California Cemeteries Promised 'Perpetual Care.' The State Found $1 Million of the Trust Fund in Gold Bars.

Every California cemetery that sells a grave, niche, or crypt is required by law to peel off a cut of the sale and lock it into a trust fund it can never touch except to invest.▸ Only the income that fund earns may ever be spent, and only on one thing: mowing, watering, weed control, road repair, and headstone maintenance, "in perpetuity" — California Health & Safety Code §8726 says so in those words. It's the financial mechanism behind the phrase cemeteries print on every contract: perpetual care. At four cemeteries owned and managed by Bay Area businessman Buck Kamphausen — Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, Skyview Memorial Lawn in Vallejo, Mount Tamalpais Cemetery in San Rafael, and Chapel of the Light in Fresno — California's Cemetery and Funeral Bureau spent three years documenting where that money actually went. In February 2025, a Solano County judge let the state seize it.

The law is specific about how much has to go in and where it's allowed to go.▸ Under the version of Health & Safety Code §8738 now in force, a cemetery must deposit at least 10% of a grave or crypt's net sale price — or $250, whichever is greater, up to a $10,000 cap — into its endowment care fund at the time of sale; niches and scattered remains carry a $150 floor. (The version of the statute in effect for most of the conduct at issue here, quoted directly in the Bureau's own filing, set the floor lower still: 6% or $200, capped at $6,000.) Once the money is in, §8751 narrows what it can be invested in to a short, conservative list: government bonds, first mortgages on improved real estate, income-producing real estate, and FDIC-insured deposits. Gold bullion is not on that list.

The Bureau's 2022 audit of Mount Tamalpais found the fund working nothing like the statute describes.▸ Money moved in and out for "personal expenditures" the cemetery's own records didn't support; deposits included checks from unrelated businesses, property renters, and — in the Bureau's words — "self-payments from the cemetery's general account or from entirely different cemeteries linked to Respondent Kamphausen"; and what wasn't moving sat "largely uninvested, in bank accounts where most of the deposits were uninsured," per the Second Amended Accusation the Bureau filed against all four cemeteries. Separately, attorneys general trial evidence — reported by the Vallejo Sun — showed more than $1 million of fund money went into solid gold bought in transactions weeks apart in June 2022, stored without insurance and, by the state's account, worth roughly $400,000 more by the time of trial. The Attorney General's office argued the whole pattern violated California's Prudent Investor Act.

The mismanagement wasn't hidden — it was cited, repeatedly, for years, and the fines kept getting paid without the underlying problem getting fixed.▸ Each cemetery is required to file an Annual Endowment Care Fund and Special Care Fund Report every year. Between 2019 and 2022 the Bureau issued citation after citation to Evergreen, Skyview, Mount Tamalpais, and Chapel of the Light for filing those reports late — each carrying a $2,000 fine. Each fine got paid. The reports still didn't show up on time: per the Bureau's own accusation, Evergreen's 2018 report arrived more than 900 days after the citation that demanded it; Skyview's 2019 report, more than 1,000 days late.

Mount Tamalpais also drew a separate citation in January 2020 for failing to maintain its grounds and control vermin — a $500 fine.▸ It didn't fix the underlying problem either: Bureau field representatives inspected the cemetery six times between June 2021 and April 2023, responding to consumer complaints each time, and kept finding the same thing — grounds "dried out and brown," "substantial uncontrolled weed growth," and "extensive evidence of rodent activity," with grave markers obscured by dirt and debris "evidently as the result of the rodent activity."

The regulatory endgame took years to arrive.▸ The Bureau filed its original accusation against all four cemeteries on June 9, 2022. That same month, per reporting from the Vallejo Sun, Kamphausen and co-respondent Joshua Voss transferred cemetery ownership to a newly formed nonprofit called Evergreen Ministries — a move the Bureau read as an attempt to move the trust funds outside its jurisdiction. When the Bureau went to Solano County Superior Court in July 2023 seeking control of the funds, the court initially sided with Kamphausen, granting a temporary restraining order in September 2023; California's Court of Appeal vacated that order in December.

On October 30, 2023, all four cemetery entities, along with Kamphausen and co-respondent Edward Wilkes, signed a Stipulated Surrender of License and Order, effective January 2, 2024: every Certificate of Authority license and cemetery manager license involved was surrendered outright, and the respondents agreed to owe the Bureau $59,781.45, jointly and severally, in investigation and enforcement costs.▸ The fight over the endowment and special care funds themselves continued as a separate civil matter. After a trial running several months, Judge Christine A. Carringer ruled — in an order reported January 30, 2025, and covered by the Vallejo Sun on February 4 — that the state could serve as conservator of the funds, finding that Evergreen Ministries "does not appear to be a religious organization" and "was formed for the purpose of avoiding governmental regulation, oversight and taxation." The following month, the Bureau issued cease-and-desist orders shutting down all four cemeteries entirely — per ABC7 San Francisco, each was fined $5,000 for continuing to operate on licenses it had already surrendered.

Mount Tamalpais Cemetery has operated in San Rafael since 1879.▸ In 1989, the Tiburon synagogue Congregation Kol Shofar bought 1,200 plots there for its congregants — it still holds roughly 200 unsold, per KQED — meaning the families who bought the other 1,000 paid, in part, for a perpetual-care promise the fund wasn't keeping. KQED's reporting captured what that looked like on the ground: families describing erosion and shoulder-high weeds a year after a funeral, roads too degraded to trust without hiking boots, and — in at least one case — a family member trimming the weeds around a relative's grave herself, because no one else was going to.

That's the labor side of this story, and it's a modest one in dollar terms.▸ The median annual wage for a landscaping and groundskeeping worker nationally is $39,150, per federal wage data. The $1 million-plus that went into uninsured gold alone — money the statute required to sit invested in bonds or insured deposits, earning income for exactly this kind of labor — would have covered roughly 25 groundskeepers for a full year. Instead, families were doing the weeding themselves while the fund's money sat in a safe.

The "$50 million-plus" and "$1 million-plus" figures are drawn from contemporaneous court reporting and a law firm press release describing the same Solano County ruling and trial record; neither figure has been itemized in a single public accounting document as of publication. The groundskeeper-wage comparison is illustrative — it measures what the gold purchase's dollar value could fund at a national median wage, not money actually spent on labor.