It’s no Walmart, hotel or high tech center, but allowing Utah’s first all-natural burial grounds would help the city of Oakley’s coffers by millions of dollars along with conserving land from development.
The City Council has been warm to the idea since Summit Land Conservancy CEO Cheryl Fox and Starks Funeral Parlor owner Shayneh Starks brought it to them in April.
Like others salted throughout rural Utah, Oakley is a small town with limited means and aging infrastructure — some water and sewer lines are over 60 years old, Mayor Zane Woostenhulme pointed out. And proximity to Park City brings its own pressure, mainly in the way of residential development.
Contemplating 20 acres of a 140-acre open parcel owned by the city near Pinion Lane and Weber Canyon Road for what would be the 11th true conservation cemetery in the country proved intriguing enough to call a public hearing — though the mayor said the council was not required to — on Wednesday evening and get a better sense of public sentiment. Oakley’s planning commission has unanimously supported the proposal.
“We’re just here to see if there’s a win-win solution for Oakley,” Fox said, adding that while she sees the proposal as a good idea, the decision is entirely Oakley’s to make.
Nearly 50 people came, as big a turnout as much larger Park City’s council sees with its hotter issues. They arrived early and filled folding chairs into an adjoining room at City Hall.
Of the 14 who spoke, 11 plainly didn’t like the idea at all, one sounded open if the idea passed a planned study into the health and environmental risks, and two expressed a lot of enthusiasm, even love for returning to the Earth at least somewhat like wildlife do every day.
But what of badgers and bears? A few wondered aloud about that, politely raising specters of bodies dug up and eaten to make their points. More seriously, most questioned what would happen to water quality near the essential Weber River even though a water expert had presented preliminary findings that this could be done safely and without risking contamination of the river.
A few other speakers questioned the council tying the hands of future generations by making conservation choices for the land now that would continue in perpetuity. They preferred the city keep its options open for the next century or so, or consider more immediately lucrative commercial or residential development options.
Woostenhulme, who engaged comfortably with the constituents who spoke or were content to sit and listen in the audience, said if the council decided to move forward with a green cemetery, it would do so conditionally. That is, it would approve a thorough study into all the elements of health and safety and would take care not to expose the city to risk or risk of liability.
The Summit Land Conservancy would fund the study, which Woostenhulme estimated at around $50,000, and manage the cemetery along with Starks Funeral Parlor, based in Salt Lake City.
Estimates show such a cemetery could hold up to 3,000 burial sites per acre, and around 300 local residents being laid to rest this way.
But this would be slow going, under a handful a year at first. Such a burial ground would take decades, a century, to begin to fill up.
Critics pointed out that city estimates of $5 million in revenue also would take a similarly long time to materialize, even with the purchase of plots ahead of their need.
Before the public hearing, Fox talked about land conservation values and the cemetery as a win-win way to achieve this in a city trying to hold onto its rural values under development pressure.
Starks talked about the sanctity she brings to her work and her study into more natural means of laying loved ones to rest, as humans did through millennia before modern means of in essence poisoning bodies in the name of preservation and the carbon costs of separating them longer from nature’s inevitable work have mounted.
Even cremation is the equivalent of a car driving 600 miles, she said.
She and her husband, Jason Starks, provide green burial services through what she called hybrid, natural and this proposal, a conservation cemetery. None have been dug up by wildlife, she said later, notwithstanding sensational stories from Malaysia and Siberia in the lurid press.
Jason Starks said concerns about water, however, are legitimate and do require careful study.
“What makes it pure is the partnership with the Land Conservancy,” Shayneh Starks said. “That’s to gain the legitimacy of having a nonprofit running it, making sure the land is protected.”
