passed away in a car accident or from an overdose,” Ivers said.
Contact reporter Krista Johnson at kj*******@ga*****.com .
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