State Consumer Affairs Agency to Regulate Cemeteries

The State Cemetery Board announced Tuesday that it will hand over its regulatory authority to the Department of Consumer Affairs, which will investigate allegations of criminal misconduct and mismanagement at 12 cemeteries that have been seized by the board, officials said.

At a public hearing at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, Assemblywoman Jackie Speier, chairwoman of the Assembly Consumer Protection Committee, said the cemetery agency failed to regulate cemeteries statewide.

Consumer Affairs will conduct investigations on the cemeteries that have resold grave sites, spent endowment care funds and money allotted for cemetery maintenance, in addition to cemeteries that have filed for bankruptcy.

She said the agency will work with the state Legislature to create a regulatory framework that will prevent cemetery atrocities from occurring again.

“The state of California is not in the business of running cemeteries, yet we’ve been forced to do that recently,” Speier said.

She said the cemetery industry was left largely unregulated and that cemetery owners were not held accountable for any of their activities.

The board did not ask the cemeteries to report how many plots of land were available for burial and did not force cemeteries to submit financial reports on how their endowment care funds were being spent, Speier said.

She indicated that the Legislature would be looking to provide these kinds of measures to help state and local officials oversee the 193 cemeteries in California that were regulated by the board.

The issue of cemetery misdoing was raised this summer when two memorial parks, one in Santa Fe Springs and one in Carson, were seized by state officials after a range of allegations including selling burial plots multiple times and embezzlement of endowment funds.