Granada Hills Man Seeks Cemetery Legislation : Bill Requires Wider Notice of Change in Use of Burial Sites

When Leon Furgatch of Granada Hills buried his mother in 1964 at Mount Olive Memorial Cemetery in East Los Angeles, he assumed that the land around her resting place would remain the same as the day she was interred.

However, 3 years ago he was surprised to see a warehouse being built on land where there had once been graves.

“Essentially it looked like the cemetery had disappeared--the whole front was a warehouse,” Furgatch said.

Dismayed that his mother was now buried in the shadow of a warehouse and that he was not notified before it was built, Furgatch had his mother’s remains moved to another cemetery. But he felt determined to make sure something like this would never happen again.

After battling the state bureaucracy for 3 years, Furgatch turned to the Legislature, persuading Assemblywoman Marian W. La Follette (R-Northridge) to introduce a bill that would require families and plot owners to be given an opportunity to receive notice whenever a change in use is contemplated for a cemetery. The bill also would give them an opportunity to complain at a public hearing about the proposed change in use.

Under state law, a cemetery must get permission from the next of kin if it wants to remove a body and change the land from cemetery use. It also must publish a notice in a newspaper when a hearing will be held on the proposed land-use change. However, there are no provisions in the law for alerting people whose relatives’ remains are not removed from the cemetery and who do not live within the newspaper’s circulation area.

Although too late to deal with the Mount Olive situation, the La Follette bill would affect other cemeteries as they face problems similar to Mount Olive’s--rising maintenance costs and scarce land for graves for California’s growing population.

But Jim Lahey, executive vice president of the Interment Assn. of California, which opposes the bill, insisted during a recent hearing of the Assembly Local Government Committee that “only once in California that we know of” have people gotten angry about part of a cemetery being sold to a developer. This was the Mount Olive incident.

Mount Olive cemetery was once in the middle of a thriving Jewish community. But with population shifts--Jews moving out and Latinos moving in--fewer people sought to be buried there. So in the 1970s, the privately owned cemetery was donated to West Coast Chabad, a prominent orthodox Jewish organization. Chabad decided to sell half of Mount Olive’s 10 acres to a warehouse developer as a means of keeping the cemetery financially solvent.

Marshall Grossman, Chabad’s legal counsel, said the decision to sell the land rescued what had been an overgrown, unfenced and unsafe cemetery and turned it into a place where people would want to come and pay respect to their dead.

The state Cemetery Board, which regulates private cemeteries but has no authority over those owned by religious organizations, opposes La Follette’s bill on grounds that it would place an extra burden of paper work on local agencies.

Complaints about the bill have angered La Follette, who has accused opponents of taking a “callous, insensitive position” and offering objections of “very little substance.”

The Assembly Local Government Committee unanimously recommended approval of the bill on April 6 and sent it on to the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, where a second hearing is expected to be held later this month.