The municipality of Gilching must increase the cemetery fees - this is also what the legal supervisory authority is demanding. However, the local councilors were unable to come to an agreement at the first attempt and will now have to discuss it again in May.
Gilching
– If there is a death in the family, it is not only sad, the surviving relatives may also incur high funeral costs. In the community of Gilching, a recalculation of cemetery fees was on the agenda. No agreement could be reached at the council meeting on Tuesday as to which criteria will be used to calculate the use of grave sites in the future.
The fact is that, despite repeated approaches, there has been no increase in cemetery fees since 2019 and a deficit of 176,000 euros has accumulated over the years. “This must be reduced to zero,” emphasized Mayor Manfred Walter. A requirement that has been demanded by the district office's legal supervisory authority for a long time. “According to the municipal tax law, fees must be calculated so that they cover costs,” explained Walter.
A considerable cost factor is, among other things, the primarily gardening work carried out by the building yard. “Two employees work for our two cemeteries. For this purpose, 3,500 hours of working time are billed annually. The desired and targeted cost reduction could not be achieved because no one-euro jobbers, people doing social hours and asylum seekers could be employed since 2020, among other things because of Corona," said the mayor.
With regard to the new calculation, office manager Kerstin Schempp assured that many hours of work had been put into a fair, but also cost-covering fee structure. The Kubus company was also called in, saying it was familiar with the topic but gave little insight into the modalities. “We are considering not using an external company in the future and taking over fee calculations in our administration.” With regard to the cost-covering cemetery fees, Schempp listed the change in the fee rate. For example, a single grave costs 84.91 euros annually, up from 66.50 euros previously. Small urn graves should cost 77.40 euros (54.50 euros). Tree diggers are cheaper at 88.92 euros (108.50 euros). The new calculations assume a so-called “grave-identical cost share”. The “grave-specific cost share”, which would in future be 76.25 euros for a single grave, would be cheaper. The small urn graves are then estimated at 61.24 euros (previously 54.50 euros), tree graves at 84.27 euros (previously 108.50 euros). According to Schempp, fees for identical grave types are calculated, among other things, by including a base contribution for the cemetery as a public, infrastructural facility. The grave type-specific fees primarily depend on the size of the grave site and the type of burial. There are also fees that the respective undertaker invoices the municipality.
When voting on which method the cemetery fees should be adopted as statutes, there was a stalemate with ten votes to ten, so the councilors rejected both methods. The issue will now be back on the agenda at the May meeting.
Uli Singer