OJAI : Reopened Cemetery Produces Revenue

The city of Ojai has found a new source of revenue by offering its residents an eternal resting place.

Reservations for 37 burial plots and 32 urn sites in Nordhoff Cemetery have brought in $32,530 since it reopened in June, an official said. More sites are available.

“When we first reopened the program, we had quite a rush. Now it’s down to a steady stream,” said Elaine Willman, administrative aide to the city manager.

“The bottom line is that people who’ve lost a loved one have been able to bury them in the town of their birth,” she said. “Prior to this, we would not have been able to provide the service.”

In 1987, when Ojai Councilman James Loebl was mayor, his state of the city address lamented that there was “no place to die in Ojai” or, more correctly, to be buried.

Believing that Nordhoff Cemetery, established in 1870, was filled to capacity, the Ojai City Council closed the pioneer graveyard at Cuyama and Del Norte roads in 1963.

Plot records were scattered and thought lost to time until Willman completed a three-year effort to patch them together.

From hand-written receipts and old ledgers and inventories, she compiled a continuous written thread dating to 1878. The audit discovered that 130 single burial plots and 95 urn sites were still available, along with 100 other plots that were sold more than 50 years ago and never used.

Willman said the city may ask the Superior Court to approve resale of those plots after a one-year waiting period for relatives to claim them.

Space in the two-acre cemetery has also been found to build another 200 cremation urn sites, she said.

Single-casket plots sell for $650, urn sites for $265. The money is earmarked for cemetery maintenance and improvements that the city had trouble funding in the past, Willman said. These include new landscaping and replacing eight large oaks that were diseased and recently removed.