MONTPELIER -- Vermont's congressional delegation has written to the head of the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, claiming that a Barre company was unfairly denied a contract to carve headstones for a VA cemetery.

Sens. Patrick Leahy and Jim Jeffords and Rep. Bernie Sanders wrote to Veterans Affairs Secretary R. James Nicholson to complain that Granite Industries of Vermont had been rejected even though it was the low bidder on a contract to make 3,000 grave markers for the newly opened Sacramento Valley National Cemetery in California.

The company filed a formal protest last month, the delegation's letter said.

The delegation members said Granite Industries, which carves the markers from marble quarried in the southern Vermont town of Danby, is in the midst of a four-year contract to make 20,000 stones for other VA cemeteries around the country. That contract expires in September.

The contract was awarded to Columbus Marble Works of Columbus, Miss., which the Vermont delegation said submitted a bid of $450,000, $30 more per stone than the $120 per stone offer made by the Barre company -- a difference of $90,000 during the course of the contract.

"Given the 16-year near-perfect track record GIV has with the VA, it is hard to believe that awarding this contract to a company at a higher price with equal or poorer past performance standards could possibly be in the best interest of the VA or the American taxpayer," the Vermont delegation's letter said.

The letter said Granite Industries was not chosen based on past performance, but questioned how that could be. "It is our understanding that for the past 16 years GIV has provided first-class headstones to the VA without a single defect or poor quality stone for more than a decade," the letter said.

Calls to the public affairs office at VA headquarters in Washington and to the Mississippi company were not returned Thursday.

A woman who answered the phone at Granite Industries referred questions to the company's president, Jeff Martell, but said he was out of the office and could not be reached.