COVINA >> Kneeling beside her father-in-law’s burial site at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Virginia Miller snipped away at grass and weeds covering his gravestone.
“It was a little bit thick today,” Miller said as she stuffed grass blades into a plastic bouquet sleeve on a recent afternoon. “Usually, it’s not so bad.”
She visits a few times a year, often with scissors, a brush and polish to clean up the stones that mark where her father-in-law and husband are buried.
It’s a familiar ritual for Miller and others who say the maintenance at the Covina Hills cemetery is so poor that sometimes you can’t even see the names of the people buried there because of overgrown weeds.
“We shouldn’t have to do all this,” said Lake Elsinore resident Elaine Lopez, adding that she had to replace her son’s gravestone multiple times because the gardeners mowed over it.
Now, she is considering digging him up and burying him somewhere else.
“I can’t even go and see him because I’ll cry,” Lopez said last week after trying to visit her son, an Iraq War veteran, on Easter. Her daughter spent two hours that afternoon clearing dirt and weeds off her brother’s grave marker. “I just want the weeds and the grass cut nice. I don’t want to keep worrying about this.”
She shouldn’t have to.
Lopez and the thousands of other families paid Forest Lawn an additional fee to cover maintenance costs for the more than 130-acre cemetery. The fees, which are currently assessed at 15 percent of the burial property, are deposited into an endowment that is used solely for the long-term maintenance and embellishment of the cemetery, according to the Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks and Mortuaries online consumer guide.
According to the most recent financial reports submitted to the state Department of Consumer Affairs Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, there was around $36.1 million in the endowment at the end of 2014. That year, Forest Lawn spent roughly $3.15 million on maintenance at the Covina Hills park, according to the documents.
Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks and Mortuaries spokesman Ben Sussman did not respond to questions about the amount of funding available for maintenance, the number of staff who take care of the cemetery grounds or how often they trim and mow each section of the park, but Lopez said employees have told her they’re understaffed.
One worker offered to give her his phone number and asked that she call him before each visit so he could clean her son’s grave before she arrives.
“You shouldn’t have to do that,” Lopez said.
Tiffani Flores, a Covina resident who has six family members buried at Forest Lawn, could only remember one time when a worker came by to help her trim the grass.
“We’ve been going for so long we just clean it up ourselves because we don’t know if they’re supposed to or not,” Flores said.
Sussman said in an email that recent rainfall and the use of recycled water resulted in some increased vegetation growth, but that park staff were working hard to “make sure the park’s appearance represents our quality of care.” He declined to say whether park officials recognized this as an ongoing problem.
“Like any park setting in Southern California, we are exposed to the effects of seasonality and unexpected weather,” Sussman wrote. “We are adjusting accordingly and our dedicated staff is hard at work to make sure the park’s appearance represents our quality of care for the thousands of families we are honored to serve.”
