A portion of voters eyeing the Nov. 4 election may be wondering what the Cortez Cemetery is doing on their ballots.
Ballot Issue 6A asks voters within the Cortez Cemetery District if they’d be willing to pay an additional mill levy on their property taxes to support the costs of running the grounds.
If passed, that would generate more than $90,000 in additional funds annually to the cemetery, the ballot says.
According to Howard Kaime, Cortez Cemetery board president, the average household paying property taxes currently provides an annual $7-$8 dollars for the cemetery. Ballot Issue 6A asks voters if they’re willing to raise that to $18-20 annually.
The increase is needed because revenues for the burial ground have not kept up with costs, said Kaime.
“With what little revenue we get, we’re having to operate our cemetery on a very limited budget,” he said.
Inflation has slogged the cemetery’s finances, some of which already comes from the current mill levy. Plenty of money from the deeds sold for burial plots have long dried up.
Due to these financial conditions, numerous projects have been put on hold, Kaime said.
For one, the cemetery is quickly becoming overcrowded.
“We’re running out of room for the burial spots,” he said.
While the cemetery has the land to add more spots, they’d still need to pay for the ground to be properly developed, Kaime said. That entails grounds leveled, vegetation planted and roads paved.
With all that labor, a new burial block would add room for about 240 more deceased people, he said.
Another project put on hold is the installation of a new sprinkler system. The current set up is decades old, Kaime said, estimating them to be about 50 to 60 years aged.
Then there’s an essential piece of equipment, also decades old, that needs some maintenance costs; the cemetery’s backhoe.
The cemetery itself is over a century old and includes grave sites for buried pioneers and veterans dating as far back as the Civil War, said Kaime. Some of the additional revenue could be used for maintenance of historic burials too, he said.
“Our income is not meeting what we need to spend,” said Kaime. “We’re having to drastically cut back.”
