Orange County’s veterans have to wait at least a couple more years before they have a chance to be buried in the county’s first state veteran’s cemetery, with county officials saying the construction is underway and moving at a good pace.
It comes after a decade-long gridlock to build a cemetery in Irvine, which veteran advocates abandoned in 2021 to focus efforts on a site in Gypsum Canyon in Anaheim.
So far, state, county and federal officials have raised around $78 million to construct the veterans cemetery..
The veterans cemetery will also sit alongside a county owned cemetery that will be for the general public, with plans to share resources between the two sites as the existing county cemeteries are running out of space for burials.
Tim Deutsch, general manager of the OC Cemetery District, said construction is underway on the veterans site after state leaders signed off a few months ago, noting more pieces of the project were moving into the works to get the site graded and built out.
“We will be doing a phased approach in that there’ll be a grading contractor, utility contractor and then a contractor doing the building development,” Deutsch said in a Tuesday interview, noting they hoped to host some sort of ground breaking event next year on the project.
One of the most expensive and time consuming parts of the construction has been building new roads and utility infrastructure for the site, with Deutsch noting the electrical infrastructure is around a quarter finished and they’re planning to open bidding for the water infrastructure early next year.
Deutsch also shared that the collaboration between CalVet and the City of Anaheim was working well, with increased communication between the government entities involved in the project.
A spokesperson for CalVet did not respond to requests for comment on this article.
Nick Berardino, the head of the Veterans Alliance of Orange County, said he was encouraged by the “meaningful progress” on the construction.
“We really have the project now making very good progress and we’ll continue to do so,” said Berardino, a U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Vietnam.
On the county’s cemetery, Deutsch said that while there were initially concerns they would run out of space this year in their cemeteries they created more room by removing some roads, trees and other impediments to bury more people, and now have enough space to likely make it to 2028.
He also said that as space for burials runs out at the existing cemeteries, their staff will shift to working at the Gypsum Canyon site while they keep a smaller crew to maintain the existing cemeteries.
“Our goal is to have the cemetery up and operating by late 2028,” Deutsch said. “We’ll gear up our best of the best for Gypsum Canyon to start that cemetery and get that running.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.
