FINDING OUT WHERE THE BONES ARE BURIED To keep better track of where Santa Monicans have been laid to rest, the City Council is expected to award a contract to Intra U.S.A. for the conversion of all interment information and records into digital form so they can be preserved and more easily accessible.
The contract is in the amount of $127,350, plus a 10 percent contingency of $12,735.
More than 60,000 former Santa Monica residents have been buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery and Mausoleum, a 26.6-acre site stretching along Pico Boulevard, which the City Hall owns and operates. Services provided at the cemetery include the selling of grave sites, niches, and crypt spaces; the selling of urns, vases; interring and disinterring human remains; and setting grave markers, according to a city staff report.
Currently, all of those services are tracked manually, with records being accessed daily by cemetery staff. Paper cards are used to store information while paper and cloth maps record who is buried where and which spaces are available, city staff said. The quality of those records has deteriorated over time and they have become increasingly difficult to read, according to a city staff report.
City staff said digitizing the information will be more efficient and accurate in accounting for cemetery business transactions. The automated system also will provide increased security through data back-
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 11, 2006. Read the original PDF.