I thought about that a while ago, but it popped back up when the mild controversy emerged over a plan to spend $55,000 to decorate Doctor G's new morgue with ceramics from a Vermont artist. Why should taxpayers pay for artwork in the office when it's just as much a TV set as it is a morgue?

So I checked out her financial disclosure statements (you can read them for yourself here.) On the most recent one, filed in July of 2008, Garavaglia lists her primary source of income as "Atlas Media," the company that produces her TV show. Note, she doesn't list her job as medical examiner; she names her TV job.

So how much do we, the taxpayers, pay her to examine corpses? Her initial contract, approved by Orange County commissioners in July of 2004, sets her annual salary at $175,000. Interestingly, that contract also orders that Garavaglia consider her job as District 9 Medical Examiner her "primary employment," and she must "refrain from accepting any engagement as hereinafter described which would interfere in any way with the faithful performance of her services."

Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that she lets the TV show interfere with her duties. A chart of the office's workload, compiled by the Medical Examiner's Commission of Florida, shows it has an average to above average number of cases related to the district's population (check out page 7 on the link).

But it's interesting to note that some of her colleagues had concerns about the dual roles when she first took over the job. This is from a letter written by State Attorney Lawson Lamar, and presented at the Commission meeting in May 2004:

From what we can tell, the fears turned out to be unfounded. If you've ever seen Doctor G's show, the autopsy videos are actually all "dramatizations," and names appear to be changed fairly often. Plus it's kind of neat to see local detectives interviewed on the show, and segments set in local settings. One I saw last week was about a case in Oakland (in west Orange County).

Still, I kind of wonder about how much Orange County should be getting out of the show. Most of the time, when TV shows feature locals, it can be classified as good for tourism or migration because it puts Orlando's name out there. But who wants to move to a place where you see all these dead bodies? And shouldn't the show be paying some sort of money back to the taxpayers? After all, she wouldn't have anything to do on the show if she weren't the medical examiner, on the county's payroll.