By Lookout Staff
April 30 – You may no longer have had to live in Santa Monica to be buried in the beachside city’s 112-year-old cemetery under a proposal business plan given general support by the City Council Tuesday night.
The proposal presented by officials who run Woodlawn Cemetery, where more than 60,000 local residents are buried, would open the grounds to those with no ties to Santa Monica in an effort to boost revenues needed to maintain the grounds.
The existing law, likely the only one of its kind in California, requires those who are buried at the cemetery to have been current residents when they died or to have lived in the city for at least five years.
The change in policy is part of a proposal that “identifies a multi-phased thirty year plan to increase the capacity of the Cemetery and to achieve financial sustainability,” cemetery officials told the council.
Under the current plan, when a gravesite, niche or crypt space is sold, an endowment care fee of 15 percent of the cost is collected and placed in the Cemetery Endowment Care Fund or the Mausoleum Endowment Care Fund, cemetery officials said.
“The primary purpose of these funds is to produce interest income to cover the costs of maintaining the Cemetery and Mausoleum when all space has been sold and the facility is closed to new business,” staff wrote in their report to the council.
The dividend and interest earnings are also used to offset a portion of cemetery’s operating expenses.
But now, the cemetery is operating under a deficit and has only 60 graves left and “no adjoining plots which appeal to families,” staff said.
Unless the City’s general fund boosts its current $300,000 annual subsidy to help cover the operating costs, the cemetery will need “to increase the amount of plots, crypts and niches available for sale.”
Once he gravesites are filled, the City’s contribution is expected to increase to $1 million a year, officials said.
The business plan would make the pricing of plots competitive with other burial grounds in the region and boost marketing and advertising, said Virgil County, the cemetery administrator.
"You would be surprised by how many people don't even know the cemetery even exists," County told the council.
Council member Kevin McKeown suggested that the cemetery target Santa Monica residents in its marketing campaign.
“Maybe we can get it out in the community that Woodlawn does have space," McKeown said.
Council member Gleam Davis also urged cemetery officials to reach out to local residents.
"There is a certain portion of the community that think they can't get into Woodlawn," she said.
With the number of cremations on the rise, cemetery officials estimate that the 12,000 new spaces that will need to be set aside under the 30-year plan will be reserved for cremations. A new crematorium will need to be built to replace the one taken down in the 1970s.
