TOPEKA — U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas said personal visits to veterans’ cemeteries affirmed the nation’s responsibility to individuals interred in those places and the importance of meeting future burial needs of military families.
Moran pointed during a Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee meeting Wednesday significance of the state veterans’ cemeteries in Winfield, Fort Dodge, WaKeeney and Fort Riley. Moran, raised in Plainville, recalled being surprised by selection of WaKeeney as a cemetery site. That cemetery was dedicated in 2004.
“I can tell you it’s one of the most beautiful places that really showcase what a western Kansas sunset is and what it would mean to be buried in a place called home,” Moran said.
The Senate hearing was called to delve into escalating demand for burial in veterans’ cemeteries and persistent financial constraints on cemeteries in that national network. There is a backlog of facility upgrade requests submitted by 128 state, territorial and tribal veterans’ cemeteries in the United States. It would cost an estimated $220 million to address two dozen projects that have been on the national waiting list for more than five years, officials said.
“When mourning a death,” Moran said, “the last thing a grieving family needs is some bureaucratic hurdle or some substandard support.”
U.S. Army retired Brig. Gen. William Turner, director of the Kansas Commission on Veterans’ Affairs Office, testified before the Senate committee about challenges of operating the state’s four cemeteries for veterans. There are nearly 190,000 U.S. veterans living in Kansas, he said.
He said Kansas was witnessing a period of increased interments at the veterans’ cemeteries, which were also open to spouses or dependents of veterans. Generally, he said, 70% of about 450 annual interments at the four state cemeteries were military veterans. That figure stood at 76% in the current fiscal year, he said.
The cemeteries have registered 8,700 veterans and dependents for interment in one of the state’s cemeteries designated for veterans. The registrations range from 1,091 at Ford Dodge, 1,469 at WaKeeney, 2,782 at Fort Riley and 3,359 at Winfield. Fort Dodge opened in 2002, followed two years later by WaKeeney and Winfield, and Fort Riley in 2009.
The state cemetery program currently operated with 17 staff and at times had to redeploy personnel among the cemeteries to fill service gaps, Turner said.
“The challenge for the Kansas Veterans’ Cemetery program is to find a balance of appropriate and available staff for a growing program,” Turner said. “As more headstones and gravesites will need to be maintained each year, these challenges will surely become even more prevalent.”
He pointed to difficulty of replacing headstones due to breakage, inscription error or substandard quality. He said the state cemeteries lacked casket-handling equipment capable of operating efficiently among plots 8 feet long and 3 feet wide. The national veterans’ cemeteries, including the complex at Leavenworth, had more sophisticated and costly equipment to maneuver caskets into vaults.
The cemetery at Fort Dodge, located on the outskirts of Dodge City, was the only state veterans’ cemetery in Kansas without a memorial wall for bronze plaques honoring people whose ashes were placed in a scattering garden. The federal cemetery grant system doesn’t include funding for construction of such a wall, Turner said.
