Dan Petrella
The State Journal-Register
A consultant’s report distributed to Springfield aldermen last week by email supports Mayor Mike Houston’s plan to solicit proposals from private companies to manage historic Oak Ridge Cemetery. Meanwhile, aldermen are questioning why they weren’t told sooner that a consultant had been hired. The report from Albany, N.Y.-based L.F. Sloane Consulting Group says “the principal issue is that expenses significantly exceed revenues.”
“As a municipally operated cemetery, it is difficult to implement programs customary to cemetery management to promote the sales of burial rights, merchandise and services,” the report says. The financial difficulties facing Oak Ridge, the home to Abraham Lincoln’s tomb and the second-most-visited cemetery in the country, are “a result of the cemetery’s size, the growth of cremation, the flat death rate and other factors,” according to the report.
The city has spent about $400,000 to subsidize the cemetery in each of the past two budget years, and Houston has said he expects next year’s budget to call for the same level of spending. The mayor said at Tuesday’s city council meeting that the consultant was hired sometime over the summer for $3,000 to study options for making the cemetery self-sufficient, something aldermen said they wanted during last year’s budget discussions.
“But I think the city council should make a decision, as opposed to every year we just put some additional money into the cemetery,” he said.
‘This just stinks’
For some aldermen, finding out about the report through an email after the plan to solicit proposals for private management had already been made public was another example of the lack of communication they feel has characterized Houston’s administration. Houston did not respond to requests for comment about the aldermen’s criticisms.
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However, he said in an email that the timeline should be prepared today.
Closed-door talk
Aldermen said there was no mention of the report at the Nov. 5 closed-door executive session during which they were first told about the idea of soliciting proposals for outside management. That closed-door session prompted a lawsuit from Illinois Times reporter Bruce Rushton that accuses the city of violating the Illinois Open Meetings Act. The council cited provisions that allow discussions of personnel and collective bargaining issues out of the public eye, but the lawsuit contends the session covered budgetary matters that should have been discussed in public.
Ward 7 Ald. Joe McMenamin said he asked the corporation counsel’s office to draft an ordinance that would have released the minutes and an audio recording of that session, but the ordinance wasn’t prepared for Tuesday’s meeting. “The public deserves to hear exactly what was said in that meeting, and the release of the minutes and the recording should neither help nor harm the city’s litigation position,” McMenamin said earlier this week.
Read the full article at sj-r.com…
***In the interest of space this article has been edited from the original
Joe McMenamin for Ward 7 