Cremations are on the rise, causing the City of Mitchell to consider spending $40,000 for a granite "columbarium" that could store the cremated remains of dozens of people.
A columbarium is essentially a vault with individual, recessed cavities. Kevin Thurman, the city's golf and cemetery director, said his budget request would fund the purchase and placement of a columbarium in an open area near the center of the city cemetery.
Thurman expects to make the request today, during the City Council's budget hearings. He said the request was prompted by public demand.
"People's mentalities are changing toward cremation, definitely," Thurman said.
The city's cemetery staff rarely handled cremation burials two decades ago, but now there are roughly 20 a year. Nationally, cremation was used in less than 10 percent of all deaths prior to 1980 but is now used in 30 percent.
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Thurman attributes the trend to financial and personal factors.
Some people either can't or won't spend the money for increasingly expensive casket burials, Thurman said. Storing or burying cremated remains is cheaper than buying a traditional burial plot, which can cost thousands of dollars in a large city.
Attitudes about cremation are changing, Thurman said, thanks to societal and religious developments. The Catholic Church, for example, once prohibited cremation but has since deemed it allowable.
At Mitchell's cemetery, the current practice with cremated remains is to bury them in a vault. The addition of a columbarium would another option for cremation interment.
The columbarium Thurman wants to purchase is a 6-foot-tall, 7- to 10-foot-wide octagonal granite structure with 72 cavities known as "niches."
Each niche would house the sealed remains of one person, or the remains of couples. Identification plaques would be affixed to the front of each niche. The columbarium would stand on a concrete pad surrounded by landscaping and walkways.
Depending on the ratio of single to companion interments, Thurman expects the columbarium would house the remains of 70 to 90 people -- all in area of about 10 square feet. Conversely, the traditional burial of 90 caskets would require around 4,300 square feet.
The compact nature of columbariums could be a benefit for public and private cemeteries as they look to their future land needs. Mitchell's cemetery has about 14,000 graves on 44 acres, with about 20 acres open for expansion.
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"Depending on how things go with cremation and other trends, we have quite a few years worth of existing land in our cemetery," Thurman said. "However, we have to plan for the future of using that space up."
