Cemetery gets a needed pruning
Sometimes it seems there’s no respect for the dead in Mica. Overgrown with grass, lilac bushes and irises, the Mica Cemetery on Highway 27 is in disrepair.
The neglect spurred members of the Spokane Valley Kiwanis Club for the second time in six years to volunteer their time clearing the 194 burial sites last Saturday in the historic pioneer cemetery.
“We were hoping someone would come in and assume responsibility for it,” said Jerry Cooper, Valley Kiwanis member. “They haven’t.”
But just a few days later Spokane County Commissioners agreed to start maintaining its two cemeteries, Mica and Wood Memorial, at least until a permanent solution is found. By Wednesday, parks crews already were on scene.
After a couple of recent phone calls from area residents, Valley Kiwanis President Dan VerHeul thought the club should take another look at the cemetery.
“It’s totally overgrown again,” Cooper said. “I’ve never seen any neglected like this one.”
The scope of the project is extensive. Several headstones are broken and difficult to locate under the overgrowth of lilacs and other brush.
“As I understand it, no one will give the order to remove any of the overgrowth permanently,” said Maggie Rail, a cemetery historian who began surveying the Mica Cemetery in 1998. “Everyone knows that just pruning those lilacs and other bushes only encourages them to grow larger.”
Cooper said a site map shows that the dimensions of the cemetery are 494 feet by 265 feet – roughly 3 acres. He estimates the project taking more than 100 hours to complete. Already this year, the club has volunteered an estimated 55 hours over the course of two Saturdays.
Equipped with heavy-duty weed trimmers, a brush mower and lawn mowers, six people one week and five the following donated their time. The project is yet to be completed.
“We plan to come out again, if the club wants to,” said Cooper. “We have to schedule it and get people to volunteer.”
“If I didn’t think it was a good thing, I wouldn’t be here,” said Greg McNeilly, Valley Kiwanis member. “It’s a place that should be kept up.”
Cooper initiated the project in 2001 after driving by the cemetery. Initially the club cleared the cemetery of all the overgrown trees, plants and grass. Cooper also took the names he acquired from Rail and plotted them on a cemetery map.
Spokane County assumed ownership of the cemetery when the township of Mica, its previous owner, dissolved in 1974.
Wood Memorial Cemetery is a small gated lot surrounded by a wheat field off Elder Road, about three miles southwest of the Mica burial ground. It was handed over to the county when Valleyford Township dissolved.
“We had no choice,” said Deborah Firkins, Spokane County administration engineer. “By law we had to take ownership of it.”
According to Firkins, the township had not established a cemetery district. Without such a district, there is no mechanism to fund maintenance of the property.
However, county commissions on Tuesday approved a two-year funding plan for Mica and Wood Memorial in Valleyford for four mowings and trimmings. Landscaping each ground four times a year is expected to cost about $7,000, said Spokane County Parks Director Doug Chase.
Firkins said the best solution for maintaining the cemetery is to form a cemetery district which would require the people of Mica to vote for a tax to maintain the cemetery.
The county also could sell or give the cemeteries to a licensed organization that can prove it can maintain them in perpetuity. That’s what happened in 2000 when the county transferred Woodlawn Cemetery in Spokane Valley to Fairmount Memorial Association.
“They’re for sale if somebody wants to buy them,” Firkins said.