An additional five mill, five-year levy which would have generated $55,000 a year for Spring Grove Cemetery, placed on the ballot by the City of East Liverpool failed to pass.

Of the approximately 5,400 people registered to vote in East Liverpool, 2,775 voted on the cemetery levy with 1,186 voting in favor and 1,589 voting against it.

The levy failed to pass by 403 votes.

Mayor Bobby Smith, who proposed the levy, said the failure didn’t come as too much of a surprise for him.

He took it as the public interest for it not really being there at this time and is hopeful they will think differently next time and that next time the city will be able to sell it better and get it passed.

Smith isn’t sure when the issue will be placed back on the ballot since there are other things the city needs. He said he would like to get it back on the ballot as soon as they can, but they would need to try to sell it better and explain better why they even have it in the first place.

People don’t understand that we haven’t run the cemetery forever. We just started doing it in the last 15 years, Smith said.

“It’s not like we want to be in the cemetery business by no means there’s no money in it, but yet, everybody uses it, it’s one of those deals,” Smith said.

The city basically inherited the cemetery after it was bankrupted, and they were forced to take it over. Since the cemetery is located in both the city and the township, both municipalities were required to take over the portions that sit withing their limits.

For now, Smith intends to use this as a learning experience as to what the peoples’ opinion is on the cemetery.

Smith said they would have to try to figure out how to manage the cemetery as there is not enough money to do that. He noted that keeping the grass cut and maintaining the cemetery has been done for years by volunteers.

“It’s kind of a slap in the volunteers’ face that the people wouldn’t support it when the volunteers have been doing it since the city took it over,” Smith said. “To do it for free is an awful lot to ask of people on a daily basis. Winter, spring, summer and fall you got people up there volunteering to maintain the grounds. The grounds suffer and it shouldn’t suffer, but we will move forward and try to fix it and figure out some other way to get through until we have a solution.