Worker supply slows plans for cemetery cleanup

A shortage of workers willing to take on part time jobs has temporarily slowed plans for a spring cemetery cleanup.

Officials had planned the cleanup in response to public criticism about the condition and size of graves, as well as standing borough ordinances preventing grave adornment outside of certain standards. However, city officials soon discovered how difficult it was to find the regular complement of two seasonal workers, much less the one or two additional workers officials had planned, according to borough manager Jeff Jabusch.

The borough parks and recreation department “hires the person for mowing city hall lawn, and the parks.” he said. “They pick up the garbage and the containers in the parks and they also do the cemetery. The idea there was they were gonna hire a little bit more help than normal to do some extra work on the cemetery. For a while we couldn’t find anybody. Then we readvertised and upped the money a little bit.”

In particular, he mentioned headstone raising and straightening as possible areas of work.

The borough has since located one worker and anticipates the arrival of another worker soon, Jabusch said, though they’re still looking for a third or fourth additional laborer. Once the personnel are in place, the more emotionally difficult issue of whether to remove grave decorations remains unresolved. Borough officials favor a light touch, Jabusch said.

“I think right now as we run into those things, we’ll probably contact families,” he said. “The code says you’re not supposed to have those things.”

Decorations pose problems to both cemetery maintenance and delivering other families to their final repose, Jabusch said.

“It makes it more difficult for us to maintain weed-eating when you got all that,” he said. “It also makes it more difficult to dig a grave in the future when you got fencing. Some of them start out as a little bush, and by now they’re about (the size of) a tree.”

Borough officials are sensitive to the emotions involved with remembrance, Jabusch said.

“We’re not gonna just start ripping stuff out without talking to people,” he said. “Some of the stuff … I understand when someone is buried, it’s an emotional time and they may put some personal items there. We don’t care about that.”

In cases where outsized plant memorials or fencing don’t interfere with the ability to move machinery in and out of the cemetery for landscaping and maintenance, officials said they might offer to simply move personal items back to their rightful place atop graves.

“Are you looking for a part-time job?” he asked.