Los Osos Valley Memorial Park has revamped its cemetery following several complaints about the conditions of the grounds just a few years ago.
Leah Bodily has been visiting her loved ones for years, including her childhood best friend, Sharla, at the cemetery off Los Osos Valley Road.
"Looking around, there are not really any dead spots like we had seen before. All the grave sites, the weeds are taken back,” Bodily, of Los Osos, said.
Back in 2022, KSBY looked into conditions at the cemetery, which has 10,000 grave sites.
“Gopher mounds would maybe sometimes take over half of the grave. There would be whole patches of dead grass where probably sprinklers weren’t working,” Bodily said.
According to the California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, due to vermin infestations, flooded gravestones, and grass covering grave sites, citations were issued in late 2022 and early 2023 by the bureau to the cemetery.
“It just made you feel like people didn’t care,” Bodily said.
“A lot of the grounds were mismanaged. They were not kept up, so that violates a lot of the endowment care that we are responsible for,” said Keyna Torres, Los Osos Valley Memorial Park general manager.
Linda Hood also has family buried at the Memorial Park. She says she complained about the grounds for three years, but nothing happened until a new management team arrived. It’s one she’s now part of.
“My husband passed away in 2019. He’s buried in the veteran’s section. Every week, my grandkids and I would come to put flowers, and it was a mess. I would cry and the grandkids would get upset,” said Hood, now a Los Osos Valley Memorial Park employee.
Keyna Torres joined the team last year.
“What we do periodically every week is we mow, trim, and replace any headstones that have been damaged,” Torres said.
Bodily says she started seeing improvements about two years ago. “It’s definitely better. Before, you really couldn’t see a lot of her name. The weeds had overgrown,” Bodily said.
“We had gophers all over the place, and you don’t see that anymore. We have a gopher company that comes in every week. You couldn’t see some headstones because the gophers had thrown dirt over. You don’t see that anymore,” Hood said.
Bodily says a lot of love and care have gone into the property.
“That makes you feel like this is somewhere that you’d want to come and visit or bury your loved ones,” Bodily said.
“Markers are being put in, the grounds are kept, we are having Veterans Day and Memorial Day,” Hood said.
