[01/30/02]Mayor Laurence Leyens said during a tour Tuesday that Beulah Cemetery, privately owned, should be acquired by the city so it can be kept in better condition.

“The city feels it is appropriate to take over this cemetery and maintain it,” Leyens said, adding that only 14 of the cemetery’s original 58 acres, at the east end of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, would need maintenance.

“This would not be a huge budget item,” Leyens said, “and the city would be eligible for grants that private organizations would not be eligible for.”

The cemetery has been owned since the 1880s by a fraternal organization called Tabernacle No. 19 of the Independent Order of Brothers and Sisters of Love and Charity, said Yolande Robbins, the head of the cemetery preservation committee that is Tabernacle No. 19’s successor.

Robbins said the city’s possible taking over the cemetery had not been discussed recently in her committee, which meets about every month.

“The ongoing attitude of our committee is that this should be maintained as a private cemetery,” Robbins said, adding that the city’s taking over the property had been proposed once before, around the mid-1980s.

“When it was first proposed I was in favor of the city’s taking it over, so that maintenance would be more assured and predictable,” Robbins said. “But this cemetery has a long history of ownership in the community. That ownership wouldn’t be lost, but would be lost somewhat.”

State Rep. George Flaggs, D-Vicksburg, helped the city acquire a $50,000 grant four years ago for a clearing and restoration project under the Department of Archives and History. After many false starts and amid some controversy, all but about $14,375 has been spent clearing areas that had been taken over by trees, shrubs and undergrowth.

As long as the cemetery, where many prominent black citizens are buried, is privately owned, it is illegal for city employees to work there.

Flaggs said Tuesday that he did not have enough information on what the city was proposing and so was not prepared to comment.

The hilly cemetery has many sunken graves in its soft ground and is not amenable to large mowing equipment. It costs about $2,500 and takes about three days to mow using mainly commercial line trimmers, said volunteer Eddie Leo Sims, who has taken a role in maintaining the cemetery. Sims spends a couple of hours a day maintaining the cemetery, he said.

“We’re exploring what we can do,” Leyens said, adding that the city’s legal department is looking into its options for acquiring the land, one of which is eminent domain, which allows a governing body, such as a city, to take ownership of land in certain situations.

“This is not a done deal,” Leyens said. “We’re still figuring out how we can do it.”

Vicksburg does own and operate and maintain the vast Cedar Hill Cemetery, not far from Beulah. The last administration moved to add land to Cedar Hill and contracted out maintenance to a private firm.