City of Bellingham Parks and Recreation Committee

### Meeting Overview The Parks and Recreation Committee of the Bellingham City Council met on December 8, 2025, to review two fee-related proposals: establishing new services and fees for Bayview Cemetery, and updating Parks and Recreation Department facility use fees including a new commercial use permit system. ### Key Terms and Concepts **Terramains:** The organic compost product that results from terramation, a process where human remains are composted. The finished product comes in 15-25 bags weighing about 25 pounds each and can be scattered in designated areas or buried in shallow graves. **Commercial Use Permit:** A new fee structure for businesses and organizations that use city parks regularly to run commercial programs without actually renting facilities. Examples include fitness classes, camps, and guided tours that advertise meeting in parks. **Cemetery Enterprise Fund:** A separate city fund that operates Bayview Cemetery, designed to be self-supporting through fees charged for cemetery services rather than using general tax revenue. **Facility Use Fees:** Charges for renting city park facilities like pavilions, shelters, athletic fields, and indoor spaces. These fees help offset maintenance and staffing costs. **Memorial Garden Ground Space:** A cemetery service offering 4-square-foot plots for memorial stones without any burial of remains. Bayview Cemetery has mapped out 90 such spaces. **User Conflicts:** When multiple groups want to use the same park space at the same time, creating scheduling problems and potentially overusing popular areas like the Cordata splash park. **Expedited Fee:** An additional charge ($75 in this case) for processing applications faster than the standard timeline. ### Key People at This Meeting | Name | Role / Affiliation | |---|---| | Edwin H. "Skip" Williams | Committee Chair, City Council Member | | Hannah Stone | Committee Member, City Council Member | | Jace Cotton | Committee Member, City Council Member | | Nicole Oliver | Parks and Recreation Director | | Richard Griffin | Cemetery Sexton and Park Facilities Manager | | Steve Janschewski | Parks and Recreation Staff | | Melissa Bianconi | Parks and Recreation Staff | | Karen Regenball | Parks and Recreation Staff | | Councilmember Anderson | City Council Member (not on committee) | ### Background Context These proposals reflect the city's ongoing effort to make park and cemetery services financially sustainable while responding to changing community needs. For the cemetery, there's growing demand for alternative burial options like terramation, which reflects broader cultural shifts toward environmentally conscious end-of-life choices. The cemetery has also faced space pressures, leading staff to plot out 350 new traditional gravesites. The parks fee increases address a common challenge in municipal government: rising costs for maintenance and staffing while trying to keep public facilities accessible. The commercial use permit system tackles a specific problem where businesses were using parks as their workplace without paying fees, creating conflicts with regular park users and additional maintenance burdens. The proposed 5% annual increase authority would eliminate the need for staff to return to council each year for routine fee adjustments, streamlining the process while keeping pace with inflation. ### What Happened — The Short Version The committee reviewed two separate fee proposals. First, they approved new cemetery services including terramains disposal, memorial garden plots, and donated benches. There was a brief discussion about a typo in the memorial bench pricing that will be corrected. Second, they approved increases to park facility rental fees and created a new commercial use permit system. This system will charge businesses $75 to apply, then $1 per person per day for nonprofits or $2 per person per day for for-profit organizations that run regular programs in parks. The committee discussed how to distinguish between casual park users and commercial operations that need permits. Both measures passed unanimously and will go to the full city council for final approval. ### What to Watch Next • Full City Council vote on both resolutions at the evening meeting on December 8, 2025 • Implementation of the commercial use permit system over the next year as staff identify and contact existing commercial users • Monitoring of how the new fee structures affect cemetery revenue and park usage patterns ---