Clark County owns a lot of stuff, from the ordinary (vehicles) to the specialized (an apparently endless supply of road-construction cones) to the truly unusual (Myrna Williams). Another example from that last category: Somewhere in its inventory are the pebbled remains of thousands of people who have died in the county's arms. Indigents with no family, abandoned bodies, unidentified morgue meat. They've been cremated and shelved in crypts the county buys at Bunker Mortuary on north Las Vegas Boulevard. The county owns 17 now.
"We put about 250 urns with cremains in a crypt," says Nancy McLane, acting director of social services for the county. "They're catalogued, in case anyone wants to claim them." If not, they sit there, lonely ashes longing for a friendly mantle but gathering dust and time instead.
It's been nearly a year since the county switched to a policy of preferring cremation to burial—not only for Johns Doe, but also for low-income folks eligible for county burial assistance. Before that, "we were trying to go with the wishes of the family," McLane says. While nice, this was also expensive. In the 2003-2004 fiscal year, the county buried 628 people (at a cost of $688,805) and cremated 228 ($98,256). Total: 856 bodies, costing $787,061 to get rid of.
So the county examined the ways other jurisdictions handled their dead and noted that, for instance, LA uses cremation exclusively. Makes sense: Contracting a funeral home to incinerate bodies and pour the remains into an urn simply costs less than boxing the dead and settling them into a hole someone must be paid to dig. "So we decided to move in that direction, but to still make allowances for religious wishes of the family," McLane says.
The result: During fiscal year 2004-2005, in which the county operated for the first four months under the old policy and eight months under the revised approach, the numbers had flipped: 569 cremations ($242,895) and 172 burials ($215,249). Total: 741 cases costing $458,141.
"That's a savings of more than $300,000, or 42 percent, and we were under the program for only eight months," McLane told the County Commission on Tuesday in a report on the program.
The county doesn't cook down every body—if the family has religious objections or the corpse might be connected to a criminal case, it's buried for possible later disinterment on CSI. But most county clients are fine with the practice. Cremation has largely shed its stigma as a pagan or disrespectful practice. Since the early 1930s, when less than 5 percent of the nation's dead were cremated, the percentage had climbed to nearly 30 last year, mostly for the same reasons the county likes it: A.) it's cheaper, and B.) it's easier.
"It's not widely known," McLane says, that some people who can't afford to dispose of their loved one's bodies are eligible for a county assist. But she admits that the process is complicated, factoring in household size, income, insurance or veterans benefits to arrive at a "standard of need." McLane was before the County Commission Tuesday promising to streamline that process as part of a general package of social service efficiency measures.
The county has 5,700 cremains (at least a few crypts obviously buddying up with more than 250) that either no one has claimed or whose families couldn't afford to retrieve. They may be in the county's hands forever. "It may have come up a few times," McLane says, "but we have not made a decision to go for a time limit." That's the situation at deadline, anyway.