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| Hoping For Hallowed Ground |
November 10, 2001 |
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ALBUQUERQUE - If U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson has her way, Veterans Day ceremonies will be held in a new national cemetery in Albuquerque by 2009, the year in which the Santa Fe National Cemetery is predicted to be filled.
Wilson and Sen. Pete Domenici, both Albuquerque Republicans, have introduced legislation in Congress to appropriate $125,000 to the Department of Veterans Affairs “to start initial planning activities”-including site selection- for the proposed new cemetery.
“My top priority this year has been to get funds for site selection” for the cemetery, Wilson said this week just before her proposal was approved by Congress.
New Mexico already has two national cemeteries-the 126-year-old Santa Fe National Cemetery, which now has about 35,000 burials, and the Fort Bayard National Cemetery near Silver City, a military burial ground since 1866 and a national cemetery since 1922.
"My top priority this year has been to get funds for site selection” for the cemetery, Wilson said this week just before her proposal was approved by Congress.
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Veterans’ groups and individual veterans, concerned that the Santa Fe National Cemetery will soon be filled-and wanting one closer to the state’s major population center-have been working for years to get a new national cemetery established in or near Albuquerque.
Wilson’s bill marks the first time federal money has been appropriated for the effort.
Wilson, now serving her second term, is an Air Force veteran and the first female veteran to serve in Congress.
“I’ve been pushing for this for three years,” she said.
“We want to find a site that really works within a reasonable distance of Albuquerque,” she added. “We’ve done everything we can do to expand Santa Fe National Cemetery. Now we’re trying to plan for the future. We’ve known for a long time we needed to do this.”
Wilson said the need for a new national cemetery in the Albuquerque area was first brought to her attention by Bill Drumm, a World War II vet, while she was first running in 1998 to fill the seat vacated by the death of former U.S. Rep. Steve Schiff.
Drumm, who retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel and who still flies at age 77 with the Civil Air Patrol, said he’s been pushing for a new national cemetery here since 1994, when he was told the one in Santa Fe could be running out of space by this year.
In 1999, Domenici got legislation passed authorizing the use of space-saving flat grave markers, rather than standing headstones, to extend the time the cemetery could stay open for new burials until about 2008.
Lawrence Romero, acting director of the 100-acre Santa Fe National cemetery, said this week that current development of 14 acres at the cemetery for in-ground burials will allow about 8,000 eligible veterans and their spouses to be interred there.
After those 14 acres are filled only 10 acres will remain for burials.
Romero said that from 1,100 to 1,200 people are currently being buried at the cemetery each year. “There’s only a small section that’s undeveloped,” he said, predicting the cemetery will be filled by 2008 or 2009.
“The last time I checked, 97,000 veterans eligible for burial in a national cemetery lived in the Albuquerque-Santa Fe area,” Drumm said.
Statewide, there are about 180,000 veterans eligible for burial in a national cemetery.
The 15-acre Fort Bayard National Cemetery now has about 5,000 burials and is expected to have room for more for about 20 years.
Initially, Ralph Piatek, a World War II Navy submarine-service veteran who is now 78, supported suggestions that a new national cemetery be located in Rio Rancho, on about 200 acres of state-owned land near the intersection of U.S. Route 550 and N.M. 528.
But now he said he thinks that space would be too small; and he agrees with Drumm that a better location might be on land now owned by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Energy at Kirtland Air Force Base.
“We’re talking in terms of about 2,000 acres,” Piatek said. “And when we consider the veterans from Desert Storm and now this thing in Afghanistan, we may need burial sites for a hell of a lot more than we thought.”
“When thinking about property, we have to look at how we can expand it in the future,” Drumm said. “If we look at the next 75 years, you’re talking a couple of hundred acres. But it’s our responsibility to look farther ahead, even to the year 3000.
However, Dale Nelson, an 80-year-old Army veteran of World War II and president of the Rio Rancho Veterans Monument Association, continues to support a site in Rio Rancho-about 1,280 acres of land now owned by the state where the extensions of Unser Boulevard and Paseo del Norte are likely to intersect.
“We’ve not been sitting around,” Nelson said. “We’ve already got a site selected. We’ve got the support of Rio Rancho and Sandoval County, and now we’re trying to get the state for us, too.”
The VA’s National Cemetery Administration operates 119 national cemeteries in 39 states and Puerto Rico and is planning to build six more cemeteries, in the Atlanta, Detroit, Miami, Pittsburgh and Sacramento, Calif., metropolitan areas and at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. |
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