As lawmakers in Juneau near the end of this session and begin mulling over the capital budget, they'll be deciding whether -- and how -- to fund a pillar of Gov. Sean Parnell's initiative against domestic violence: a proposed $76 million crime lab to replace an aging and cramped facility.

The state has already spent about $16.8 million to design the new structure and to prepare its site. An architect on the project says the project is "hammer ready" with utilities already positioned.

Parnell, in seeking funding, said in a letter to legislators that the new lab will offer a modern facility that will allow evidence to be quickly and efficiently analyzed. New technology will help with arson investigations, cases involving trace evidence, latent fingerprints and ballistic identification, he said.

"Unfortunately, the existing outdated and overcrowded crime lab is insufficient to accommodate the increased workloads," Parnell wrote. "The design of the new crime lab includes all the necessary elements to optimize the use of DNA evidence and other crucial tools for solving crimes."

Few seem to doubt that the current facility is too small. But not everyone thinks a new facility is the way to go.

Sen. Tom Wagoner, R-Kenai, said the current lab, built in 1986, is still functional and there isn't a need to build something entirely new. Plans for the building's size have ballooned exponentially since it was first proposed to something that now rivals the size of the Egan Center, he said.

"A crime lab is a functional building that provides certain services to the law enforcement people in our communities. It doesn't have to be a Taj Mahal, it doesn't have to have all the window dressing on it," Wagoner said. "This is another program mishandled by the state of Alaska, and it smells as bad as the fish factory that opened in the '90s."

The Raspberry Road plant, designed to process raw fish into prepackaged meals, cost the state $50 million to build before the project failed.

The current lab is 19,200 square feet and, with about 40 full-time employees, is at the limit of staff and equipment it can house, according to the Parnell administration. The proposed lab, planned at a site south of Tudor Road at Tudor Center Drive, would be about 84,000 square feet, including 49,200 square feet of lab space. It will include all the current resources and three new sections to examine trace evidence, toxicology and documents.

The lab will also include space for storage, in particular for samples taken from crime scenes that could have value for cold case investigations.

A state law that requires DNA samples of felons be collected in a database requires testing on about 7,000 samples per year, said crime lab manager Orin Dym.

But state officials say the lab's caseload has increased as well, in part due to the "CSI effect" -- in which judges, lawyers and juries expect scientific evidence because they've seen and read of its use in popular media -- and there's no reason to think it will decrease. At the same time, prosecutors are aware of the limitations of the current lab and have to select which cases can get by without sophisticated testing like DNA, and that sometimes costs the case, Dym said.

The new project is ready to begin, he said. Now, the Legislature needs to determine whether to fund it with general fund money or bonds, he said.

"This isn't a conceptual project. This is a project that is $16.8 million so far in the making," Dym said. "So if we go off to a general bond election in November, we miss the summer's construction season. It's gone. That's a year's delay."

'MONSTER LAB'

A group called Alaska Policy Forum, which describes itself as a resource for research from a "conservative perspective," last month came out with a report criticizing the planned facility as a waste of state money for a perceived need that hasn't been proven.

The facility is a "monster lab" -- too big and too lavish for what it needs, said retired crime lab director Chris Beheim, who, along with former Chugach Electric Association president Ray Kreig, authored the report.

The report asserts that technological advances will make large portions of the lab obsolete within a decade and suggests suspending work on the lab until the needs can be better studied. Beheim said DNA sampling technology, for example, is being miniaturized, with portable "lab on a chip" testers in development. It's possible that police will soon be testing suspects themselves at the booking station with self-contained devices, he said.

"This is coming down, there's no doubt about it," Beheim said. "It's a huge priority for Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the FBI."

But that technology's potential use -- if it proves viable -- would be in collecting known samples for the offender database, not collecting trace evidence at a crime scene, Dym said. And the DNA section is only 3,600 square feet -- hardly a large chunk of the 84,000-square-foot proposed building, said project manager Matt Tanaka with the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

Sen. Hollis French, an Anchorage Democrat and former prosecutor, said such devices "may be a little too cutting-edge to be a reliable predictor of what's going to happen." The lab project has been overdue for several years, and it's time to move forward with it, he said.

"While I know that there are continuing concerns about the size of the project, you don't build something for next year and the year after," French said. "You've got to build something that's going to last for the duration."

One key reason the Parnell administration offers to explain the need of the lab is that Alaska ranks No. 1 in the nation in its rate of sexual assaults. But that doesn't necessarily translate into a huge amount of cases, Beheim said.

"It's terrible that Alaska's number 1. But that's rape rate. We're actually No. 39 in total number of sexual assaults that occur," Beheim said. "They say we're right between California and Florida in violent crime. Well, California gets about 180,000 violent crimes a year. Alaska has about 4,500. To try to claim that the lab should be sized based on the rate of crime just doesn't make any sense to me."

The $76 million would pay to complete about 81 percent of the building, leaving 19 percent unfinished "shell space" inside that could eventually be finished to house more workers, equipment and storage. Finishing that space -- probably in about 20 years -- and adding onto the building over the years will allow it to meet the state's needs for the next 75 years, Tanaka said.

"The best professionals we could assemble in the state of Alaska, the best crime lab designer in the United States -- with over 90 labs to his credit -- a very experienced crime lab manager, all together as a team properly sized the lab," Tanaka said. "Now (it's) being criticized by an individual that isn't qualified to do that in the first place."

ONE CRIME LAB IN STATE

Tom Livingston, of Livingston Slone Architects, the local architect for the lab, said his firm has designed many of the labs in Alaska, including the Alaska Public Health Laboratory and the Department of Health and Social Services Virology Lab.

They hired McClaren, Wilson & Lawrie to help plan it because that company specializes in crime laboratory design, he said. But the design was based on what state officials wanted the lab to do, he said. And the lab is the only one in the state.

"Everybody's material is processed by the state crime lab in Anchorage. That's pretty unusual. Even in states where there are real small populations, like North Dakota, they're close enough to Minneapolis where they'll send specialty stuff," Livingston said. "What it means is that you end up with a lot more space for the building because you've got all these different functions that you have to test for and prosecutors are demanding more and more tests."

The Anchorage Police Department does some forensic work, like fingerprint and tire track analysis, because it handles a huge volume of that type of evidence and doing it in-house is fast and efficient, police spokesman Lt. Dave Parker said. But APD relies on the state lab for most everything else, including DNA testing, he said.

"They're just so overwhelmed now with DNA evidence that I think there's a greater lag time than when I was doing those kinds of cases a few years ago," Parker said. "It's just real hard to get stuff processed when you have that volume to deal with."

Sen. Lesil McGuire, an Anchorage Republican who sits on the Senate's Public Safety Subcommittee, said there is a definite need for the lab, especially to store evidence that can be useful in cold case prosecutions or exonerations.

"Sometimes we get evidence and we don't know what to do with it at that time," McGuire said. "And sure enough, 20 years later, we've still got that evidence. And if it's preserved properly, we can find that killer. I can't put a value on that."