Vets cemetery phase nearly done
Surge of burials puts project in line for acceleration
Bill Wussick, manager of the Arkansas Veterans Cemetery in North Little Rock, navigated between heaps of pea gravel Tuesday before reaching a clearing where an acre’s worth of crypts had been lowered into the ground.
Construction crews packed the gravel in between the double-stacked, 10-foottall, concrete crypts — one of the final steps in an expansion project to increase the number of burial sites at the cemetery.
The project began in September 2013 and is expected to be completed by January, Wussick said. It is the second in a four-phase, decades-long expansion of the 82-acre cemetery, which is run by the Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs and located off West Maryland Avenue near Camp Robinson.
The current stage includes the development of 9 acres to add seven clusters of crypts — a total of 3,800 spots — as well as roadways
and a new irrigation system. Pulling water from the cemetery’s lake instead of using Central Arkansas Water will save about $30,000 per year, Wussick said.
Although more burial sites will be added, the goal was to keep the cemetery’s “private feel,” Wussick said.
“We’re concentrated on a forested-type layout with trees acting as buffers between interment areas,” he said. “Each area is its own little cove. We’ll keep that theme as we continue to expand.”
The cemetery, opened in 2001, has space for 37,000 sites that should be developed and filled in the next 100 years. Wussick estimated that there are currently about 6,000.
“We have lots of room to grow,” said Kelly Ferguson, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs.
The state department was given more than $4.4 million from the national Veterans Cemetery Grants Program for this second round of improvements.
When the grant was awarded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration in 2013, officials projected that the addition of 3,800 spots would be sufficient for the next 10 years.
However, because of a recent increase in the number of burials at the cemetery, Wussick estimates that the third phase — originally expected to start 10 to 12 years after the current project is complete — will need to start sooner. A shift in more people choosing cremation over burial also will change what the next phase will entail.
Wussick said an average of 500 people were buried at the state-operated cemetery each year, until recently. In the past year, the number jumped to 700, leading Wussick to guess the available sites — even with the latest expansion — will be exhausted two years earlier than expected.
Five years after the second phase is complete, the National Cemetery Administration and the Arkansas Department of Affairs will take into consideration the number of remaining sites and the burial rates at that time to come up with an updated plan.
“They’re watching it, and we’re watching it so we don’t get caught with veterans needing a place to be buried and we don’t have something for them,” he said.
The increase in burials is due to more veterans being eligible for burial at the state-operated cemetery, Wussick said.
Under current law, veterans who served active duty for two consecutive years and were honorably discharged are eligible, as are any members of the Armed Forces who die on duty or in training. Veterans who served in the National Guard or Reserve are eligible only if they were called into active duty or reach retirement eligibility at age 60.
More veterans are eligible, Wussick said, because more Guard and Reserve units have been called into federal service since Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s. According to Department of Defense statistics, there were 32,718 National Guard and Reserve troops on active duty as of Oct. 1, although the number fluctuates week to week.
“Because of the engagements we’re in around the world, they’re having to use our resources a little bit smarter, and the Guard and Reserve were resources they decided to tap into,” Wussick said. “There’s quite a few more veterans in this area that are now eligible for interment out here that wouldn’t have been.”
There has also recently been a “major shift” at the state-operated cemetery from casket burials to cremations.
In the first phase of the expansion, the state department used about $1.13 million in federal grant money to realign and clean the headstones and construct a columbarium with 720 niches to hold cremated remains. Many of these new niches have already been filled, Wussick said.
“That’s going to impact our timeline for our columbariums,” Wussick said. “We’re going to exhaust that soon, so we’re going to have to do another project.”
About the time the second phase ends, planning will begin on a special project to build a memorial wall listing the names of veterans who were missing in action, buried at sea or chose to give their bodies to science.
Funding for the memorial wall was not included in the $4.4 million federal grant. Most of the money will come from the Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery Beautification Foundation, a fundraising arm of the state department that recently raised $13,000 to complete a face-lift on the main entrance in May.
Meetings on the project design and sources of funding will be held in December.