Buried in New York’s $70 billion annual budget are thousands of unexpected expenses that define the city’s cradle-to-grave benefits. Take body bags.
The city is spending $95,000 this year to buy about 5,500 heavy duty ones, mostly for disasters or for bodies in bad shape, and another 13,000 pouches for corpses delivered to the medical examiner’s office from homes, hospitals and crime scenes for autopsies. (On average, some 50,000 people die in New York each year.)
The heavy-duty orange or black bags cost $21.92 each. The white or black plastic pouches come in three sizes: $6.86 for adult, $3.29 for child and $2.49 for infant. They are also used to transfer bodies to funeral homes after autopsies.
Burying impoverished New Yorkers on Hart Island comes from a separate Correction Department budget. The cost of uniformed guards who supervise inmates, a backhoe operator, transportation and maintenance averages $500,000 annually to bury about 1,000 bodies.
