Save the labs and the field agents.

That’s the message area law enforcement chiefs are giving the Kansas Bureau of Investigation as the agency prepares for what could be as much as a $1 million cut in its next budget.

Traci Fruit, forensic scientist at KBI headquarters in Topeka, prepares to weigh a sample of what was thought to be crack cocaine gathered by the Lawrence Police Department. As the KBI faces budget cuts, area law enforcement chiefs are telling the KBI to spare the most important areas of lab work and field officers.

“Without the lab work, we’d be lost,” Jefferson County Sheriff Roy Dunnaway said. “I don’t know what we’d do.”

Earlier this month, KBI Director Larry Welch sent letters to county sheriffs, police chiefs and prosecutors asking for advice on what services he should protect in his budget.

The KBI currently faces a $400,000 shortage in funds in planning the budget for fiscal year 2003. Depending on what the Kansas Legislature does, that shortage may go considerably higher, Welch said. He also points out that the KBI’s budget is already nearly 40 percent paid for by federal grants.

“Now, given the dire fiscal predictions facing us, I need, and seek, your advice and counsel as we evaluate budget proposals for our agency,” Welch said in his letter.

“It’s really hard to do without any of their services,” Douglas County Sheriff Rick Trapp said.

Trapp agreed, however, that the KBI’s lab services are essential to his department. So did Franklin County Sheriff Craig Davis.

“Without the lab work there is such a tremendous amount of forensic evidence probably many cases wouldn’t get filed,” Davis said.

Lawrence Police Chief Ron Olin said all of his department’s drug cases rely on KBI lab testing. The specialized services the KBI provides are a major benefit to smaller law enforcement agencies, he said.

Dunnaway also doesn’t want to see cutbacks affecting KBI field agents. He noted that agents in the KBI’s “cold case” unit, which investigates old, unsolved homicides, played a key role in the recent arrests of three people suspected in the Clarence Rinke murder case. In October 1999 Rinke was shot to death in his rural home.

“They helped us line up some interviews with people and kept things going,” Dunnaway said.

The KBI does not charge for its lab work or other services. Its main lab is in its Topeka headquarters, and satellite labs are located in Great Bend, Pittsburg and Kansas City, Kan. Local law enforcement agencies rely on the labs for firearms, toxicology, fingerprint and drug testing, to mention a few.

Without KBI lab services local agencies would be forced to use private labs or labs at bigger law enforcement departments. That would be expensive, local sheriffs said.

“If we have to pay for it, I’d rather pay the KBI,” Dunnaway said.

Yet local agencies also are dealing with budgeting problems of their own.

“We’re facing the same budget problems the state is and I don’t know if I’d have the money to pay for that,” Trapp said.

“That’s another expense that would fall back on the local agency, and we just don’t have the money,” Davis said.

If a private lab had to be paid for services such as DNA testing it would add thousands of dollars to the cost of prosecuting one case, Douglas County Dist. Atty. Christine Kenney said. The KBI also provides its expert witnesses to testify in trials without charge, she noted. That saves the county hundreds of dollars that would be needed for an outside expert’s testimony, she said.

“We would not be able to have the quality of prosecutions we have now without the KBI services,” Kenney said. “You have to really start thinking about the consequences for law enforcement. Nobody wants a tax increase but I think that there would be grave consequences for cutting the KBI.”