Already a notoriously expensive place to live, Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»is also about to become a more expensive place to rest in peace.
City council approved a staff recommendation earlier this month to make the cost of being placed six feet under at least 10 per cent higher at the citys only cemetery. Its one of several municipal licence and service fee increases set to kick off at the beginning of 2012.
While most feesincluding building permits, animal licences and business licence fees for marinas that allow live-aboard boatsonly saw a two per cent increase, the cost of doing business at the 106-acre Mountain View Cemetery shot up higher because rates havent changed since 2007.
Most fee-charging community services in the city go for annual increases and typically the cost of inflation was the guideline, said manager Glenn Hodges, who has been running the 125-year-old cemetery for the past decade. The cemetery for some reason was never part of that regularly update of fees and were trying to be more like that, so this year we managed to get in on the same report and it seemed like an appropriate place to start with to make up for the lack of it for past few years.
The increase will affect a variety of grave matters, some costing even more than the proposed 10 per cent to reflect market values. The current cost for a single-depth adult casket, for example, is $880, and staff recommend raising it to $1,100 for next year. A deep-depth casket would go up to $2,000 from $1,760, while costs for a standard, two-person interment of cremated remains would go up to $2,500 from $2,000. However, the cost of many other services and productsincluding infants and childrens caskets, administration fees and hall rentalswould remain at the current rate.
Despite the higher fees, Hodges said that now is a rare opportunity to acquire a plot at Mountain View because it is the first time theyve been for sale in a quarter century.
Weve sold more than 90,000 of them between 1886 and 1986, but we havent sold any for 25 years and we think we can get up to another 1,000 that will be available over the next few years, said Hodges. If people didnt have already a space in the cemetery, the family would have to go buy space in the surrounding area, or go to cemeteries in Burnaby or North Vancouver, Surrey or wherever. For a lot of those folks who have wanted to be buried in the cemetery but didnt buy space prior to 1986, they now have a limited opportunity.
Working under the provincial Cremation, Interment and Funeral Services Act that allows cemeteries to reclaim grave space purchased over 50 years ago but never used, the city acquired 160 vacant plots. Just over 100 of them have been put up for sale. Forty graves capable of holding the remains of 400 people, which includes created remains, were placed on the market in the summer and were quickly snapped up by 300 buyers.
Many cemeteries only allow one casket in a grave, some will allow twoa deep casket and a standard casketbut at Mountain View, we allow families after 40 years to bury another casket in that same space. By then, natural decomposition means there is very little left of the casket and the human remains.
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