Council to consider cemetery land deal

Coffins or children? A mausoleum or a middle school?

Some east-side Salt Lake residents prefer the cemetery uses over a proposed expansion of private school Rowland Hall-St. Mark's, but the school is pushing Mt. Olivet Cemetery owners hard to sell 13 acres for a middle school, high school and soccer fields.

The public cemetery wants to sell the land, which is now a weed field, to help pay for better landscaping, road repair and perpetual care and to ensure that it has enough money to operate for the next century or so, an assurance that it hasn't had since Congress created it in 1909.

"Public cemeteries traditionally have never made money," said William Adams, president of the cemetery's board of trustees. This one has survived for a century by selling or leasing parts of its land — some sold for blocks of graves to organizations, some sold to build Sunnyside Avenue, more leased to East High School for its football stadium. It now risks financial distress if it doesn't slough another parcel to plump its accounts.

But neighbors in the Yalecrest neighborhood just south of Rowland Hall's lower school at Guardsman Way and Sunnyside Avenue say that selling that land to the school would pave the way for worse traffic and a denser use on the open field than has been allowed.

A public hearing is scheduled Tuesday before the Salt Lake City Council.

The cemetery started offering the parcel a few years ago and responded to Rowland Hall's bid for the land over a University of Utah proposal. For Rowland Hall to put in its schools and soccer fields, however, the city first must change the zoning from "open space" to "institutional," which was the zone for the land before 1995.

Assuming the city rezones the land, though, the cemetery and school must ask Congress to remove a clause in a 1909 contract that allows the federal government to claim the land if it is used for anything other than a cemetery. That so-called reversionary clause would require specific legislation from Congress.

"It's maybe not as tough as it sounds, but it will take an act of Congress for them to be able to buy it," said Dave Buhler, the councilman for that area. "Their sale is contingent on zoning and the reversionary clause being removed."

If not using it for a cemetery, neighbors want it to stay as open space.