Sunnyside Cemetery holds breath as Long Beach weighs takeover

As reported in the June 21 issue of the Signal Tribune, the Sunnyside Cemetery in Long Beach may close its doors by the end of August if the City of Long Beach doesn’t agree to assume responsibility for its upkeep.

That option may be one step closer to reality now that the 113-year-old cemetery has submitted a formal proposal to the City following a June 22 meeting with Long Beach Economic Development Director John Keisler.

Linda Meador, one of the cemetery’s four board members, told the Signal Tribune this week that the proposal consists of four areas: the action it wishes to see and its assets, obligations and contracts.

[related title=”Related Stories” stories=”42414″ align=”left” background=”on” border=”all” shadow=”on”]

“The obligation is obviously to the families that still have a right to have family members buried there,” Meador said. “We want those obligations to continue on.”

She added that the cemetery only has two outstanding contracts, one with the Long Beach Historical Society to hold its annual tour in October and the other with Long Beach Opera, which is planning a production at the cemetery in May 2020.
In terms of actions, Meador said the board just wants the City to take over the cemetery and improve and maintain it.

“John Keisler said to keep [the proposal] simple and then they’ll get into the nitty-gritty of everything,” she said. “I’ve offered to be available whenever they’d like to come to the cemetery to see more of our records. […] So now I’m just waiting to hear back from them.”

After receiving the proposal last week, Keisler’s staff started analyzing the cemetery’s costs, benefits and liabilities to present to the Long Beach City Council in August, Keisler told the Signal Tribune in a July 2 interview. The council will then vote to determine whether the City will act to prevent the property’s closure.

Given the cemetery’s timing, Keisler said he is shooting to have the item on the council’s agenda for its Aug. 20 meeting, though he would try for Aug. 13.
“The council is responsible for the fiduciary health and wellbeing of the city,” Keisler explained. “In this case, there is a lot of support– not just among the council, but the community– to preserve a historic asset, but they just need to know up front what they’re committing […] public resources to.”

Keisler added that his office also has to find out from the State whether the city faces any technical or legal regulatory requirements in transferring a privately-owned, historic cemetery to become a municipally-owned cemetery.

“We’ll be having those conversations this week and next week as well,” he said.
Keisler also answered affirmatively to a question about whether there were other options besides the city simply absorbing the cemetery.

“Yes, there’s all kinds of creative options, and that’s what we’ll present to the council in August,” he said.

Keisler explained that the city sometimes engages in public-private partnerships (PPPs) whereby the city owns an asset but has an operating agreement with a private foundation or organization to manage it.

“But there’s also some sort of economic benefit [in those cases], whether it’s jobs [or] sales-tax generation,” he said.

As an example, Keisler described how the city’s Parks, Recreation and Marine (PRM) Department negotiated a lease and operating agreement whereby the city owns a historic rancho but a private foundation maintains it and sometimes runs programs that generate revenue to offset capital-improvement costs.

Alternatively, Keisler’s staff may recommend that the council just take care of the short-term, immediate needs of the cemetery for the next three to six months to prevent its closure.

“But our recommendation long term might be to go out to bid and find a private nonprofit organization that would want to enter a PPP with the city to write grants, operate, maintain, program and preserve historical assets,” he added. “There might be funds out there from private philanthropy or governmental sources that they would be eligible for.”
The bottom line for the council will be the best use of public resources, Keisler said.

“Any dollar that we recommend spending or using is actually a public resource,” he explained. “So we’re very sensitive to making sure that we are good stewards– whether it’s general-fund tax revenue or it’s public assets like buildings or equipment, or even staffing resources. All of those are resources that essentially are owned by the community, by the public.”

The 13-acre cemetery at 1095 E. Willow Street opened in 1906 and is the resting place for approximately 16,300 graveyard residents, including Long Beach’s first fire chief, a police chief, a former California lieutenant governor and hundreds of Civil War veterans.

However, embezzlement of half of the cemetery’s million-dollar endowment fund between 1989 and 1994 by a former owner left it with minimal monetary resources, not enough to consistently water or maintain its gravesites without the help of assiduous volunteers.

Meador had told the Signal Tribune before her meeting with Keisler that it’s been an uphill battle over the past two decades and the board finally made the decision to close the cemetery’s gates permanently by the end of August.

“For 19 years, we have been trying to get the city to take it over,” she said. “Nothing has ever come to fruition so I hope that this time they will do it because otherwise, we’re going to be forced to close it.”

Until recently, Sunnyside had been taking $2,500 per month in endowment-fund interest from the Farmers and Merchants Bank to pay for expenses and a groundskeeper, but that interest has dwindled.

“At the beginning of this year, we were advised that we were getting close to the corpus of the fund,” Meador said, adding that the board has only drawn money twice so far this year and just requested another $2,500.

The board has instead been using proceeds from a fundraiser to pay expenses, plus labor from six to eight court-ordered community-service workers.

Meador said the current major groundskeeping project is replacing broken sprinkler heads so the cemetery can start watering again. After the rains this past winter, the grass had grown so tall that many of the sprinkler heads had gotten inadvertently mowed off.

“Then we have the issue that our equipment is very old,” she said. “It keeps breaking down. Right now, we only have one commercial mower running.”

While the board could host more fundraisers to try and stay afloat, age and physical impairment are becoming serious concerns for its members, Meador said. One of them, Mike Miner, resigned as the cemetery’s manager on Nov. 30, 2018, making it noncompliant with state law.

“We have advertised for a manager,” Meador said. “But they either want too much money or they don’t have the two years’ experience that the state requires.”
The cemetery has also held off performing a state-required annual audit that costs $7,500, the same as for larger cemeteries that do thousands of burials per year compared to one to five funerals at Sunnyside, Meador said.

Meador estimates the average cost to run the cemetery is between $60,000 and $70,000 per year.

“If the city takes over, then it becomes a municipal cemetery […] and they’re not under the direction of the state,” Meador said. “So the money that’s in the endowment fund– which is about $541,000– that goes to the city as well.”

The City already manages the smaller, four-acre Long Beach Municipal Cemetery at 1151 E. Willow St., directly adjacent to Sunnyside, maintaining it through the PRM, which waters, mows, weeds, removes debris and adjusts headstones, according to its webpage.

In the meantime, Meador expressed concern this week over recent inaccurate media reports– such as one saying that the state may take over if the cemetery closes, or that a number of gravemarkers had been stolen– which may be causing family members of those buried there to take inappropriate action.

Meador said one family of a father and son buried in the cemetery, perhaps after watching the news, broke up the surrounding concrete of their gravesites and took their markers.

“Legally, they can do that,” Meador said. “They bought it, they paid for it, that is their property. But the illegal part comes if they try to remove the remains from the cemetery.”
She added that she has asked the police to find their contact information to try to reach out.

Another woman recently called a local news channel to complain about a relative’s grave rather than call the cemetery, Meador said.

“Come talk to us,” she invited anyone concerned. “If you have family buried here, and you have questions, please call. We are here to answer any and all questions.”

Keisler acknowledged the board’s ongoing investment of time, energy, stress and anxiety in managing the cemetery.

“They’ve done a fantastic job over the years as volunteers,” he said. “It’s not easy. Everybody here at City Hall is grateful for the work they’ve done and understands the challenges they face. We just want to make sure we understand those challenges.”

Keisler added that he believes there will be a positive outcome for the historic site.

“My hope is that […] we find some sort of model that the council can approve and feel responsible approving,” he said. “I hope that the best days are ahead with regard to the cemetery.”