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Hamilton owes over $1M to its Cemeteries Trust Funds due to banking error


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The Hamilton city auditor released an audit on Thursday about municipal cemeteries and discovered the city owes more than $1M to its Cemetery Trust Funds.

The City of Hamilton operates 69 cemeteries at an annual cost of $4.5M. Those same burial sites bring in $2.7M in revenue. A recent audit of Municipal Cemeteries Trust Funds found that the city owes the funds $1.2M because of a banking error made 22 years ago.

The city’s director of financial planning Brian McMullen says that $1.2M accumulated slowly over the past two decades. In 2009 the balance was $884,000. He says that money likely ended up in one of the city’s reserves.

“The city has many reserves, the one that those funds would typically go to would be what we refer to as a tax stabilization reserve. We use that for many purposes and then we need to replenish it every once in a while with surpluses from subsequent years. That particular reserve I think would be in the $3M range at this time,” McMullen said.

Cemetery assets are in three separate trusts that total $21.6M and are related to the management of cemetery property, services, and supplies.

The goal is to repay that debt to the trusts in the next few weeks.