Wright City leaders last week continued a discussion of how to better care for the city cemetery by asking whether they should outsource the work of groundskeeping.

During a May 27 board of aldermen meeting, Public Works Director Kyle Roettger said his staff had taken corrective action to improve the appearance of graves in one of the cemetery blocks. Roettger said his staff will go block to block making improvements, and have also revised their caretaking procedure to ensure verdant grass cover is established on all grave sites.

The corrections follow complaints from the Wright City Cemetery Memorial Society about the unattractive state of some graves and other groundskeeping issues at the cemetery.

Acknowledging the corrections, Alderman Ramiz Hakim nonetheless asked if the city should hire a specialist company to care for the cemetery. He said it isn’t fair to expect public works staff, who are dividing their attention with street and park maintenance, to also meet the high standards of a volunteer group dedicated solely to the cemetery.

“When you’ve got a guy filling pot holes at 9 a.m., and then at 10 a.m. he’s dragging a ball field, and then by 1 p.m. he’s brush hogging in a ditch, and then by 2 o’clock he needs to meticulously take care of individual tombstones ... it’s a bit unfair to put our city employees in that position to be held to that kind of standard,” Hakim said.

Hakim proposed isolating the portion of city budget paying for staff hours at the cemetery and using that money to hire a third party company, or the cemetery memorial society, to oversee care of the cemetery. Hakim added that such a proposal should be contingent on also saving money by outsourcing the work.

While other city leaders agreed that a new approach to caretaking could be warranted, they advised Hakim to temper his expectations that the city can both outsource for a higher quality of care, and also save money at the same time. As City Administrator Jim Schuchmann explained, the city once had a caretaking arrangement with the memorial society, paid for by a cemetery endowment fund. But in 2017, the memorial society returned that responsibility to the city because payments from the endowment fund weren’t keeping up with costs.

Aldermen Michelle Heiliger and Nathan Rohr added their support to the idea of reestablishing a closer partnership with the memorial society and empowering it to make larger improvements in the cemetery. However, much would depend on the details of any new arrangement.

City Attorney Paul Rost explained that any agreement to outsource cemetery groundskeeping would have to carefully describe all the expectations for the caretakers, as well as explicitly outlining how money from the city is to be used. He advised aldermen to develop those requirements before further engaging the memorial society or any other outside group. The issue will continue to be revisited at future public meetings.