White River Junction
The issues came to light after inexpensive labor for mowing and trimming provided by the Vermont Department of Corrections ceased following the 2017 closing of Southeast State Correctional facility in Windsor, where the work crews came from. It forced the private, nonprofit associations that have traditionally maintained burial grounds such as Hartford Cemetery on Maple Street, Christian Street Cemetery in Wilder, Quechee Cemetery and West Hartford Cemetery to pursue contractors for services such as basic landscaping — and finding the open marketplace more expensive.
For example, at Hartford Cemetery, which was mowed and trimmed about every 10 days this summer, the bill came in around $24,000, compared with about $5,000 when Southeast State inmates took on the task, according to Ken Parker, who is a member of the Hartford Cemetery Association that oversees that facility and also sat on the Hartford Cemetery Committee.
Other issues facing the town’s cemeteries include aging association members that likely won’t be replaced, roads and monuments in disrepair and lack of revenue sources beyond the approximately $18,700 in total money allocated from the town each year.
Under Vermont statute, municipal governments assume responsibility for cemeteries if they’re not otherwise maintained, a reality Parker said the town should be prepared to take on fully within the next five years. Associations for four of the five cemeteries in town that still offer plots for sale have fewer than four members, and most are past retirement age, while the fifth, Mount Olivet Cemetery in White River Junction, is owned and managed by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington.
Parker presented the Cemetery Committee’s findings at a Hartford Selectboard meeting last Tuesday.
“These places eat up money, they do,” Parker said on a video recording of the meeting. “As a community, we haven’t had to carry the maintenance as a significant burden to the taxpayer, but we’re up against the wall, folks, we really are.”
The Cemetery Committee itemized projected annual costs for each of the active cemeteries, including basic maintenance and repairs for of a handful of monuments and other features at each site.
The total projected cost for 2019, the committee found, was $179,360, approaching 10 times as much as is currently allocated.
“I’m almost embarrassed to put this number up here,” Parker told the Selectboard. “But, realistically, somewhere between the number you spend now and that number is where we need to be to provide adequate, appropriate maintenance in the cemeteries.”
Selectman Dick Grassi wondered why it wasn’t up to families of the dead to maintain cemetery markers such as headstones, monuments and plaques. They are, Parker explained, but decades may go by without upkeep.
“This happens everywhere, where there is no longer family there to care for the sites,” he said. “If there’s somebody who passed away in 1920 and there are no longer relatives to care for the monument, it falls on the cemetery association to care for it.”
In a Saturday phone interview, Parker emphasized that the committee isn’t recommending that any future Hartford Cemetery Commission attempt to have all of the cemeteries’ deficiencies repaired at once.
“That, of course, wouldn’t make sense because it would be a tremendous financial burden,” Parker said. “But at Hartford Cemetery, for example, we have about 60 monuments in disrepair, either fallen over or leaning badly. If we repaired five to 10 monuments per year, in six to eight years we’d have a cemetery that is in good order of respectability, a dignified final resting place that we all would want.”
Nonmunicipal revenue is limited by the fact that only the interest for the endowments attached to the associations is accessible, Parker noted. Lot sales also are trending downward as more of the deceased are being cremated. According to the committee’s findings, 77 percent of deceased Vermonters in a recent survey were cremated, as opposed to 14 percent that were buried.
“These are immediate problems for us, and not ones we can kick down the road any further,” Parker said at the meeting. “We’ve been able to forestall the inevitable, but the inevitable is here now.”
The cemetery committee also was particularly concerned about the lack of protection for burial records. For example, Christian Street Cemetery’s plots are documented via handwritten entries on a window shade, while Quechee Cemetery’s are inscribed on index cards and kept in a shoebox.
The first item in the cemetery committee’s final recommendations presented to the Selectboard was that the town provide a “permanent, safe, environmentally controlled place that is readily accessible for all death and burial records.”
Town Manager Leo Pullar suggested this could be difficult.
“I’m concerned because once the records come here, the public should have a reasonable expectation that they’re inspectable,” Pullar said at the meeting. “We’re not really in a position to say, ‘They’re back there in three cardboard boxes in an environmentally controlled area.’ ”
“The thing that concerns us is there is no duplication of these documents,” Parker countered. “They either need to be replicated or stored somewhere safe. God forbid if somebody’s garage or house should catch fire, and they’ve got the record of who’s buried in a cemetery for the last 100 years. Poof! It’s gone and you can’t reconstruct that.”
Long-term burial space is another issue, the committee found, with three of the four association-run active plots likely to be at capacity by 2036 and the fourth, Hartford Cemetery, likely to be filled five years after that. (Plot information for Mount Olivet was unavailable.)
Parker’s presentation gave the Selectboard plenty to mull over, Chairman Simon Dennis said.
“Cemeteries are very important to the town, and what (the committee) has done has done will be a huge service to the town,” he said.
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.