News photo by Julie Riddle Flattened dirt fills a dip in a corner of the Sanborn Township Cemetery. Mounds of dirt and roots filling the space a month ago riled residents.

OSSINEKE — A month after Sanborn Township residents expressed concern about roots and dirt piled in the township cemetery, the debris is gone, and a section of the cemetery is on its way to being ready to house more burial plots.

The removal of the waist-high piles was a project planned for this spring anyway, according to Sanborn Township Supervisor Ken Gauthier.

Roots were pulled from the piles — temporarily dumped in unused space at the cemetery last fall when a ditch was dug on Ossineke Road — and thrown into an out-of-the-way hole, while the dirt was used to level off a deep dip in one corner of the cemetery.

That corner should be ready to be used for burials within a year, Gauthier thinks.

Area residents last month approached the township board requesting the piles that they considered unsightly be removed.