Mayors drop cemetery study

Local mayors decided against further studying whether their Regional Board of Mayors could consider taking over the Spring Canyon Cemetery.

Meeting as the RBOM Dec. 7, the mayors voted to drop their research into taking over ownership of the cemetery currently owned by the local Lions Club.

The club had approached the mayors about that possibility last August, and they’ve been looking into it ever since.

Coulee Dam Mayor Bob Poch said his council was not in favor of it. City Clerk Stefani Bowden had asked the Municipal Research Services Corporation, which supports cities and counties in such efforts, whether the four local cities could take over a cemetery.

But it’s complicated.

For one thing, Spring Canyon is in Lincoln County; none of the four local towns extend into that county, and the nearest cemetery district (a common type of junior taxing district in the state) is over 20 miles away.

Electric City Mayor Diane Kohout, chairing the board, said she’d also been told it would take getting all the counties the cities are in to agree to the formation of a new cemetery district in Lincoln County.

That’s not impossible, but it’s not easy. Ask anyone involved in the formation of the Douglas, Grant, Lincoln, Okanogan Counties Hospital District 6 in the early 1990s.

Kohout was also still willing to contact the secretary of Grant County Cemetery District 3 to talk about it, but she asked the board if they wanted to keep looking into it.

“Maybe we should just have the county line moved over,” joked Grand Coulee Mayor Paul Townsend. His council was also not in favor of the proposal. “It just seems to be … too many complications,” he said.

In other business, the mayors voted to table for three months an ongoing discussion on the possibility of starting a garbage hauling service.

“I still would like to know what it’s going to cost to pick up a couple of trucks and whatever else goes into it before we abandon it,” Poch said. He said he’d get that started.

The subject won’t be on the agenda again until March.