A comprehensive plan to improve Cedar Hill Cemetery by amending and enforcing the cemetery’s regulations, raising the fees for opening and closing graves, improving some of the roads that run through the cemetery and improving drainage could soon be under consideration by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen.
The 177-year-old, 155-acre cemetery fronting Sky Farm Avenue was initially plotted in 1837, 12 years after the city was incorporated.
North Ward Alderman Michael Mayfield, who chairs a committee of city officials and cemetery directors to investigate improving the cemetery, said he will present the proposed plan to Mayor George Flaggs Jr. and South Ward Alderman Willis Thompson at a board work session Monday.
“I want to hold a public meeting on the plan on Oct. 6, and I’m going to ask to hold it at 5:30 (p.m.),” he said. “We’re going to have a PowerPoint presentation (on the plan) and a video of the problems at the cemetery. We’re going to lay out everything at the meeting.”

That includes showing a new cemetery fee schedule to open and close graves. Mayfield would not say what the new charges would be. The cemetery’s fee schedule had not been adjusted in 25 years.
The plan is the result of several meetings by the cemetery committee, which was appointed by Flaggs after a July 14 meeting between the board, cemetery officials, law enforcement and the funeral directors.
The meeting was initially called to discuss traffic problems caused by overbooking funerals on the same day, but the traffic congestion, which Mayfield said has been corrected, is one of many problems affecting the cemetery.
People have placed fences around the graves of loved ones in violation of the cemetery regulations, which require prior approval of decorations by cemetery officials before they are put on or around graves.
Many of the items, like vases and fences, are made of plastic and put around, instead of on, the graves as required. The plastic accents become brittle with age and from the effects of weather and shatter and scatter across an area when struck by trimmers used by yard crews to remove grass from the graves.
Other, more serious, problems needing attention include:
• The city contracts out the cemetery’s grass cutting, which Mayfield said takes up a good chunk of the cemetery’s budget.
“We have roughly a $450,000 a year operating budget for the city cemetery,” he said. “In that operating budget (for the) last three years, we’ve paid an average of $100,000 a year for grass cutting, which starts in late March and goes into October.”
• Several areas of the cemetery have drainage problems and some spots face the potential threat of landslides.
Between 1991 and 1992, city landscape director Jeff Richardson said, the city installed French drains along a drainage basin on the west side of Cedar Hill that drains into Glass Bayou.
The city in 1999 bought a 29-acre section northwest of the original cemetery for expansion, and an 18-acre section that was threatened by slides, forcing the city to install weirs, or low dams, to slow water draining through the area.
In 2006, a slide near the cemetery office, which sits on a hill overlooking the expansion, became a problem.
“We’re currently working toward repairing two and possibly three serious slides,” Mayfield said.
One, he said, is near the Soldiers Rest section on the east side of the cemetery. Another, he said, is on the extreme eastern side of the cemetery.
“That’s usually what causes the flooding on Sky Farm (Avenue),” he said. “That water comes off that hill and brings a lot of mud with it.”
Another hill also sends water to Sky Farm, he said.
Also, an underground spring runs under the cemetery on its south side along Sky Farm.
• “We’re going to have to go in and do some serious paving in that cemetery, and some road widening,” Mayfield said. “Some of them you can’t (widen) because they’re built right on the edge of the graves.”
Richardson estimates about 90 percent of the roads cannot be widened; adding the last major paving project in the cemetery was done under the administration of former Mayor Joe Loviza.
“It’s been patching ever since,” Mayfield said.
“If the asphalt truck has some extra asphalt, they’ll take it out there and repair holes,” Richardson said. “It’s more of an as needed basis.”
He said a 2011 paving project to fix 1,500 feet of streets in the cemetery cost the city $74,000.
He said plans for the new section, includes a two-lane access road from the cemetery office to the 3 to 4 acre portion of the new section now under use and access roads there is estimated to cost about $220,000 to $300,000. “We’re looking at (the equivalent of) four city blocks,” he said.