City council will vote Monday to contract for landscaping
Geneva is likely to hire an outside firm to maintain the landscaping at its two cemeteries, and to open and close graves.
The city council, meeting as a committee of the whole, recommended the move this week and is scheduled to take a binding vote Monday.
The city would hire Professional Cemetery Services to open and close graves, at $600 for caskets and $200 for cremains. Work done on weekends would cost $700 and $350, respectively. The costs will be covered by the fees charged to users; currently that is $850 for caskets and $400 for cremains, with an extra $250 and $150 for weekends.
The city would hire Classic Landscape, at an estimated cost of $25,760, to maintain the landscape at Oak Hill and West Side cemeteries.
Until now, the city has had a sextant and streets department employees doing the work. Besides maintenance, the sextant also handled the sale of graves, and dug and closed the graves.
There have been complaints the last several years that the cemeteries were unkempt, with long grass and grass clippings sprayed across gravestones. The cemeteries are mowed as many as 50 times annually, depending on the rate of grass growth. Income from plot sales and openings/closings pays for about 63 percent of the cost of operating the cemeteries.
West Side Cemetery is in Alderman Sam Hill‘s ward. He said last year one couple told him that they were so disgusted with the look of the cemetery, they planned to sell their plots. He organized volunteer teams last year to trim grass and pull weeds around gravestones.
He thinks contracting the work out may be a good idea.
“I’m not always going to be around to motivate people to go out and clip grass,” he said Tuesday.
The seasonal workers who helped maintain the cemeteries will instead be put to work restoring parkway sod where dead ash trees were removed. The sextant position will be eliminated in the 2012-13 budget. Grave sales have already been shifted to administrative assistants in the public works and administrative departments.
Public Works Director Dan Dinges said he expects outsourcing the cemetery work will save money.