The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

Today's Front Page

March 7, 2010

Bill designed to protect access to rural cemeteries

By Mannix Porterfield Register-Herald Reporter

CHARLESTON — As the years roll by, life imparts many nuggets of wisdom, and two of them were shared by Sen. John Pat Fanning this past week.

“There are two things you don’t do in the South,” Fanning, D-McDowell, told fellow panelists on the Energy, Industry and Mining Committee.

“Don’t fool with a man’s dog and don’t bother his cemetery.”

His latter admonition directly figured in a bill Chairman Mike Green, D-Raleigh, steered out with a favorable recommendation — one that is designed to help families maintain access to cemeteries in rural locations.

“I’m just trying to protect people,” Fanning intoned.

Existing law forces grieving survivors to seek a court injunction once they are denied access to a cemetery.

Under HB4457, the intent is to enhance access, explained one of its supporters, the Rev. Dennis Sparks, director of the West Virginia Council of Churches.

“Many times the property owner, either out of neglect or intentionally, has destroyed an access road to a cemetery,” Sparks said. “So this bill is to help assure the access is provided.”

Initially, the issue arose out of concern that mining operations were blocking access roads to graveyards in rural settings, he explained.

“When they discovered they themselves were preventing access to sacred places, they wanted to do something about it, and we wanted to do something about it,” Sparks said.

As a result, the consensus was to accord everyone a means of working out the difficulty without resorting to court action.

“If you’ve had a cemetery on your property for 100 years and it’s a little walking trail, you don’t have to go build an access road that a car can drive on,” Sparks said.

“A walking trail is still that way. But if there was a road that was accessed by a Class A vehicle, that has to be maintained. Or if, for some reason, it would be destroyed, another one has to be put in its place that’s similar. That’s what we’re saying.”

Carol Warren, representing the Catholic Diocese, told Green’s committee that in some instances even families who went to court didn’t prevail.

“We feel like putting in this process, people at least will get a response,” she said.

Warren alluded to the difficulty in prescribing a bill that fits all situations.

“We can’t write something so broadly that it applies equally to an oil and gas company, and Farmer Brown, who just doesn’t want you to drive your vehicle across his property,” she said. “It’s hard to find a way to be fair to both of them.”

Warren advised the committee that the bill reflects “a lot of compromise on both sides.”

One portion obligates a landowner to notify the sheriff if he discovers a grave marker on his property.

Warren said she is convinced the bill will improve cemetery access and revealed that most instances of controversy don’t entail disputes with industrial operations.

“Just some landowner who is refusing to allow people to cross their property,” she added.

That cemetery access is an issue in a rural state wasn’t lost on Sen. Douglas Facemire, D-Braxton.

“Most of us live in rural areas,” he told fellow panelists. “The loss of a loved one is a pretty major thing in someone’s life. We ought to take every measure we can to protect people’s rights to egress and ingress into cemeteries.”

Sparks agreed with that, suggesting the Legislature has a sacred duty to protect one’s ability to attend to gravesites of departed loved ones.

“This won’t do it all,” he said. “But it’s a great start.”

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com

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