The cost of being buried in Green Hill Cemetery is going up by a substantial amount, if City Council follows the recommendations of the city’s cemetery committee.
Buena Vista City Council is to consider increases to the prices for plots and perpetual care fees that have been recommended by the city’s cemetery committee.
Danny Staton, vice mayor and chairman of the committee, told City Council at its July 16 meeting the proposal is to raise the price for plots by $500 – from $1,200 to $1,700 for city residents and from $1,500 to $2,000 for non-city residents.
He said perpetual care fees would rise, if Council adopts the proposal, from $150 to $500. This fee is the same for city and non-city residents. There is no proposal at this time for increasing the prices for grave openings, which would remain at $1,000 for weekdays, $1,350 for weekends and $1,500 for holidays.
Staton said the cemetery fees Buena Vista charges are well below what’s charged in neighboring jurisdictions.
“We feel like we need to make these changes to bring us back in line,” he explained. “This is something we’re probably going to have to revisit in a year or two because of just rising costs.”
He alluded to a presentation by Steve Bolster, the city’s finance director, at Council’s June 18 meeting, in which Bolster told how the perpetual care fund was depleted over a 19-year period, from 2003 to 2022, because of annual transfers of $10,000 to the city’s general fund. The transfers were then halted and the perpetual care fund was replenished a year ago to where it now stands at about $215,000 – close to the amount it was in 2003.
The former practice of transferring funds from the perpetual care fund to the general fund was intended to help cover costs associated with the cemetery, which have generally exceeded revenues generated by sales of plots and fees for grave openings and perpetual care.
