Construction scheduled for 2026 on new Grant Co. morgue
CHERYL SCHWEIZER | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 11 months AGO
A new Grant County morgue is projected for completion by late 2026, replacing the existing morgue. Above is the entrance to the current morgue located at the Samaritan Hospital facility in Moses Lake.
CHERYL SCHWEIZER/COLUMBIA BASIN HERALD
Senior Reporter Cheryl Schweizer is a journalist with more than 30 years of experience serving small communities in the Pacific Northwest. She began her post-high-school education at Treasure Valley Community College and enerned her journalism degree at Oregon State University. After working for multiple publications, she has settled down at the Columbia Basin Herald and has been a staple of the newsroom for more than a decade. Schweizer’s dedication to her communities and profession has earned her the nickname “The Baroness of Bylines.” She covers a variety of beats including health, business and various municipalities. | October 9, 2025 3:00 AM
MOSES LAKE — County infrastructure includes a lot of different things, including attention to the end of life. To that end, a new county morgue is projected to be finished by late 2026 or early 2027.
Tom Gaines, director of Grant County Central Services, said the new facility will be on Kittleson Road, not far from the new Samaritan Hospital. It will be 8,000 to 10,000 square feet to better accommodate the recommendations of state authorities that provide accreditation for a morgue.
Among the upgrades is additional space for coroner’s office employees to talk to families, he said.
The building is projected to cost about $6 to $8 million, Gaines said.
The project to build a new morgue started because there’s a new Samaritan hospital. The morgue was located in a section of the old hospital, and for a while, county officials expected the new hospital to have room for a new morgue. Gaines said that didn’t work because there’s only so much space at the new hospital.
Originally, county officials were planning a morgue of about 5,000 to 5,200 square feet, Gaines said, but that was before the morgue was awarded reaccreditation, and county officials looked at recommendations from the accompanying report.
“That’s when we first started to discover that it might not be big enough,” Gaines said.
Grant County Craig Morrison said part of the accreditation process was an analysis of the existing space and the existing caseload.
“Our caseload does exceed what our square footage is currently at,” Morrison said.
The accreditation team suggested that, given the coroner’s caseload, it needed both more space and more personnel.
Gaines said county officials did talk to the architects and construction managers at Samaritan, and the space they could spare, the original estimate of about 5,000 square feet, wasn’t enough.
“We just couldn’t get the space on the hospital side,” Gaines said.
In addition to cases in Grant County, the morgue is used by some neighboring counties, including Adams, Kittitas and Lincoln counties. Grant County does charge other counties for the facility’s use.
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