031326...R LIB-CEMETERY 3...Liberty...03-13-26...Liberty Twp. trustee Arnie Clebone, left, and Belmont Park cemetery Superintendent Ron Talyor of Hubbard inside the aging mausoleum...by R. Michael Semple

LIBERTY — Few individuals have a deep knowledge of the Belmont Park Cemetery like Ron Taylor.

“It was opened up in 1913 — it was actually opened by a company, then the cemetery took it over in 1918,” said Taylor, the cemetery’s superintendent. “There was a fire there in the 1960s that actually had some old news clippings from it and stuff, so they had to do some repairs back then.”

Taylor, who has overseen the cemetery for the past 31 years, understands the help the Belmont Park mausoleum — a 4,500-square-foot building with 500 vaults and a chapel — requires.

The mausoleum was part of the 30 acres of developed cemetery land that the township began assuming responsibilities for under the Ohio Revised Code in June. Trustees approved authorizing a capital funding application for a project totaling $270,000, with a $25,000 match, in a last-minute resolution at their meeting Monday to provide support.

“The main thing is the roof needs to be repaired, and of course, it’s a costly venture nowadays,” Taylor said.

Taylor said the Belmont Park Cemetery Association previously attempted to explore ways to improve the mausoleum, but operating a cemetery has become a tough business in recent years — going from 350 burials in 1995 to 140 in 2025.

“The cremation rate has risen rapidly, and in our area, the population decline obviously has some effect on our cemetery business,” Taylor said. “It’s just not us, it’s all around.”

Taylor said the mausoleum opened five years after the cemetery, but houses graves predating that.

“Because the building itself wasn’t open, they would have disinterred people and a family would have come in and bought crypts,” Taylor said. “There’s some over there that say 1860 for (date of) death, so they were probably buried in another cemetery and they disinterred them.”

Taylor said the roof is the mausoleum’s major project, but it also requires other improvements, acknowledging the chipping paint that lay strewn across its floors.

“Some gutters and stuff like that, moving forward with fixing the interior — like we have a service in here,” Taylor said. “We come in and sweep it, clean it, turn on the heat and stuff for people to be out of the elements.”

Trustee Arnie Clebone said Taylor has no problem managing the facility’s day-to-day operations, but it is a matter of making capital improvements, which is why the township is approaching the state for funding.

Fiscal Officer Matthew Connelly said officials are seeking the capital funding to preserve the mausoleum and its chapel through the state to avoid using residents’ real estate taxes paid to the township.

Connelly explained officials cannot use the cemetery’s $2,407,516 endowment fund, which they expect to receive later this month, to pay for the improvements because the township is only supposed to live off of the endowment’s returns.

“We’re supposed to be the fiduciaries of it and only live off the interest; it has its own special sort of trust language that says you can’t spend the principal of this,” Connelly said. “We’re kind of going off of what they had done all the years they had it and never spent anything but the interest on it.”

Connelly said the endowment fund generates approximately $100,000 a year in interest, but it takes more than that to operate the cemetery.

“It does make some money on its own, with the sale of grave sites and burial fees that the deceased’s family pays the funeral home for, and then the funeral home pays us,” Connelly said.