NEWPORT BEACH : Compromise Reached on Expansion of Cemetery

After a series of meetings with the management of Pacific View Memorial Park, residents near the cemetery have settled on a compromise plan for expanding it.

“I was told that homeowners would not see any mausoleums from their homes,” said Don Olson, a Monterey Circle resident who helped negotiate with cemetery operators Pierce Bros. and owners SCI Inc. “My approval is based on that representation.”

Olson and Paul Hitzelberger, who have helped negotiate on behalf of residents over the past 14 months, said screening mausoleums from view was their top concern.

Commissioners generally supported the new plan and instructed Pacific View Memorial Park representatives to work out the details and return to the commission May 4.

Preliminary plans dating back to 1992 call for the construction of buildings, including mausoleums, a garden crypt, a maintenance building, a garage and sales office, and roads to access the new buildings and grave sites.

Despite the compromise, some residents of the Spyglass Hill, Spyglass Ridge and Broadmoor Sea View tracts who attended a Planning Commission meeting last week on the conceptual plan for the cemetery remained upset.

“We’ve been ignored. We’ve been sandbagged,” said H. Ross Miller, who lives on Baycliff Circle in Spyglass Ridge and represents the Spyglass Ridge Community Assn. “We have not been invited to any of those meetings that you have heard about tonight.”

Carmel Bay Drive resident Carol Miller said she knows of about 350 homeowners who oppose any expansion.

“I had 50 people at my house, and most of them do not want the cemetery” expansion, she said, complaining that one planned 9,200-square-foot mausoleum would be clearly visible from her home. “That’s three times the size of my house. They say I won’t be able to see it, but I don’t see how” to prevent it.