Cemetery Columbarium idea comes back to life

A once dead-in-the-water project to build a columbarium at the city-run cemetery has been resurrected by the Fernandina Beach City Commission at its workshop Tuesday.

The city's first attempt at funding a columbarium—a structure with niches or compartments designed to hold urns containing cremated remains—at Bosque Bello Cemetery was voted down 3-2 by the city commission in 2021. That vote followed a recommendation by the city's Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee (PRAC) not to finance the structure. The original cost estimate in 2020 was $3.5 million.

Now, four years later, both the city commission and PRAC have all new members to consider whether designing and funding the project will generate additional revenues for the cemetery.

"It (the columbarium) is very past due and something that I really feel strongly that our community needs and deserves, and we ought to find a way to do it," said Commissioner Genece Minshew. "We have a (2021) plan in place, and it needs some tweaks, as all plans do, but I would very much like to see us figure out how to move this forward. I think we can do this without using taxpayer dollars."

The previous 2021 plan was reliant on the pre-sale of 109 of the eventual 1,872 niches that were projected to be built. That would have raised $286,125 to go towards construction.

Minshew said in reconsidering the project, the city could pre-sell niches or take out a loan from the $1 million cemetery perpetual fund for seed money that would be repaid.

Commissioner Tim Poynter supported the city moving forward on the project.

"I'm 100% in favor of moving forward with this. All we're doing is putting off the inevitable and it always costs a lot more money when we do it," he said.

The original 2020 rendering of Bosque Bello columbarium

The city had previously spent $16,140 for columbarium plans from Marquis-Latimer + Halback. However, PRAC members in 2021 were unable to support those plans, saying the design was flawed. At the time, the city commission was being asked to spend $20,000 for architectural drawings for phase one of the project.

PRAC told that commission the plan consumed a large amount of cemetery space; the phase one 1,000-niche component would require the removal of several trees; the submitted brick proposed did not meet the building code; in phase one the city would lose $77,000; and there was no warranty for the finished product.

As with the original proposal, Minshew suggested reinvolving the informal Friends of Bosque Bello group in the project.

"I think maybe another outshoot of this conversation is that having a friend of the cemetery in a formalized way, where they can market and they can raise funds, and they can do projects is really valuable. With hope that the folks who had done that before can bring in some new life," Minshew said of Friends of Bosque Bello.

The commission reached consensus on having Marquis-Latimer + Halback give the city estimates on updating the columbarium project.

The original 2020 rendering of Bosque Bello columbarium