Clear Lake council approves bid for new columbarium units at Municipal Cemetery

CLEAR LAKE — The City Council in Clear Lake this week approved a bid to construct additional columbarium units at the Municipal Cemetery.

Public Works Director Jason Korenberg says they put out a request for proposals on the project as the current columbarium is full. “What we were requesting, these units are a six-high niche, they have a total of 72 spaces in each columbarium. Each niche can essentially have two urns in each one. Quite a bit of space there. We also asked for an alternative bid as part of this for four granite benches to go along with these units. These proposals were all-inclusive, so they include the foundation, them bringing the crane in, them setting the unit, and then setting the pavers as well, so it’s all inclusive, everything.”

Korenberg says the project will likely be split between this budget year as well as the upcoming budget year that starts on July 1st.  “We have some expenses before July 1 on ordering. What my understanding was there was a very long lead time on these units to get shipped, so they probably won’t get shipped until the fall, but we could probably have a lot of that preliminary work done kind of in between, kind of split it over two budget seasons here. We had talked about a columbarium and budgeting it all for next year a while back, and then the amount of units that just kind of continuously sold that we brought it up that we had to accelerate the process a little bit.”

The council approved a bid from Memorial Park Cemetery of Mason City for $132,137 for the base portion of the project plus $5990 for the installation of the granite benches.