The wheels of justice – or state regulation – often turn at a depressingly slow pace. It’s easy to sympathize with Myron King, one of the local residents who had to wait four years to get some action on problems at Lawrence’s Memorial Park Cemetery.

“That’s the trouble with government,” King said this week. “We make laws but don’t enforce them.”

It’s a discouraging situation for King and others who became aware of maintenance problems at the cemetery four years ago. About a year ago, a lack of action by the cemetery’s owners caused Memorial Park to be turned over to the city of Lawrence to maintain. This week, the Kansas Attorney General’s Office accused the cemetery owners of illegally diverting trust funds to a bank account in Alabama. The money was intended to be used for current and future upkeep at the cemetery.

What was particularly discouraging is that the situation might have been discovered much sooner if the cemetery owners had been forced to fulfill their legal responsibility to file financial disclosure forms with the Kansas Secretary of State. Although those forms hadn’t been filed since 2000, the Secretary of State’s Office was trying to “work with them and talk with them to bring them into compliance.”

While officials were working and talking, the cemetery owners apparently were socking away trust funds from not only Memorial Park but also other cemeteries and funeral homes in at least six other states.

The cemetery isn’t the only recent case in which state action seemed to come too slowly. Last week, after years of serious inspection violations, state and local officials finally took action to cut off Medicaid payments to Lake View Manor nursing home. The care and administrative deficiencies never seemed to get fixed, but the state kept working and talking (sound familiar?) with the home in hopes something would change.

Due process is important. We wouldn’t want state agencies to rush into unwarranted enforcement actions that could have been avoided with better communication. Many local residents surely are grateful for the actions now being taken, but sometimes, it seems, it takes too long to quit talking and start acting.

Maybe in both the cemetery case and the nursing home matter, state agencies were moving as quickly as they could to investigate and correct the situation, but it’s easy to see why those directly affected in those cases might think otherwise.