They went to buy a grave.
People have been hurrying to get a plot at Sunset Hills Cemetery before prices doubled Nov. 1. The cost of a casket-size plot went from $647 to $1,200. An urn plot went from $424 to $900.
“I visited with three families today alone to show them areas in the cemetery,” Chris Remely, owner of Dokken-Nelson Funeral Service, said last week.
Burial costs at the city’s only public cemetery have gone up four times in the past five years.
Now, Bozeman charges more for burials than Missoula and Billings. In Missoula, a casket plot costs $720 less. In Billings, it costs $465 less.
Yet, none of the cities are making money.
“It’s an issue everywhere,” Missoula Finance Director Brentt Ramharter said.
Bozeman city officials had worried that if they didn’t increase fees now, there wouldn’t be money to cover the cemetery’s “forever” costs — decades of watering, plowing and mowing graves.
“You have a forever and ongoing maintenance responsibility, and you only sell the plot once,” City Manager Chris Kukulski said.
Located south of Lindley Park, Sunset Hills Cemetery contains the remains of more than 15,300 people. About 150 dead are buried there each year.
These days, cremation is popular.
Roughly 70 percent of the families served by local funeral homes opt for cremation, said Remely and Irene Dahl, owner of Dahl Funeral Chapel.
That’s twice the national rate.
Montana has the seventh-highest cremation rate in the United States, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. The states with the highest cremation rates are Nevada (74 percent), Washington (70 percent) and Oregon (69 percent).
“The reason it’s so high is a lot of Bozemanites are from other places,” Dahl said. “They don’t have the same roots as you might find in say Eastern Montana … (Bozeman has) a more transient population.”
Primary reasons for choosing cremation are: to save money (30 percent); because it is simpler, less emotional and more convenient (14 percent); and to save land (13 percent), according to a 2005 study commissioned by the Funeral and Memorial Information Council.
The study also said people who favor cremation tend to be better educated and from households with higher incomes.
Bozeman’s cremation rate has been steadily climbing for years, Dahl and Remely said, and higher burial prices are likely to make it an even more attractive option.
“It might make it easier for people to say, ‘Well, we’ll just scatter the ashes instead,’” Remely said.
Scattering ashes is cheaper, but a connection to the past will be lost, he said.
“(Burials) provide a place for family members to come back to for generations and say, ‘This is your grandfather,’ or ‘This is your great-grandfather,’” Remely said. “I suppose you could point to the Bridgers and say, ‘Grandpa was scattered up there,’ but obviously, it’s not quite the same.”
The dead in Sunset Hills cost the living in Bozeman about $275,000 last year.
That’s the amount that taxpayers contributed to cover cemetery costs that weren’t paid by fees. Last year, the city collected about $125,000 in fees and paid $400,000 in expenses.
Sunset Hills has been “hemorrhaging red ink” for years, said Russ Tuckerman, chairman of the Cemetery Advisory Board.
“The cemetery has never covered itself,” he said.
A superintendent, foreman, two full-time employees and about six seasonal employees make up the Cemetery Department.
“We maintain the cemetery like a park,” said Ron Dingman, city superintendent of parks, recreation and cemetery. “So there’s mowing, irrigation, weed trimming, tree trimming … road maintenance, plowing, fence maintenance, grave maintenance … It’s a lot of hands-on, time-consuming work.”
It takes about a week to mow the entire cemetery. By the time workers are done, it’s time to start over, Dingman said.
“It’s pretty much mowed continuously,” he said.
City staff members help people shop for graves and find relatives buried in the cemetery.
Plus, when someone is buried, city crews dig the hole and fill it in. City gravediggers use backhoes and other heavy equipment. The average burial takes about four and a half hours to excavate and complete, Dingman said.
The price for opening and closing a grave rose last week from $484 to $605 for a casket and $242 to $303 for an urn.
Bozeman has a number of options for funerals, caskets and urns, but there’s only one public cemetery in town.
A traditional funeral and burial, plus extras — like flowers, obituary notices and limousines — can cost around $10,000.
“Funerals rank among the most expensive purchases many consumers will ever make,” the Federal Trade Commission, which monitors American commerce, notes on its website.
If you’re planning a traditional burial, caskets can run anywhere from $600 to $10,000, according to local funeral home price lists.
Then there’s the cost of an underground vault to surround the casket. That runs around $500 to $2,500 – depending on whether you plan to use plastic or steel.
One cheaper option is donating your body to Montana State University.
The university uses a cadaver for one to five years to teach anatomy to medical students. When they’re finished, the body is returned to the family or buried in a common grave at Sunset Hills.
There are environmentally friendly burials, too, though funeral directors said they’re not necessarily less expensive.
For a “green” burial, the deceased is wrapped in a simple shroud. There’s no embalming or underground vault.
After the body decomposes, the grave caves in. Cemeteries charge an upfront fee knowing the plot will eventually need to be filled.
Basic cremation — without any extras — generally costs at least $1,200. That’s the most Gallatin County will pay when someone dies without any money or family.
Last year, the county paid $9,600 to cremate eight people, according to Glenda Howze, assistant to the Gallatin County Commission. The number of people buried has fluctuated in recent years, but there has been no clear increasing trend, she said.
In some cities, cemeteries are a business.
Bozeman has one privately owned cemetery, Sunset Memorial Gardens, located on frontage road in east Bozeman.
Sunset Memorial Gardens charges $300 more for a casket plot than the city. The cemetery also charges another $225 for long-term care of that plot.
Some people said public cemeteries should be free to taxpayers.
Tom Olsen, owner of Bozeman Granite Works, which makes headstones, argues that long-time Bozeman residents have already paid for their spot in Sunset Hills.
“The cemetery is paid for by our taxes just like any other park and recreation-type facility,” Olsen said. “If we’re paying those taxes, I don’t want to have gates go up on the parks and have to pay $20 to get in, so I don’t think there should be financial gates on the cemetery either.”
And like the funeral home owners, the price increase won’t help Olsen’s business.
“It’s going to be a hit,” he said. “People are going to opt not to use the cemetery and therefore, I won’t be able to sell tombstones to those people.
“I think (the city) is going to lose so much business … that the net gain will be negative,” Olsen said. “People who otherwise interred will just opt to put an urn on the mantle.”
Public cemeteries operate in the red, city officials said. That’s just part of the game.
In Missoula, Finance Director Ramharter said cemetery fees only cover about 18 percent of the cost there. That city has commissioned a study of cemetery budgets in Montana and may raise its prices, he said.
“We’re looking at what an appropriate level of subsidizing is,” he said.
Under Bozeman’s new fee structure, taxpayers will actually pay about 12 percent more to subsidize annual cemetery operations, Finance Director Anna Rosenberry said.
However, all revenue from cemetery plot sales will now be set aside to build a nest egg for the cemetery’s long-term care, she said.
Sunset Hills spans 56 acres now. Another 60 acres is available for future development.
Dahl, whose grandfather started Dahl Funeral Chapel in 1939, said when she was growing up, the cost of a funeral and a car were roughly the same.
“If you think about what you pay for a car now and the cost of a funeral, you pay a lot more for a car,” she said. “When you’re looking at a diagram with all those other things … it’s not out of line.
“Bozeman had it really great for a long time because (cemetery) costs haven’t been what they should have been,” Dahl said.
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