Perpetual Care Fund Had Been Nearly Depleted
The perpetual care fund for Buena Vista’s Green Hill Cemetery was nearly depleted for several years, from 2022 until last September, when a cash infusion from the city’s general fund replenished it to almost what it had been in 2003.
A 19-year budgetary practice of transferring $10,000 annually from the perpetual care fund to the city’s general fund to augment the cemetery’s operations and maintenance costs reduced the perpetual care fund from $219,000 in 2003 to $3,690 in 2022.
The balance stayed at that nearly depleted level until last September when a City Council committee approved a plan rec- ommended by stau to transfer
$215,000 from the general fund to the perpetual care fund.
Steve Bolster, the city's finance director, recounted this series of events for City Council at its June 18 meeting to explain how dire the fiscal situation had become for the perpetual care fund and what had been done to replenish it.
Council member Ron Cash, a member of the city’s cemetery committee, brought the matter to Council’s attention at the June 4 meeting, prior to Bolster’s report two weeks later. Cash and Vice Mayor Danny Staton, who chairs the cemetery committee, each offered comments at the more recent Council meeting.
In his June 18 report, Bolster explained that last September, Council’s budget and finance committee supported a staff plan to take a maturing $125,665.87 certificate of deposit with no outstanding obligations and reallocate it to the perpetual care fund.
(This CD was from a fund that had been set up years ago to pay potential legal costs related to an interjurisdictional dispute stemming from failed plans to bring MeadWestvaco to the regional industrial park.)
An additional $89,334.13 from the general fund was used to increase total CD investments to $215,000 across 12-month and threeyear terms.
“These actions,” said Bolster, “substantially restored the fund toward prior historical levels and position the city [moving forward] to continue building a sustainable reserve for future cemetery maintenance and post-closure needs.”
Bolster brought to Council an appropriation request to support the previously coordinated effort to account for the transfer from the general fund to the perpetual care fund. Council approved this request.
Looking ahead, Staton commented in his report from the cemetery committee: “We’re going to have a major overhaul of the cemetery [prices]. We are way off on pricing, from top to bottom. We really need to give it some thought. Mr. Cash and I talked about [putting this on Council’s] next agenda. … bringing Council up to date on a few things at a time because it’s many pieces … it’s something we need to get on pretty quick.”
Cash added that Council needs to be, if not “aggressive, purposeful” in building up the cemetery’s perpetual care fund, “in particular, protecting that fund going forward and building it up because costs are only going to increase, labor is going to increase, equipment. All the things that go into taking care of a cemetery are going to increase in costs with the passing of time.”
Although it may be many years before it happens, when the time comes and the cemetery is full, with no more funds coming in from the purchase of plots and the opening of graves, Cash continued, “folks are going to want to know that their loved one who is interred at Green Hill Cemetery … is being taken care of.”
