MINOT — Work on the Center Minot Hill Cemetery expansion is nearly complete for the season, Town Administrator Arlan Saunders told selectmen Monday night.

Much of the work was accomplished with the $22,000 raised at March town meeting.

“Everything has just fallen into place,” Saunders said. “We’re way ahead of where we thought we’d be, probably by about $20,000.”

Saunders noted that L&L Timber of Livermore cut and cleared the three-acre lot at no cost to the town, making its money by selling chips to a biomass plant; Washburn & Son did the stumping and rough grading at a favorable “help your hometown” rate; and Main-Land Development went “above and beyond” what might be expected in surveying the entire 16.41 acre addition the town purchased for future cemetery expansion and mapping the three acres under current development.

In the final grading, loam and seeding, great savings were achieved, Saunders pointed out, because of the prideful work of the town’s highway crew and Rent-It’s Jim Pittman’s donation of the use of a loam screen, excavator and bulldozer.

“We owe big thank-yous to the highway department, Jim Pittman and everybody who’s worked on the project,” Selectman Eda Tripp said.

The cemetery fence and gates for the two roads that come off Center Minot Hill Road to serve the cemetery are also being paid for with this year’s $22,000. Saunders said they will be installed in the next two weeks.

The Cemetery Committee will, in the next few months, Tripp said, finish work on the ordinance that sets the rules for the cemetery’s operation, the actual sale and development of lots, and submit the ordinance for voter approval at next March’s town meeting.

She said voters will also be asked for money to complete the cemetery expansion, to pay for laying out the individual lots.

Tripp estimated the three-acre expansion could contain about 842 burial lots and that, if all goes well, the first of these could be for sale within a year.

In other business, selectmen appointed Jim Brown to serve as an alternate member of the Planning Board. Saunders also told selectmen that Don Fortin has put the paving for Fortin Drive out to bid and that developer Lloyd Poland will be cutting the right of way for his 13-lot Village Wood Estates subdivision in West Minot soon, but most likely won’t begin construction until spring.