Watching Over Wildomar Cemetery May Fall To City

2/24 Update:

During the Feb. 24 Wildomar City Council meeting, council voted 5-0 to provide management services on an interim basis to the Wildomar Cemetery District. See more below ...

2/22 Original Post:

Caring for some of the community’s dead residents may soon fall to Wildomar city officials.

On Thursday, Wildomar City Council is scheduled to consider a recommendation that would place the city in charge of managing the Wildomar Cemetery District, which oversees Wildomar Cemetery.

Located at 21400 Palomar Street next to the U.S. Post Office, the cemetery is the final resting place for about 1,000 people. Some of the town’s historic figures are buried there, including former train master Joseph Nichols, who died in 1889 at the age of 31.

The scenic cemetery also contains the remains of Wildomar-area settlers who were buried in an original cemetery in the foothills. Their bodies were exhumed and relocated when the new cemetery opened.

Today the cemetery averages about 25 burials a year. Situated on 10 acres, only about half the land is used for the cemetery. The remaining five acres, east of the cemetery, are undeveloped, although Wildomar Little League leases a portion of the vacant parcel for baseball at an annual cost of  $1.

While Thursday’s recommendation is that the city take over the Wildomar Cemetery District on a part-time basis, for the last nine months officials have been working on a broader plan to take over the district full-time: An application to incorporate the cemetery district into Wildomar City Hall as a “specialty district” is expected to go before the Riverside County Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) within the next few months, Wildomar City Manager Frank Oviedo said.

“After our first year of incorporation (as a city), we went before LAFCO so they could review our Plan of Service,” Oviedo said. “LAFCO does that to make sure we’re meeting our obligations per the terms of incorporation.”

The review prompted LAFCO to suggest the city/cemetery district consolidation, he said.

“What really got the momentum going … was that the cemetery district trustees passed a resolution asking us to formally take action,” Oviedo added.

Oviedo said consolidating staffs and management could create savings for local taxpayers and eliminate redundancy.

“In the day-to-day maintenance and operations costs, you’re not going to see much savings,” he said. “But (the district has) a general manager on the books. If it goes away as a result of consolidation, you’d have savings right there.”

The city is still crunching the numbers, Oviedo said, and does not have an actual savings estimate yet. Any tax revenue the district brings with it would remain solely for the cemetery’s use, he said.

“The cemetery district fund would be separate from the city’s general fund,” he said.

If consolidation ultimately occurs, the City Council would serve as the cemetery district’s Board of Trustees, much the way it wears a second hat now as the city Redevelopment Agency’s governing board.

LAFCO Executive Officer George Spiliotis said his agency was interested some years ago in seeing the Wildomar Cemetery District merge with the small Elsinore Valley Cemetery District. The idea was shelved, however, when both districts objected.

Gil Rasmussen, president of the three-member Wildomar Cemetery District Board of Trustees, said the district has been operating with a two-person staff and no general manager for nearly a year. The district could benefit from the city’s administration’s professional management skills and knowledge, he said.

“Up until recently, we had a secretary, which a temp agency provided,” he said. “We also use outside auditing people and make reports to the county.”

Other than that, day-to-day operations are handled by two employees.

The district has an annual operating budget of about $300,000 with most of its funding coming from property-tax revenues. Property owners typically pay about $45 a year to maintain and operate the facilities.

Rasmussen said the district has an aging population and needs to plan for the future, particularly regarding land acquisition.

“We have to be thinking in terms of what we’re going to do as a cemetery district 20 or 25 years from now,” he said. “We don’t want to end up landlocked.”