SAUGUS — Riverside Cemetery is running out of space, and if a plan for expansion is not identified quickly, the town could find itself in violation of state law.
The cemetery, which has been on the brink of capacity for more than a decade, has a mere 40 plots available for purchase, according to Cemetery Commission Chair Richard Thompson. While neither Thompson nor Cemetery Department Superintendent John Falsacca provided a timeline for when the cemetery will completely run out of open lots, it is clear that without expansion, Riverside will reach capacity — and soon.
Expansion, Thompson said, is required by law. Massachusetts General Law Chapter 114 Section 110 dictates that “each town shall provide one or more suitable places for the interment of persons dying within its limits.” If Riverside reaches capacity, Saugus will have no such place.
While expansion efforts in previous years focused on the Curley Property on Walnut Street in North Saugus, Thompson said the commission plans instead to ask Town Meeting to support expansion across a brook that marks the end of the current boundaries of the cemetery. A prior plan to do so failed at Town Meeting, though Thompson said he believed that was a result of the commission’s membership rolling over ahead of the vote and no commissioners attending Town Meeting to state their case.
The current expansion plan, he explained, would require the construction of a bridge, but could enable officials to add another 5,000 plots to the cemetery, which is more than a century old.
“We’re at a point right now where we’re looking heavily at that option, trying to piece everything we would need from cost to design, and there’s also been some discussion about other town properties with the schools closing or things such as that, but we have no idea what the future of those properties are,” he said. “Right now across the river is what we’re going to try and put something together and see if we can get the support of Town Meeting.”
Planning is still in its early stages, and no firm estimates have been made regarding the cost of constructing a bridge and turning the space into land suitable for a cemetery, said Thompson, who was reappointed to another three-year term on the commission earlier this week.
He said the commission was going to work to put a proposal together to submit to the Board of Selectmen in April, for review ahead of the annual Town Meeting in May. Town officials and board members have indicated support for expansion in informal conversations, said Thompson.
While Thompson said he was optimistic about the possibility of expansion winning approval, he said he understood if residents were resistant to the idea of change.
“No one likes change. I don’t either. When something closes or something changes everybody’s shocked. The idea of a bridge being built across the brook down there and some land being converted into a cemetery, it’s gonna need a little bit of winning over some citizens in town,” he said.
School Committee member Dennis Gould, who helped lead previous expansion efforts as a member and as chairman of the Cemetery Commission, said he was not surprised to hear another proposed expansion was being formulated.
“People are panicking because they’re almost shut down,” Gould said. “More people are getting on board, they finally realized that what we were telling them back then was true and they finally realized, ‘Hey, if we don’t do this, we’re not going to have a place to get buried in Saugus.’”
To that end, Gould said he believes some of the pushback to the idea of expansion came from the notion that cremation should replace burials. But, he said, tradition is important to many.
“There’s people still out there, and that’s why there’s probably a move now, to do it. They still want to be buried in a casket traditionally, and as long as that happens, as long as people want to do that, then they’re going to be looking for a place to do that,” he said. “What will happen is they’ll have to go to … commercial places that sell graves.”
Thompson said he was genuinely unsure what would happen if expansion were not approved by Town Meeting, citing the legal mandate for burial space in town.
“I don’t know what the ultimate consequences for the town would be if they could not provide another piece of land,” he said. “We had not bothered to look at that because we had several options that we were looking at.”
The decision not to renew a pursuit of converting the Curley Property to cemetery space was driven by fears that doing so would be costly and time-consuming, Thompson said.
“That’s the last of what we’d like to do now because the amount of effort and cost that would probably go into it just to clear the area one acre at a time to expand over there,” he said.
Thompson said he joined the Cemetery Commission because he has several generations of family members buried at Riverside. When he expressed concern about some of the goings-on at the property, he was encouraged to volunteer.
It’s his connection to the cemetery that fuels his volunteer service, and he would likely step aside from the commission if expansion once again failed at Town Meeting.
“I take great pride down there. My son used to go down there and … straighten the flags and turn the pots and planters upright and pick up the trash, and just going down there and seeing something I wasn’t happy about with a family member’s grave just made me get involved, and if we can continue on that one piece of property, I believe it’s going to be a much better situation than trying to start somewhere new,” Thompson said. “We have no choice but to move forward, and if I can’t make that effort for the town, I’ll need to step aside and have somebody else do it because it needs to be done.”
