Memorial bench sticker shock
City orders families to pay upkeep decades after original purchase
When longtime Edmontonian Nora May Dalton (nee Crossley) died in August 1996, her family scattered the 82-year-old’s ashes in Queen Elizabeth Park, where she often played as a child.
Her children also purchased a memorial bench in the park from the City of Edmonton. It was installed in the park in 1997, bearing a plaque with Dalton’s name and overlooking the North Saskatchewan River. Twenty-one years later, Dalton’s bench plaque is gone, replaced by a City of Edmonton advertisement after her daughter refused to pay $2,500 in newly introduced upkeep fees for a bench she believed she already owned.
A city spokesman said Friday changes to its Benchmark Program are on hold, and that some commemorative plaques pried off the benches may return if families wish.
“That’s just wonderful, and so good for the other people, too, that have been affected,” Dalton’s daughter, Barbara Dalton, said Friday after hearing of the change.
Nora Dalton had no grave or niche at a columbarium — the bench was her final resting place, Dalton said earlier last week.
In April, Dalton received a letter from the city saying rising costs of keeping up the commemorative benches meant she would have to pay $2,500 now, and every decade thereafter, to keep her mother’s name on the bench.
She was astounded by the insensitivity with which the city introduced the changes, she said.
“There’s a reverence around a headstone. There was a reverence for me around the bench,” Dalton said. “Mom was OK — that she was there ... Now there’s no tribute. There’s nothing out there that memorialized my mother. It kind of feels like I let her down.”
Information the city faxed to Dalton in 1996 said families can honour friends and loved ones “through the purchase of a park bench” for $2,100. Each bench, it said, will bear a bronze plaque “to serve as a lasting tribute.”
When the demand for more money arrived, Dalton said it ran afoul of the original purchase agreement.
In an email reply, Benchmark program co-ordinator Amanda Brown wrote that relatives of some people commemorated on the older benches have moved away from the city or died.
“With families interested in these highly sought after locations, we want to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to commemorate loved ones without compromising our park standards or aesthetics by overcrowding with benches,” Brown wrote.
There are about 700 commemorative benches around the city, including 600 installed before the program changed in August 2016 to require families to pay maintenance fees every 10 years.
Dalton did not want to pay the additional fee, and asked that her mother’s plaque be returned to her.
She has yet to receive it. On Thursday, the bench that once bore Dalton’s name had a smaller plaque in place saying:
“Looking for a meaningful way to remember your loved ones? Visit edmonton.ca/benchmark.”
This year, the city began contacting people who paid for commemorative benches between 1995 and 1998 to explain changes to the program and the new maintenance costs, said city spokesman Rohit Sandhu in a Friday email.
The city is revisiting its decision to ask for the new bench maintenance fees in light of public feedback, Sandhu said. Staff will also contact families affected, he said.
“We will provide interim options, which may include reinstalling plaques, to families who have made the decision to renew or not renew while this review is underway.”
Dalton said she’d like her mother’s plaque back on the bench, “like, yesterday. That would be so wonderful.”