Considering the Cemetery

Last Friday, the Board of Estimate and Apportionment (BEA) reviewed the proposed budget for the cemetery. The budget for the cemetery is a perennial issue. As city treasurer Heather Campbell explained, "The cemetery is supposed to be self-funding, but it's not." That's due in part, because, as Rob Perry, superintendent of Public Works, explained, the perpetual care fund, which is supposed to ensure the maintenance of cemetery in perpetuity, suffered from some "bad investment" in the 1970s, a decade that saw a lot of bad decisions made in Hudson.

At the BEA meeting last Friday, Council president Margaret Morris asked, "Is there some way that we could scale back on the maintenance in the cemetery?" Perry's response was, "Absolutely." He went on to explain what had been done in the past, at the request of former mayor Kamal Johnson and former Council president Tom DePietro:

We took out the part-timers, and I said that means that the old section does not get mowed. And in third week of June, they were getting calls and emails because it looked like a sh**hole, with a foot and a half grass, that everybody uses for their dogs and their walking and their jogging. And they called immediately to hire somebody. Of course, we hire the people in April, so those guys were no longer available. We didn't get people on until July, and then it was a bushwhacking session. And I never had that discussion again.

Perry maintained that the old section of the cemetery--the part of the cemetery that has been determined to be National Register eligible--is a city park not a cemetery, and people expect it to be maintained as a park would be. He concluded, "The part-time portion of this [budget] is $80,000. That's the price of having a pristine cemetery that nobody complains about and everybody uses as a park."

Several years ago, the idea of using sheep or goats to keep the grass trimmed in the old section of the cemetery was suggested by Friends of the Hudson Cemetery. Gossips did a post about the idea in 2018: "Sheep May Safely Graze." Other cemeteries--one in New York City, one in Schenectady, and several in the UK--used sheep to tend the grass. Why couldn't it be done here? The steep slope of the old cemetery and the seemingly random placement of the headstones and monuments make mowing a challenge, but those things would not be a problem for sheep or goats. That idea was never seriously considered. Perry made reference to it on Friday when he told Morris, "At least you spared me the goat discussion again." 

When Perry spoke of the goat discussion, Campbell mentioned clover, referring to the idea being promoted by advocates for the cemetery, for the environment, and for a balanced city budget of replacing the grass in the old section of the cemetery with a low-growing, weed-resistant ground cover that does not require mowing. There are several possibilities, clover being one of them. The grass could be replaced with ground cover one section at a time over time, and different areas could possibly have different types of ground cover--clover in some places, creeping thyme in others, sweet woodruff somewhere else.  

Perry, however, dismissed the idea, saying that seeds from trees would drop into the clover and germinate, causing unwanted trees to sprout. When asked if that didn't happen with grass, too, he explained that the mowers chopped up the seeds.

Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, speaking about something else altogether, is reported to have said something that seems apt here: "The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery."  

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