Lawrence Memorial Park Cemetery is underfunding its maintenance operations and could face state action if finances aren’t in shape by mid-December.

“They’re basically out of compliance with state law,” said Jesse Borjon, a spokesman for the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office, which this fall audited the cemetery’s finances.

Deborah Flint, one of dozens of Lawrence residents to complain about shoddy upkeep at the East Lawrence cemetery, said she wasn’t surprised by the state finding. The graves of her grandparents, she said, regularly disappear under a sea of uncut grass.

“This is has been the worst year since (her grandparents) have been out there,” Flint told the Journal-World. “I can’t even find the graves.”

Randall Davis, an Arkansas-based district operations manager for Houston-based Mike Graham & Associates, the firm that owns the cemetery, did not answer Journal-World phone calls seeking comment.

Two dozen Lawrence residents complained in August to the Journal-World that the cemetery was poorly maintained and that they often had to bring their own gardening tools to keep gravesites in good condition. The criticisms emerged after vandalism at the cemetery prompted relatives to check the condition of family graves there.

When the complaints became public, state officials said they would conduct an audit — required for every cemetery every few years — to determine whether officials were complying with state laws requiring cemeteries to spend money made from the sale of burial plots on maintenance.

Borjon said state law required private cemeteries to deposit 15 percent — or a minimum $25 per plot — from burial plot sales into a permanent maintenance fund. Officials have said there was no requirement on how much should be spent.

“Basically, we have audited the number of burial lots they have sold,” Borjon said. “The amount they have in their permanent maintenance fund does not meet the percentage required by state law.”

A state audit of Memorial Park Cemetery has found the maintenance to be inadequate. A group of Lawrence residents has protested the site's condition.

Borjon declined to give a more detailed accounting of the cemetery’s finances. He said the cemetery had until mid-December to correct the shortfall or the matter would be turned over to the Kansas Attorney General’s Office.

Such actions are rare, Borjon said.

“I think it’s safe to say that typically the cemeteries are in compliance,” he said.

Davis last month suggested that complaints about Memorial Park’s maintenance were overblown, but he said he was working to remedy any problems.

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“I personally mowed the cemetery,” Davis told the Journal-World at the time. “I didn’t see that the (burial) plots looked that bad.”

But Flint said her family had continued to do its own weeding and maintenance of burial sites. Otherwise, she said, little gets done.

“I was pretty upset when I went out there,” Flint said. “It was atrocious.”