State of California seeks to seize cemetery assets

March 6, 2024/Cemetery, Regulations/

It has been pretty well publicized that former President Donald Trump may have assets seized by the State of New York to satisfy a judgement recently decided against his companies. Turns out that is not the only siezure battle by a state against against someone as you can see from this article in the Vallejo Sun that the State of California is proceeding in an effort to seize about $50 million of trust funds set aside for cemetery mainenance.

The article points out that the State of California has already asked the operators of the cemeteries in question to surrender their licenses to manage cemeteries and are now proceeding in an action for the trust funds. And, as you can see from this more recent February 2024 article, the cemeteries in question are being accused of being negligent in the upkeep of the cemeteries according to people who have family members buried there.

Make sure that you read the articles because there are a lot of plot twists already. They include:

“Questionable distributions” from cemetery funds, including about $1.35 million in payments to two companies managed by the cemetery owners and over $50,000 in cemetery funds purportedly used to pay for taxes in locations where the cemeteries did not operate

A petition of over 1,500 people calling the conditions of at least one of the cemeteries ““disgraceful” due to the presence of weeds, gopher holes, unwatered grass, and buried headstones.

An attempt by the owners to transfer over $50 million in trust funds to a religious nonprofit corporation called Evergreen Ministries, which now operates the cemeteries. Officers of that group are essentially the same that control the cemeteries today.

Families of Jewish-faith people buried at a cemetery in question say that the transfer of what once was a secular cemetery with a Jewish section to a non-Jewish religious organization is “deeply troubling,”

Funeral Director Daily take: This is truly one of those stories that if you included it in a fictional novel the story would be far-fetched to be believable. What’s the old standard line? . . . .”You can’t make this stuff up“. That line, in my opinion, is very true with this situation.

While this is an interesting story, it certainly is not unique when it comes to who holds and controls cemetery perpetual care trust funds. And, I think we are bound to see more of these stories.

In my area of Minnesota there are hundreds of small country churches that have, or are being decommissioned, because there are just no longer small farms with families operating in the area to populate the churches. Most are kept up by well-meaning and volunteer-minded individuals for the benefit of the cemeteries on the church grounds. Taking some amount from the pepetual care funds to do this is what those perpetual care funds were designed for.

However, as families have left the area with their ancestors buried in these cemeteries they have donated to the perpetual care funds in order to have an ample “perpetual endowment” for the future. In some cases those perpetual care funds have became quite large.

There are what I term “opportunist ministries” in our society who are on the look-out for these type of small parishes and offer to re-open the church to re-build the congregation, but many also have a suspected motive of getting their own church board in place and then being able to access the cemetery’s perpetual care fund for their own benefit. . . .such as paying out large stipends to board members until the fund is exhaustive.

In many states religious organizations are exempt from state or other governmental oversight on how they handle their endowment or cemetery funds.

Here’s an article entitled, “Is this the future of small rural cemeteries?” that Funeral Director Daily did on this topic almost two years ago.

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