About 50 community members gathered last weekend to help clean up the Arroyo Grande Cemetery that has deteriorated due to budget issues, an infestation of gophers, and the long running drought.
“It was wonderful to see all those people out there working together,” said Cemetery District Board Trustee Terry Fibich. “The contribution of people-power that they donated will allow us to recover from some of the challenges we are faced with each and every day.”
The Arroyo Grande District Cemetery serves most of the South County. The cemetery located at 895 El Camino Real, which spans a little more than 20 acres and is home to 15,000 graves, has come under criticism for brown lawns, piles of dirt and tire tracks on grave stones.
Members of the group Friends and Family of AG Cemetery Movement and Arroyo Grande in Bloom along with other concerned community members cleaned off headstones, xxxxx
“I just want to see a smile from people going to visit loved ones,” said Miranda Osteen, founder of Friends and Family of AG Cemetery Movement. “This cemetery has been let go way to far for to many years. I hope to accomplish the awareness of what our cemetery has fallen to and to get our community together for a clean up once a month. I had a great outcome this month and I was very happy to see how many people shoed out of the kindness of their hearts–some with no loved ones there.”
The cemetery has three employees, a general manager and two grounds men. A third grounds man retired and budget constraints prohibited filling his position. A voluntary board of trustees consists of three people. It operates with a nearly $400,000 annual budget that covers payroll, equipment and maintenance.
“One of the things that we are extremely proud of is that our salary line in our budget represents about 52% of our budget,” Fibich said. “That includes salaries, health benefits and the retirement that is paid to the employees. If you look at most other government organizations including the City of Arroyo Grande and the City of Pismo Beach that have salary and benefits, they have salary/benefit line items up in the 70 or 75% bracket. The Lucia Mar Unified School District, it is up in the 90% bracket. We are very proud that we are able to keep out salaries and benefits so well in line.”
Fibich said that they have contracted with an exterminator to get rid of the estimated 500 gophers that are tearing up the grounds.
“About 99 percent of the dirt that is on the graves is from the gophers that have kicked the dirt up,” said Fibich.
As for the brown grass, Fibich said it comes down to expensive water bills and conservation efforts. As of June 1 of this year, the grounds are no longer watered.
“We stopped watering because our water bills were in excess of $15,000 per billing period,” Fibich said. “We have a very limited budget on which we work. For four out of the last five years, we were in a deficit budget situation. There are two major reasons we stopped watering. One is because the State of California and the governor have directed cemeteries to cutback or to eliminate watering. We also recognize that in our own community, because we have no well and have to buy our water from the domestic water system in the City of Arroyo Grande, we decided we would try to cutback on water use so that the water would be conserved.”
Many people have complained about tire tracks on the sand covered grave markers. Fibich said the Cemetery District would revisit the policy of driving maintenance machinery over the graves that signs of have become more evident with the piles of dirt left by the gophers.
“With moving our equipment around out there, a lot of times it necessitated that we drive across the graves,” said Fibich. “We have large mowers that we use, we have tractors that we use, we have to go out there and dig graves. We are going to be looking at our policy about driving off the roadways in the cemetery. We are going to look at that policy very closely and compare it to the way things are done in other cemeteries.”
At the end of clean up day, a yellow flower was placed on every grave in honor of Veteran’s Day.
“Just driving by to the highway on ramp on El Camino Real, I can look over and smile looking at those yellow flowers we placed out on every single grave,” said Osteen. “It makes it look not so forgotten. As they say gone but never forgotten.”
Another clean up day is scheduled for December 3 starting at 8 a.m., all are welcome.
