Orem Public Works Director Bruce Chesnut got no further than, "This proposal is what the existing life of the cemetery is as it sits now" during a City Council work session last week before being interrupted.

"The what of the cemeteryfi" Councilman Les Campbell asked with a grin.

City Council 1, Chesnut 0. Nextfi

"Don't get buried in the details," Councilwoman Karen McCandless cracked.

Council 2, Chesnut 0. He jokingly said he'd finished the presentation, then everyone in the meeting sobered up and discussed the city's cemetery, its shrinking capacity and what to do about it.

According to the city's projections, based on a 5 percent annual growth rate in cemetery plot sales, the current available lots will be taken by 2012. If two unused lots, between the south road of the cemetery and the Murdock canal, are opened up for sale, lots will be sold out by 2017.

"We'll keep monitoring that," Chesnut said, adding the land was there should lots be bought at a higher rate than anticipated.

The discussion was an informal one, as the City Council didn't need to make any decisions regarding opening the new plots, which will happen in a few years. The bigger question is what will happen in the next several decades as Orem continues to grow.

Without open land, however, Orem faces a different struggle. The council said it recognizes that the demand for plots just makes land more important.

By 2017, when the cemetery is filled, the city will have opened the several acres on 800 East just south of the Murdock Canal; that land is a couple of soccer fields and a track, but is actually part of the cemetery and always has been. Once those lots open up, which will keep available space in the cemetery until 2034, the park will meet its demise.

"We've always known that that's what we wanted it for," Chesnut said.

Once that space is expired, the city will look at other options, including the need to acquire an additional 25 acres to meet demand in the next 50 years.

The current administration won't decide those options, but they discussed them. One of those, which Mayor Jerry Washburn dismissed as unlikely, was filling up the cemetery and then getting out of the burial business, leaving that to the private sector.

"It is certainly an option if somebody were to want to do that," he said.

However, a private owner would run into the same problem the city would; there's not a whole lot of land left in the city. For the city to expand the cemetery, it most likely would have to buy land and bump off the structures.

The other reason, he said, was the city committed to providing at-cost burial services for its residents, and as long as the land is there, that service will continue.

"I think we still have that ongoing obligation," he said.

Other options were somewhat less conventional. Councilwoman Shiree Thurston suggested using mausoleums, which house a number of caskets in one building, and Councilman Mark Seastrand asked about double-stacking coffins. The second option is available now, Chesnut said, but very few people in Orem opt to bury one coffin on top of another. But it's there should people want it.

"This community is traditional," he told the council.

McCandless also threw out a hypothetical situation in which the city got out of the burial business in the next few years and didn't even sell the lots that are now soccer fields. City Attorney Paul Johnson snuffed out that idea because a corner of the lot was acquired by eminent domain and has to be used for the purpose for which it was acquired.

The consensus from the meeting was to open the two lots in the next few years, monitor lot sales and gauge the need when the cemetery is closer to being filled.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D1.