05/11/2018
Good Morning all, well here is what I know about the vote to incorporate last Sunday, the count was 26 yes and 131 not to incorporate. The outcome is not a surprise to anyone. From the onset of this” push to vote” it became very clear that Mission Funeral Home and its Operations Officer Michelle, would do anything, say anything and spend any amount of monies necessary to prevent transparency and accountability that a nonprofit association would have brought to the table.
They even went as far as to include a second item to vote upon, as to when the next time anyone could hold a vote to incorporate!
As I understand it 9 votes were cast to revote in one year and 115 votes were cast to wait 10 years before another vote could be called for. So here is what is funny about that. They voted not to incorporate, so there is no legal body or group with any authority to propose such an item. The 10-year timeframe along with the vote has absolutely no authority or bearing on the ability to call for another vote in the future!
While I get that some of you on this FB page could care less about the crematory, what they pay or who they pay it to. Or if it appears that something illegal is happing on the west part of the cemetery, but what you do not know is what the agenda of Mission Funeral home is. In the next few weeks, I will finally be sharing with you the many documents, as well as the audio recording, 2:40:00 mins of a public meeting and you will hear it in their own words.
What they did do is spend thousands of dollars in legal notices in the newspaper as well as a website, domain name, and hrs. to put up content, Most of it was misleading and WRONG, then they paid of off-duty Travis County Sheriff’s Officers to stand by and a retired judge (not in an official capacity) to be a Facilitator of the events. All of this so they could protect the very questionable lease of public cemetery land for a private business- Superior Cremations, who we are told has a 50-year lease for the cost of $8.33 / Month to operate that business. That’s one hell of a deal; you cannot rent 1 sq ft of space for $8.33 anywhere in Travis County little own a building the size of which they operate in.
I told many of you on this site, this vote had no bearing on the long term. They would vote no, we would continue to document the site and educate plot owners and descendants and look at the options and perhaps in the fall or next spring call for another vote.
So we have come full circle and are back to where we started. You are let again with a trustee system and each to manage their own section, with no legal owner or group with title to the land.
What has happened is the trustees of the Hispanic section along with their business partners Mission Funeral Home have shot themselves in the foot.
When I say shot in the foot I refer to the fact that an association could have legitimized the practice of the Hispanic trustees to sell grave space’s for a fee, now they are quick to say they do not sell grave spaces, that they have a onetime donation for maintenance, but it is a mandatory donation .... which is a fee, and they set the fee based on who you are, if you have family in the cemetery or if you are part of their family and your people helped in the past with caring for the site. It can be anywhere from $125.00 - $200 - $300.00, all of which goes into a comingled personal bank account. As licensed funeral professions they know better, but they just want to keep things the way they have been! The amount of monies involved make this a misdemeanor, the reality is the DA would most likely not prosecute, but I feel once they have a look at the facts, and listen to the audio recording that practice of a mandatory donation will stop, and it will once again be a free cemetery as it was intended in the 1934 deed.
It became clear early on that the whole cemetery has some important issues that should be addressed such as the legal size of the cemetery is listed as 3.11 acres but yet it now covers 5.0 acres! When you look at the older plats and the shape of the site, that little point, it is very possible that the NE portion of the Hispanic section is not on cemetery property.
Hopefully, we have addressed the old practice of illegal dumping of trash to the west of the business and “Housekeeping” issues in the area surrounding the business that was addressed in the series of YouTube videos. I still shake my head when I hear Michelle try to support the use of the old outhouse which was within a few feet of gravesites stating that “a gross potty is better than no potties when you have a little girl doing the p*e p*e dance, that boys are different they can go behind a tree”
