ERIN – A recent inspection found an estimated $215,000 worth of repairs are needed at the Town of Erin’s cemeteries.
On July 7 council reviewed the site inspection report, which identifies several repairs and renovations required at each of the town’s cemeteries.
The report stemmed from a decision in June 2021, when councillor Jamie Cheyne put forward a motion to have staff conduct a review of the status of the cemeteries in the town.
“This is obviously a long-awaited report because it’s from 2021, so staff did attend the cemeteries and completed a visual inspection looking for safety hazards that needed to be repaired,” director of infrastructure services Nick Colucci explained.
Based on the report, the Erin Pioneer – formerly McMillan Cemetery – was assessed as the biggest estimated cost at $75,000. This includes foundation repairs and rehabilitation, replacing signs and removing and trimming trees.
Colucci said staff will obtain more accurate quotes on repairs before allocating funds in future capital budgets to do the work.
Once more accurate quotations are received staff will include funds in the capital budget to make the necessary repairs, which will be prioritized based on risk and property damage, he added.
This year’s operating budget for cemeteries also included an additional $5,000 for cemetery repairs, providing a total of $10,000 to begin the work, Colucci said.
“Now this year a lot of that will be used up because of the large storm we had that knocked down many, many trees on many cemeteries and some fences,” he explained.
“Some of that stuff we’re working on repairing now but a lot of that $10,000 will be used up there.”
Colucci said staff is working to obtain a contractor to assess the smaller cemeteries for repair and look into cleaning up any monuments that are unsafe or leaning.
“The big thing about cemeteries is that we have to make them safe and ensure that a headstone doesn’t fall, or fall on someone, or fall and damage the neighbouring properties,” he explained.
Colucci warned staff may not be able to fix everything on each of the cemeteries due to the size of some of the monuments and the costs associated with repairing them.
“So we’ll have to come up with a plan to fix those without costing too much money,” he said.
Cheyne, the architect of the motion, thank Colucci for the report, but noted he was disappointed with how long it took.
“It’s unfortunate that it’s taken 13 months to get,” he said.
“I presumed this would have been done last year, and I know everyone’s busy, but this just seemed to drag on and we still don’t technically know what it’s going to cost.”
Come budget time this is something council should be taking into consideration and putting extra funds aside, councillor John Brennan added.
“This is the first time in four years that I have seen any report of this nature,” councillor Michael Robins said, noting he thought it would be an annual review and asked why staff haven’t done it in the past.
Colucci said usually for the town’s cemeteries, staff do a standard annual maintenance, which includes things like cutting grass, trimming trees and keeping the fences upright.
“They don’t typically, as part of the normal process, repair monuments,” he explained, adding, “we typically don’t, as a municipality, go and start repairing all the monuments in there because it could be very costly.”
Colucci said that while the standard maintenance is what’s budget for, looking at how many monuments need to be repaired would be going the next step.
“But in the next budget cycle we can add some money in there on a yearly process and that will be up to council to decide how much they want to spend per year,” he said.
The proposed repair budget of $215,000 will be included in future capital budgets for cemetery repairs.
