The Lowndes County Board of Supervisors on Monday bought a $180,000 piece of equipment for the Columbus Crime Lab that will speed up the process of testing drugs in criminal cases.
The supervisors voted unanimously to use some of about $1 million of unallocated federal American Rescue Plan Act to purchase the gas chromatography-mass spectrometry machine.
The Crime Lab is run by the city of Columbus but conducts drug testing on narcotics cases for the Lowndes County Narcotics Task Force, which includes Columbus Police Department officers, explained Sheriff Eddie Hawkins.
“This equipment is very important because it speeds up the process of getting our drugs analyzed at the crime lab,” he said. “Right now there’s a backlog of cases that are not being processed because they don’t have the equipment to get it done in a timely manner.”
Hawkins estimated the backlog at about 1,000 cases.
“It will help us by getting cases analyzed faster, and it will also speed up the court process,” he said. “People aren’t getting prosecuted in a timely manner” because of the backlog.
Right now the crime lab is limping along with a single obsolescent machine, Columbus Crime Lab Director Claudette Gilman told the supervisors. Having two machines up and running will be a vast improvement.
“The one we have now was built in 2001, and came (refurbished) to us in 2013,” she said. “It is currently being phased out. As long as I can keep tearing it down and putting it back together, I think we probably have another five years (of life), probably.”
Gilman gave the supervisors three options for the GC-MS: a basic model at $113,000, a mid-range model at about $130,000 and a top-of-the-line model at about $185,000.
Hawkins recommended the top-tier machine.
“If we’re going to buy one, I think we need to buy the Cadillac,” he said. “The reason for that is that it does testing that can detect fentanyl. We can test for that up front and know without having to run the whole system to check it out.”
Gilman estimated it would take “under five minutes” to run the test for fentanyl.
The purchase did come with some strings, however.
While the county will pay for the machine, the city will be responsible for its upkeep, Hawkins said. Lowndes County Narcotics Task Force cases will jump to the front of the line when they come in.
The crime lab is also used by about 29 other agencies, Gilman said, and produces a revenue stream for the city.
At a Columbus City Council work session earlier this year, Gilman said that a drug analysis case runs about $60. In 2021 the crime lab worked 1,095 drug cases, and had received 437 by June of this year.
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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