Councilmembers decided, again, Irvine will not pursue the construction of a veterans cemetery at the Great Park.
Furthermore, the city will retain its support for a proposed state and county-funded cemetery at Gypsum Canyon in Anaheim Hills — a proposal endorsed by all 34 cities in Orange County and the Veterans Alliance of Orange County.
The seven-member council voted 4-3 shortly after midnight on Wednesday, May 28, against Mayor Larry Agran’s proposal to develop a 20- to 30-acre municipal veterans cemetery by Memorial Day 2028 that he hoped would eventually be expanded.
Hours of public comments from veterans and Great Park neighborhood homeowners for and against the proposal, but mostly against it, pushed Tuesday night’s City Council meeting into the next day.
Ultimately, councilmembers Mike Carroll and Betty Martinez Franco supported his plan. Councilmembers William Go, James Mai, Kathleen Treseder and Melinda Liu said no.
“This isn’t a veterans’ issue,” Go said. “This is a cemetery issue.”
Go, as did all the councilmembers, endorsed plans for a veterans memorial at the developing Great Park, the former site of the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro.
But, he vehemently opposed the idea of spending the special taxes paid by nearby homeowners on a cemetery that might devalue their properties.
“Our CFDs (Community Facilities Districts) are being used against our own will,” he said, referring to the taxes. “That is a problem.”
Plans for a veterans cemetery at the Great Park date back well over a decade, to a time when fewer homes and schools existed in the area and other ideas for the billion-dollar park had not yet begun to take form.
But plans were never set in stone, and Irvine equivocated as to where in the city the cemetery should go.
In 2017, the city went so far as to dedicate land for a veterans cemetery not at the Great Park but on strawberry fields near the intersection of I-5 and I-405.
Agran, then out of office, joined two other residents in a lawsuit against the city to overturn a land swap with developer FivePoint that enabled that decision. Meanwhile, he rallied a group of more than 19,000 residents to sign a petition to put the city’s decision on a referendum.
In the referendum, voters rejected the land swap.
Thereafter, plans for the cemetery lurched back to the Great Park but never successfully held on to momentum.
In 2020, the City Council adopted an initiative based on another petition signed by nearly 20,000 Irvine residents to build a veteran cemetery at what’s known as the “ARDA site” adjacent to the park.
A year later, the council abandoned plans for any municipal veterans cemetery when it voted to support the Gypsum Canyon site instead.
At the same time, VALOR, the veterans alliance group behind the push for a veterans cemetery in Orange County, also discontinued its support for an Irvine cemetery in favor of Gypsum Canyon.
“While we may have our challenges ahead financially and legislatively, we won’t be involved in a civil war, we’ll be fighting a single mission,” VALOR president Nick Berardino said at the time, referring to what he hoped would be the end of a political struggle between proponents of the Irvine site and Gypsum Canyon.
Despite bipartisan and nearly unequivocal support for Gypsum Canyon in the intervening four years, Agran has refused to relinquish his goal of completing a veterans cemetery in Irvine.
“We’re very pleased with the vote, and we hope and believe that this will end difficulties and challenges that have been presented to the veterans community by Larry Agran and his cohorts there in Irvine,” Berardino said in a phone interview Wednesday. “We are excited and prepared now to move to the future.”
Agran, during the council meeting, acknowledged the passage of time and the acceleration of development around the Great Park, which changed the equation for building a cemetery in the vicinity.
“I do think there is a timing issue here,” he said in response to concerns about building a cemetery amid recently built housing.
“I still think it’s the perfect site for Orange County’s veteran cemetery,” he said. “I don’t see this as a battle between the ARDA site and Gypsum Canyon, because this is a county that absolutely could and should have two veteran cemeteries, perhaps even three.”
Others effectively characterized Agran’s reasoning as wishful thinking.
Liu cited a 2019 Orange County Grand Jury report that stated the California Department of Veterans Affairs will support only one official veterans cemetery in Orange County.
“They will support one, and because funding has already been committed to Gypsum Canyon, I don’t really see how it’s possible for us to pursue that,” she said. “I really don’t know where the money is going to come from.”
Agran rebutted with the same concerns over the Gypsum Canyon site.
About $45 million from the county and state had been pledged toward the veterans cemetery as of early 2024 at the 156-acre Gypsum Canyon site. But the Orange County Cemetery District had already been planning a public cemetery at the county-owned property, which will now share the space with the veterans cemetery, and Berardino said Wednesday that the figure is actually much closer to $100 million after considering money earmarked for the public cemetery.
The veterans cemetery’s first phase of development, which would not include crypts to bury caskets, was projected in 2023 to cost $123 million to develop.
“There’s about $100 million in the bank, and then when you apply the cost-sharing agreements that will be established between both the veterans and public cemetery, we’ll definitely have enough to get going and finish the first phase of development,” Berardino said. “We’re very confident, and we’re ready to go.”
Agran, who last year had Irvine finance its own technical review of the Gypsum Canyon site, doubled down Tuesday on his conviction that the project will be much more expensive than that and will not get built for lack of funding.
“We’re the largest county without a veteran cemetery in the whole country,” he said. “Now, are we going to get a veterans cemetery? I want to level with you. It ain’t happening at Gypsum Canyon. I’ll tell you why. There is no money for it. None.”
Earlier studies also raised concerns about potentially similar costs to develop a cemetery at the ARDA site.
Board of Supervisors Chairman Don Wagner, himself the Irvine mayor from 2016 to 2019, addressed the City Council Tuesday, along with Board of Supervisors Vice Chair Katrina Foley, to support Gypsum Canyon and to staunchly oppose Agran’s proposal.
He said that the ARDA site has never been a viable place for a state-funded veterans cemetery.
“ARDA was always a placeholder until a better site could be found,” he said. “ARDA was going to cost upwards of $50 million just to tear down the buildings. Forget the remediation that needed to be done on the base. ARDA is back where the airplanes were parked, where they had chemicals degreasing them, all of it leaching into the ground. The cost of ARDA made it absolutely unacceptable.”
“If the city would like to have a municipal cemetery, knock yourselves out,” Wagner said. “But be under no illusion — it will not be a veterans cemetery.”
“Gypsum Canyon is coming with your help or without it,” he added.
Mai, elected to the City Council in November, and Martinez Franco, elected in April, both acknowledged that promises had been made to veterans to build a cemetery in Irvine. Martinez Franco said those promises compelled her to support the municipal cemetery, but Mai said that Irvine no longer should.
“I appreciate the history, the promises that were made,” he said. “We’re here on a new dawn and a new era. I feel bad for the promises that were made to people, but this was 20 years ago. It was a different time. It was a different land. There are people here now, there are houses here, there are schools here. We have to take that into consideration.”
In bringing the matter back to the council, Agran said prior to the meeting that building the veterans cemetery was a moral issue related to the city’s promises to veterans and their widows and also a legal issue related to the City Council’s 2020 initiative.
He said that, according to his interpretation of that zoning law, the city must build the cemetery and that he would not quit his fight for a Great Park veterans cemetery no matter the result of Tuesday’s City Council vote.
In a phone interview on Wednesday, Agran said he is hopeful the state will find funding for the Gypsum Canyon site, that he is pleased Irvine is moving forward with plans for a veterans monument and memorial gardens at the Great Park and that he will continue to advocate for a cemetery there, too — although he’s going to put that issue aside for now as he considers what next steps he has left at his disposal.
“For now, I want to devote a lot of attention to moving forward with the memorial park, the perimeter park and the meadows that are going to be out there,” he said. “It’s going to be really quite wonderful. As far as the cemetery, I think it’ll be put a little bit on the back burner, but we will be watchful regarding the progress, or lack thereof, with Gypsum Canyon.
“I wish them well in it,” he added. “But I’m a realist.”
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