Middletown is among three area police departments that have dropped contracts with the Miami Valley Regional Crime Laboratory, and there is concern others will follow, threatening the viability of a lab that currently provides evidence analysis for 100 jurisdictions in southwest Ohio.

The departures provide the first evidence that the downtown Dayton lab, which employs 26 people, is losing business to the state of Ohio.

The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (BCI) provides free testing for police, sheriff’s departments and prosecutors at its laboratory in London.

For some jurisdictions, the transportation costs are easily recovered through savings from getting out of the local contract.

Ken Betz, the regional crime lab director, said for now there is work enough for everybody. But if regional labs continue losing business, he said, it would not only hurt them but also cause a crushing workload at the BCI lab, which has long struggled with a backlog on testing cases.

“If we collapse, it could be very expensive for the state to take on our caseload,” said Betz. “Between Hamilton and Montgomery counties we work 30,000 criminal cases a year. The state is not in a position to absorb them.”

The Miami Valley crime lab has long been one of the region’s stopgap agencies against crime, providing fingerprint identification, DNA analysis and blood, drug and semen testing for area law enforcement.

Laboratory testing has become an increasing and vital aspect of law enforcement, and is often the difference between a closed case and one that remains unsolved for months or even years. DNA analysis is expensive, however, and as more and more jurisdictions look to cut costs, the state lab gives them an alternative.

The three jurisdictions that did not renew their contracts with the Miami Valley Regional Crime Lab — the Five Rivers MetroParks Ranger Division, the city of Middletown and Butler Twp. police departments — were not dissatisfied with the lab’s work.

“I must make clear my decision was based totally upon financial reasons and not the service or any issue in the lab,” Butler Twp. Police Chief Carl Bush wrote in a Dec. 30 letter to Betz. “My hopes are the financial difficulties change and we are able to return to the lab in the not to distant future.”

In addition to its London lab, BCI has facilities in Richfield, Bowling Green, Youngstown and Athens.

For the local lab — one of seven regional labs in Ohio — the three contracts represented a $110,500 loss of revenue for 2012.

Overall, contracts with local police departments accounted for $2.9 million of the the regional crime lab’s $3.9 million budget in 2011, with the balance coming from federal grants, according to Montgomery County budget data.

Betz said he balanced his budget by taking on two state contracts last year, one for up to $40,000 for evidence analysis in drug cases and the other for up to $90,000 in DNA analysis.

Both were to assist BCI with its evidence backlog.

Betz, who served on the transition team for Attorney General Mike DeWine, who oversees BCI, did not criticize the London lab or any jurisdictions that contract with the state.

But he said said working with a local agency has advantages.

“When there’s a local issue that requires immediate action, we respond to it,” Betz said. “Police departments that we work with know that.”

State Attorney General Mike DeWine in April 2011 said his No. 1 priority was to cut down the time needed to test evidence at the state lab. BCI, which processes more than 7,000 DNA cases each year, has been working to reduce lab turnaround times by streamlining processes, adding staff, and increasing the use of technology.

“We’re trending downward, but we’re not anywhere that we want to be yet,” said Tom Stickrath, superintendent of BCI.

At the close of 2010, BCI took an average of 125 days to complete DNA testing on biological evidence and get results to local authorities. That time has been cut by 25 percent, Stickrath said.

BCI’s five lab units — Chemistry, Documents, Firearms, Forensic Biology, Latent Prints, and Polygraph — consistently met a 45-day benchmark for returning results to law enforcement agencies, according to a 2011 state Attorney General’s report. The Trace Evidence Unit achieved that mark the last six months of the fiscal year.

The total budget for BCI labs in Fiscal 2011: $19.5 million, according to state records. Funding for those services — provided free by the state to support law enforcement — came from three sources: fees for services such as for background checks, general fund revenue and other state collections.

While the regional lab may not be able to compete financially with the state, Betz said working with a local agency does have advantages.

“When there’s a local issue that requires immediate action, we respond to it,” Betz said. “Police departments that we work with know that.”

But, even a small savings can intice cash-strapped departments.