Vote falls short of ending Curley property saga in Saugus

SAUGUS – The vote for the Curley property to be used as a future cemetery site earned majority approval at Special Town Meeting, but not the two-thirds majority it needed.Town Meeting members, voting 22-18, reflected the town?s split vote when the same question, though nonbinding, won by a 51 percent majority in the town election last November. During discussion of the article, the amount of speakers either in support of the 63-acre land being used for a cemetery or a future school site seemed even.Town Meeting member Peter Manoogian said the School Committee had the chance to look at other parcels, adding that he couldn?t “envision bussing kids over the Walnut Street bridge every day.”During the discussion, some questioned how much longer the tradition of burying the dead with the intent to keep the grave forever could continue. Voting member Brian Costin suggested planners look to how Europeans and the Native Americans buried their dead as land began to run out.Voting member Robert Cox said if voters behaved as if land use should keep up with the rate of dying Saugonians, “there will be one house in Saugus that will be several stories high and the rest of the land will be cemetery.”But others pointed to the Massachusetts General Law that said a municipality must provide land for a place that its residents can be buried. Manoogian said a mark of a civilized society was “not only how you treat the living, but how you treat the dead.”Cox and others, including School Committee member Arthur Grabowski, called for objective engineers to look at how much land could be used at the Curley property with all its wetlands.Cemetery Commission Chairman Dennis Gould said it was “definitely a possibility” for him continuing in his goal to win the land for a cemetery by petitioning for a binding ballot question at the next town election.Gould was confident that if the question went to ballot it would pass. “It passed by majority, so that?s a good thing,” he said after the vote.Gould said his next step will be to meet with the School Committee to see if they will conduct a study to show if the Curley property is still a viable option for a school. He hoped to gain support from the Board of Selectmen in his efforts to make achieving the 2,600 signatures needed a lot easier.