NEW HANOVER COUNTY — The New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office is asking the county to approve the use of roughly $125,000 in federal forfeited funds to purchase a new piece of drug testing equipment.
The equipment being requested is a gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer (GCMS) for the crime lab, which NHCSO took over from the Wilmington Police Department in July of 2019, although the lab itself remained physically inside WPD headquarters.
While the lab is currently in the midst of regaining certification for drug testing, the GCMS is also used for blood-alcohol testing; it’s also integral to the training process leading up to getting certified, which NHCSO lab director Brian Dew has said he hopes to accomplish by July of 2021.
The lab currently has two GCMS units. One will reach the end of its service life by January and the manufacturer, Thermo Fisher, won’t be able to guarantee service contracts. The other GCMS is much newer, acquired in a lease approved by Wilmington in 2018 when the lab was under WPD’s management.
The newer GCMS unit was delivered in April of 2019 but never installed. After the lab was transferred to NHCSO’s management several months later, Thermo Fisher attempted to contact NHCSO to schedule installation, but that never happened.
According to a spokesperson, NHCSO did not want to ‘inherit’ the WPD’s GCMS unit because the new lab director wanted a different model from a different manufacturer, Agilent, because it is the same model used by both the state crime labs and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. According to NHCSO, this will make it easier to access ‘shareable libraries’ of controlled substances and simplify training, since many drug chemists from CMPD, the state, and other labs are familiar with the Agilent technology.
NHCSO also cites these reasons as a viable exemption — e.g. where ‘standardization or compatibility is the overriding consideration’ — to state laws requiring competitive bids.
[Editor’s note, NHCSO initially stated the reason for declining to pick up the Thermo Fisher lease from WPD was that the machine wouldn’t ‘communicate’ with other agencies; NHCSO later clarified, giving the above reasons.]
According to a technical sales representative for Thermo Fisher, the company had no indication that NHCSO didn’t intend to pick up the Wilmington GCMS lease prior to a July 5 Port City Daily article concerning the issue. The company had contacted NHCSO in late 2019 saying that the billing was 180 days past-due but, according to city emails, the Sheriff’s Office directed the issue back to WPD.
Related: Wilmington stuck with $166,000 lease for unused crime lab equipment
The city of Wilmington, meanwhile, said it has notified Thermo Fisher that it intends to break the 5-year GCMS lease based on a contract clause essentially saying if the city doesn’t use the equipment and appropriates no money for it, it can terminate the deal. According to the city, this could only be done after the budget for Fiscal Year 2020-2021 was approved and the new budget started, on July 1.
A technical sales representative for Thermo Fisher confirmed the company had received a letter from Wilmington, dated July 10 with a signature dated July 14. While WPD previously stated in late June that it had been negotiating an end to the lease, Thermo Fisher said the company had no record or knowledge of previous outreach from the City of Wilmington regarding the lease.
Send comments and tips to Benjamin Schachtman at [email protected], @pcdben on Twitter, and (910) 538-2001.
