The Jasper County Attorney’s Office is handling a complaint from a Newton funeral home, whose owners claim the county has underpaid them for over a decade. Wallace Family Funeral Home and other funeral homes in Jasper County transport bodies to the State Medical Examiner’s Office. Chantelle and Brett Lundberg, who own Wallace Family Funeral Home, recently met with the Jasper County Board of Supervisors. Chantelle told them that based on a pay rate resolution passed in 2009, she believes the county owes Wallace Family Funeral Home well over $10,000 for the service they have provided in the past ten years.

“If we were paid according to the resolution, like the medical examiner and the medical examiner investigators are, then we were underpaid by over $14,000. I am frustrated. We do work for the county that I can promise that many would do. We are available and answer our phones 24 hours per day. We arrive within minutes of that call in all conditions, doing and seeing what many can’t imagine.”  

Lundberg says she first brought up this issue a year ago, and that two additional attempts to get the board of supervisors to address the issue had failed. At the end of her meeting with the Jasper County Board of Supervisors, Lundberg was told the County Attorney’s Office would be speaking with her about this issue.