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Blog Entry 69 of 80 Grave Concerns: Inside Grand View Memorial Park

News you can use regarding Grand View Memorial Park, Glendale, CA's oldest cemetery, which has been closed for regular business since June 13, 2006, due to legal and financial problems. Lisa Burks also runs the website GrandViewMemorialPark.info.

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Glendale going to court over cemetery "nuisance"

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Contributed by: Lisa Burks on 8/22/2007

Make room for another litigant in the Grand View Memorial Park case.

Before it spends another dime on the fire hazardous cemetery, the City of Glendale will be going to court over the privately-owned property it now considers an official nuisance.

A routine (if you can call anything about the Grand View story "routine") city staff report to the City Council Tuesday night, requesting appropriations and direction for actions to take in order to make the arid grounds there safe enough for limited visitations again, was turned on its ear when the council learned it had been kept out of the loop about some very important cemetery-related developments.

Paul Ayers, one of several attorneys representing approximately 400 plaintiffs in a civil lawsuit against Grand View, dropped a bombshell on the council when he informed them that he recently learned about a meeting last Thursday between the California Department of Consumer Affairs and cemetery owners.

According to Ayers, who stated that he was not invited to the meeting but had learned about it through the cemetery litigation grapevine, Grand View's owners were ordered by the state to come up with a plan to re-open the cemetery and present that plan back to the DCA by Oct. 3.

Ayers also told council that he was informed by unnamed sources that the owners have arranged for a plumber to inspect the integrity of the watering system currently in place at Grand View today, Wednesday, Aug. 22.

I have not yet been able to confirm this meeting with anyone at the DCA or reps for minority owner Moshe Goldsman. Administrator of the estate of majority owner, the late Marsha Howard, her brother, Tom Trimble, was not immediately available for comment but his fiance, Betty Haskell, told me that this was all news to her and that Trimble "was not included in or informed of" any such meeting or plumber activity.

Regardless, as a result, the council voted unanimously to delay making any decisions to appropriate further funding, upwards of $400,000, in favor of instructing the city attorney to prepare a nuisance abatement action against the cemetery in order to eliminate immediate fire hazards on the property, possibly recoup its costs and to aggressively pursue the matter with the court.

City Attorney Scott Howard pointed out to the council that the track the city has been on since this time last year has been to work in a cooperative, non-adversarial manner with the owners, in the form of a written agreement with Goldsman, which has allowed 29 city-sponsored limited visitations to date.

Howard also stated that if the city chose to take a position to exercise its authority as government body to declare the cemetery a public nuisance and file legal action to seek to recover its expenditures, the possibility exists that the owners may in turn revoke the access agreement which would negatively affect future public service openings.

"The public is going to be the losers in that scenario," City Manager Jim Starbird concurred.

Mayor Ara Najarian reflected the council's overall reaction to the breaking news when he expressed anger over the sudden realization that while city staff had been spending a great deal of time planning irrigation and tree maintenance solutions at the cemetery for which the council was on the verge of approving funds for, parallel actions were apparently being taken by other entities without a courtesy alert.

"The process really disturbs me," said Najarian.

Ayers agreed, stating the developments didn't seem to make any sense and there should be a more "transparent operation" in place that involves cooperative communication between all parties.

The situation is illustrative of the four-ring circus that the Grand View case has evolved into over the past year, involving state agencies such as the DCA and the attorney general, defense and plaintiff attorneys, cemetery owners and the city all pushing their agendas without a clear ringleader in charge to force parties to work in harmony toward a positive end.

The city will now be looking to a judge to fill that leadership role.

Just a week ago, during the last council meeting, Starbird had reiterated his frustration over months worth of unsuccessful attempts by his office and the city attorney's office to get all parties to sit down together in order to begin a productive dialog.

"The court seems to be, just like you, very sensitive to the issue of public access," Starbird told the council.

"Frankly, when we relieved that pressure point things seemed to get lulled back into this state of 'OK, let's just let the legal process run its course,' until something like this occurs and we light another fire. Then concern starts to arise again," he added.

The next status conference hearing for the civil lawsuit against Grand View is scheduled for Sept. 11, before LA County Superior Court Judge Anthony J. Mohr.

"This cemetery is a nuisance and a fire hazard," said council member Bob Yousefian, who warned that the costs for fire suppression, should a wild fire break out on the property, would amount to three times or more what the council was being asked to currently consider spending to avoid such a disaster.

"I'm prepared to expend this money; however, I'm also prepared to change direction and go with an adversarial position," said council member Frank Quintero. "For me, personally, I've had enough. I'm not going to continue to spend tax payer money and somehow have to tip-toe around the owners of this cemetery," he added.

Council member Dave Weaver stated that he was against taking the adversarial role and jeopardizing what working relationship the city currently has with the owners in favor of trying to get all the parties to the table in September.

"If all goes well at that hearing, we'll get permission (from the judge) to get the work done without the abatement. If we take a combative role, what's the chance we'll come out any further ahead than if we continue to try to work with them at this point in time," asked Weaver.

"I find it unfortunate that I'm being asked as a representative of the citizens of this city to vote to spend almost $400,000 when we don't even have the permission to go on the site to do any of this work beyond opening the property a couple times a month to allow people to have visitations," said council member John Drayman.

Drayman, who was not on the council last year when the city initially got involved in the limited visitations said that he had recently taken a tour of Grand View "which involved bringing more lawyers together in one spot than I've ever seen in my life, just so I could go take a walk through this property. It is really very sad, what is to be seen there."

"All I'm willing to vote for is to become a party to the litigation, to obtain permission to do some of the work and to then revisit the issue at that time," Drayman added.

Mayor Najarian said his position was in line with Quintero's. "I think we've been tip-toeing around this issue for too long and it really hasn't gotten us anywhere. We've got to change the status quo," said Najarian.

"The course of a normal civil litigation is going to take years," said Najarian. "We've got to change the dynamics, he added.

The council also discussed the "added advantage" that a nuisance order brings, namely the opportunity to try and recoup any expenditures for the work done through a lien on the cemetery property and other possible assets. That way "the money isn't just going down the drain," said Najarian, who said the council owed that responsibility to the tax payers whose monies are being spent on a private property in the name of public safety.

"This is the local entity where this cemetery is located saying 'Hey, guess what, Judge? We've had enough and we want to get into this process,'" said Quintero.

Weaver said that while he doesn't have very much faith in the judicial system at this point, he would go along with the majority decision to pursue the matter aggressively.

"This is new territory for me on this council. I hope I'm alive to see the end result," said Weaver.

"Sometimes you just have to stand up and let them know you're serious," said Yousefian who seconded Quintero's motion for the abatement.

Sadly, the bottom line for family members who have been locked out of the cemetery and away from the grave sites of their loved ones since the last limited visitation held on June 17 is that the city cannot even begin to anticipate at this point when they will be able to open the gates again.

"We won't be opening the cemetery until we can actually get in there and do the work, I want to make people aware of that," said Starbird, who noted that will first entail getting direction from the court on exactly what work should be done.

Both Starbird and Howard said they would make this a "very high priority" for their staffs, noting that most of the research by the fire department, the building department and arborist have already been accomplished.

"It won't take long to help our attorneys," said Starbird. "It's the court process that we can't necessarily do anything about."

Video from the council meeting is available for viewing online on Glendale's GTV6 Web site.

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Submitted By: K Fog

posted on 8/22/2007 @ 9:53:30 AM

Rated Blog Entry

Wow. Does anybody (lawyers, court, city) really know what they are doing here? Everyone is fighting, yet without water, the trees will continue to die. It's like fighting over who is going to feed a starving child, but meanwhile, the child is still not eating...

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Lisa Burks

Burbank , CA

Lisa Burks has posted 80 blog entries and 5 comments since joining on 8/18/2006. Lisa Burks 's average blog rating is 4.93.

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