ANNAPOLIS – A bill to regulate crematories is a shoe-in to pass the House, a key committee chairman said Thursday, but then it will likely face the same Senate panel that rejected similar legislation last month.
Maryland has no laws regulating crematories, other than those governing their smokestack emissions overseen by the Maryland Department of the environment. The discovery last month of hundreds of rotting corpses outside a Georgia crematory has renewed interest in the issue.
“I would like to remind everybody that this passed (the House) last year, and everybody is in support,” said Delegate Michael E. Busch, D-Anne Arundel, chairman of the House Economic Matters Committee. “Your battle is across the street” in the Senate.
The bill, sponsored by Delegate Joan Cadden, D-Anne Arundel, would allow state agencies to perform annual surprise inspections of facilities, regulate operating procedures, and institute a $300 licensing fee for the state’s 24 crematories, with license renewal mandated every two years.
Crematories affiliated with cemeteries and the state’s only unaffiliated crematory in Beltsville would be regulated by the Office of Cemetery Oversight, while those affiliated with funeral homes would be overseen by the State Board of Morticians.
All witnesses at the hearing supported the bill, and the committee showed no signs that their support had wavered from last year.
“(The Georgia situation) gives more credence to this bill and its objectives,” said Steve Sklar, director of the Office of Cemetery Oversight. “There’s a tremendous unsettling impact among the public today.”
Similar legislation passed the House unanimously last year, but was rejected by the Senate Finance Committee, said Sklar. The committee also rejected an identical Senate bill Feb. 7, nine days before reports of the initial discovery of rotting corpses at the Tri-State Crematory in Noble, Ga.
The Senate committee has argued that a lack of complaints about crematories did not necessitate state regulation, but Sklar said his office has received several inquiries from consumers with concerns about crematories since the Georgia incident.
The argument that regulation is not necessary due to lack of consumer complaints is no longer valid, said Carolyn Jacobi, founder and chief executive officer of Eternal Justice, Inc., a non-profit organization that educates the public on death care industry issues.
Jacobi said she has collected 500 signatures from citizens in support of the legislation, and Sklar has consistently argued people would file complaints about crematories if they knew where to send them.
“If you build a complaint center, they will come,” he told the Senate committee last month.
Sklar’s office would also publish information about consumer rights in the purchase of crematory services to help the public understand crematory operations. Cadden’s bill will get a fair hearing in the Senate should it pass the House, said Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell, D-Baltimore County, chairman of the Finance Committee. “We’ve got to take another look at (the issue)” in light of the Georgia incident. -30-