Tulare County Board of Supervisors, acting as the Tulare Public Cemetery District, appointed Trilby Barton as the new manager of the district at its March 24 meeting.
Barton has been the district’s management consultant since Oct. 29. The board of supervisors has been acting as the district’s board of trustees since July 1.
“This was a competitive process, but Trilby’s experience, determination, and willingness to take on a challenge made her the right person for this job,” said Supervisor Pete Vander Poel, chair of the Tulare Public Cemetery District Board of Trustees, in a release.
“I’m very honored to be able to work with the community of Tulare,” Barton said about her appointment. “Tulare is very near and dear to my heart. There are a lot of my mentors that have helped shape me become the leader I am today who are buried in the cemeteries there, so it’s an honor for me to be there and help take care of them and make improvements.”
Barton has a degree in agriculture science with a minor in ag communications, which she explains helps her cemetery work.
“There’s a lot of crossover, obviously, between agriculture and cemeteries,” she said. “You’ve got irrigation, growing grass, and there’s a lot of science to that.”
Her ag education actually started years before college as the daughter of a fourth-generation farmer, growing up irrigating and working around farm equipment.
“I worked for an engineering and consulting firm for 14 years, where I established the public outreach sector of the company,” she said. “I worked a lot with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act when the GSAs were forming, and then also when the Irrigated Lands Regulatory Program was coming about.
“I worked with a lot of farmers in special districts, water and irrigation districts, so I have a lot of experience and knowledge of how special districts operate,” she said.
Barton became district manager of the Woodlake Public Cemetery District in May 2022. Two years later, Woodlake was recognized as “2024 Cemetery of the Year” by the Public Cemetery Alliance.
Barton recalled the challenges she faced when she started working at Woodlake Cemetery.
“When I first started there, we didn’t have any equipment that operated,” she said. “There wasn’t a blade of green grass on the place. The irrigation wasn’t functional. The office had 30 years’ worth of unopened mail. I just began working project-by-project on getting things turned around.”
As district management consultant for the Tulare Public Cemetery District, Barton has been working under County Administrative Officer Jason Britt, who has been acting as the cemetery district manager.
Barton compared the similarities between the situation in Tulare and the challenges she initially faced in Woodlake.
“There’s equipment that doesn’t run,” she said about Tulare. “There hasn’t really been any lawn nutrition, but it’s not as deplorable. There’s just some cleanup work to do to get things back on track, which we’ve been doing.
“One of the biggest things that we’ve accomplished was about the insurance issue, which is what led to the county taking over the board,” Barton said. “We were able to complete the risk management accreditation program, and that was a big achievement for us.”
Barton has studied the cemetery district’s financial records, which have been a concern for some city residents.
“I don’t think there was any fraud,” she said. “That the previous management wasn’t necessarily set up for success. I think that things were not done properly before, and that just kind of continued.
“I’ve gone through it with the county’s team, and we’ve got everything back on track,” she said. “We were able to migrate our payroll accounting and bookkeeping services to the county’s payroll accounting departments, which has really helped a lot, and it brings another layer of internal controls. One of the things that the public was concerned about was transparency and the checks and balances, and we’ve got that set up now.”
One of the big complaints before Barton started as the cemetery district’s management consultant was the condition of many of the headstones at Tulare Public Cemetery.
“The headstone situation is always ongoing at all cemeteries,” she said. “If it’s natural settling or natural wearing and tearing of the cement around the headstone, we’re not responsible for that, but if we break it with the equipment, then we’ll make it right.”
Barton said that she will soon be working to resolve headstone issues.
“We’ll get to it, but we’ve had to make sure we kept our insurance and got through the finances,” she said. “Those are the things that are important to keep the doors open, and then we’ll keep moving from there.”
Barton’s role as district manager includes 26 hours of work a week. In addition to her work for the Tulare Public Cemetery District, she will continue managing the Woodlake Cemetery District, dual responsibilities she has been maintaining since the end of October.
Her first day as district cemetery manager will be April 1, the day after her contract as district management consultant ends.
This article originally appeared on Visalia Times-Delta: Trilby Barton named Tulare Public Cemetery District Manager
Reporting by Steve Pastis, Visalia Times-Delta / Visalia Times-Delta
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