Builder Seeks to Sell Troubled Land to Diocese for Cemetery

Officials of Lewis Homes of California, eager to lay to rest their connection with a controversial plot of land next to a Pomona cemetery, have received tentative City Council approval of a rezoning ordinance needed to sell the property to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

The company, which purchased the vacant lot at Towne and Lexington avenues in 1988 for $1.75 million from the Pomona Cemetery Assn., had intended to build a 93-home subdivision on the site.

They dropped that plan after former workers at Pomona Valley Memorial Park, a nearby cemetery, came forward in 1989 with claims that they had often mixed ashes from cremated corpses in a trash can and dumped them on the vacant lot.

They claimed that it was common practice to commingle excess ashes after cemetery urns had been filled.

Although cemetery officials have denied the allegations, the controversy was the kiss of death for the proposed housing tract.

As a city staff report on the matter put it: “(Lewis Homes) is . . . concerned that the interment of human remains could have a negative impact on the sale of homes.”

Lewis Homes, which had started grading the land when the ex-employees dropped their bombshell, filed suit in 1989 in Pomona Superior Court against the cemetery association, a nonprofit organization that operates Pomona Valley Memorial Park.

The company also set out to find someone to take the land off its hands. Enter the archdiocese, which decided to purchase the property as an expansion site for its Holy Cross Cemetery, located next to the parcel on Towne Avenue.

The deal is now in escrow with an undisclosed purchase price. In order for the transaction to go through, Lewis Homes needs the city to rezone the 17-acre site.