Sunday, May 28, 2017

Berliner Gets Tobytown a Gate. Cemetery Fence to Be Removed. No Acknowledgement of Unmarked Graves.


HOC proposed gate to nowhere.
On February 23, 2017, Councilmember Roger Berliner asked the Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC) of Montgomery County to restore the cemetery in Tobytown “to a dignified state and to develop a plan for its on-going maintenance.”

In response to that request, HOC presented plans to the residents of Tobytown on May 23, 2017, for a gate for the Tobytown cemetery.  A drawing of the proposed gate is shown in the image to the left and the plans for the gate are shown in the documents below.  

In addition to a gate, HOC staff announced that the existing fence around the Tobytown cemetery would be removed.  The gate structure would not be connected to anything and the boundaries of the cemetery would no longer be marked under this proposal.

Many of the graves in the cemetery are unmarked and HOC staff did not present any plans to mark the graves or memorialize those that are buried in this historic cemetery.  

HOC did not present the residents with any plans for ongoing maintenance of the cemetery. 

When asked about the administration of a cemetery, the HOC staff at the May 23rd meeting refused to discuss the permitting or oversight process for Maryland cemeteries.

2 comments:

  1. Plain and simple: If HOC is destroying and/or removing the fence that surrounds this historic graveyard, then HOC must replace it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What are the true boundaries of the cemetery? Right now no one knows. A reputable independent study, that people trust, needs to be completed to identify the boundaries of the cemetery before any new fence is installed. There does need to be a new fence as is common around cemeteries, such as a wrought iron fence. R-E-S-P-E-C-T

    ReplyDelete

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