By Jill Colvin
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Families of victims of the World Trade Center attack urged the city to restore funding after the chief medical examiner warned that state budget cuts could jeopardize his office's work identifying remains.
In testimony delivered to the City Council Monday, Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch said that a proposed $16 million cut to the agency's operating budget would cripple its work, including efforts to identify hundreds of victims' remains.
"We will find it very difficult to continue our ongoing efforts to identify victims of the World Trade Center disaster," Hirsch said in testimony submitted at the hearing.
About 40 percent of those who died on Sept. 11, 2011 at the World Trade Center have yet to be identified.
Hirsch said the cuts would slash about 27 percent of the office's budget, forcing it to lay off nearly a third of its 600-person staff.
For those who lost loved ones during the attack, the news came as a blow.
"We owe it to these people [to]...bring them home and bury them, to give those people some comfort," said Rosaleen Tallon, whose brother, Sean, was killed in the attack.
"Who wants their loved one just to be left there, unidentified?" she said. "These are the people we lost that day."
Lee Ielpi, the founder of the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, whose son was killed on 9/11, described the cuts as "baffling."
"I find it very troubling that the state's budget cut won't continue the DNA identification process considering there are 1,125 people still unidentified from the World Trade Center Site. I can't imagine how badly that will affect the families of the 1,125 who are still missing, let alone anyone else we need to identify," Ielpi said.
According to the Chief Medical Examiner's Office, 1,654 remains have been identified since Jan. 2006 and thousands of additional bone samples and other remains that were recovered are awaiting testing.
But not everyone sees the cuts in a negative light.
Sally Regenhard, who lost her son, Christian, on 9/11, has long had complaints about the way the Office has handled the investigation and recovery efforts. She said she saw the cuts as an opportunity for the another organization to take over the work.
She suggested the testing be turned over to the U.S. Military's Hawaii-based Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command, which identifies soldiers lost during war.
"We're throwing good money at a bad agency," she said of the city's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. "This is the time to revisit it."
JPAC did not immediately return a call for comment about their potential involvement.
In addition to the impact on identifying 9/11 remains, the chief medical examiner also warned that other operations overseen by his office would be paralyzed by the cuts.
He said the office would not be able to continue its work on cold cases or missing persons cases, response times would be slowed, autopsies and funerals would be delayed, and he warned of months-long backlogs for toxicology reports.
Other DNA work would also be impacted.
"Within three months of staff reductions, all incoming evidence will have to wait at least four weeks before being processed," Hirsch warned.
The agency would also likely be forced to close its Bronx, Queens and Staten Island offices, putting more pressure on Brooklyn and Manhattan staff, according to the chief medical examiner.
The legislature is expected to vote on the plan as soon as Wednesday.
