Gov: Angel Fire ‘very deserving’ of vets cemetery
Construction could begin in fall 2014
Sangre de Cristo Chronicle
By Jesse Chaney
Published: Thursday, April 24, 2014
http://www.sangrechronicle.com/articles/2014/04/24/angel_fire/doc5357e092308af347705929.txt
ANGEL FIRE — Gov. Susana Martinez said she believes Angel Fire deserves a veterans’ cemetery.
“We felt that Angel Fire was very deserving, especially with the fact that it has the first nationally recognized Vietnam memorial park,” Martinez told the Sangre de Cristo Chronicle in a telephone interview April 15. Vietnam Veterans Memorial State Park is located just north of Angel Fire. “We wanted to honor that with a cemetery,” she added.
Earlier in the day April 15, Martinez publicly announced the Angel Fire area is one of four sites chosen for new rural veterans’ cemeteries in New Mexico. Pending final approval from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the three- to five-acre cemetery will be built on donated land adjacent to the memorial.
“My staff and I are working with the different communities to finalize the application packages, which will go in to the VA in (Washington) D.C. in July,” New Mexico Department of Veterans’ Services Secretary Timothy Hale told the Chronicle during last week’s telephone interview.
Martinez told the Chronicle the cemetery near Angel Fire is expected to serve an area that includes 21,000 veterans and their families in Angel Fire, Taos, Raton and other parts of north and northeast New Mexico. Hale said the Angel Fire area was chosen over other proposed sites partly because it is more accessible to people in outlying areas.
“One of the good deciding factors also was the direct road from the Clayton area direct into Angel Fire,” he said, adding that spouses and other family members of veterans can sometimes be buried in veterans’ cemeteries. “There’s a very small veteran population out in that far northeast corner. But for access to those veterans, Angel Fire was one of the natural choices.”
The Angel Fire-area cemetery is expected to have about 6,000 burial sites, Hale said.
The New Mexico Department of Veterans’ Services would operate the cemetery through a central office in Santa Fe with up to two full-time employees in the Angel Fire area, he said. State officials are considering hiring a director and a grounds keeper for the local site, he said.
“In some cases, if the city already has a fully functioning cemetery program, we could do an MOU, or memorandum of understanding, for them to operate it under our supervision,” he said. “Those are things we’ll work out over the next year.”
Construction is expected to start after Oct. 1, which is the beginning of the 2014-15 federal fiscal year, Hale said.
“Probably in the November/December time frame would be the best case,” he said.
Developers Harry Patterson of Wichita Falls, Texas and Stan Samuels of Angel Fire have access to about 450 acres adjacent to Vietnam Veterans Memorial State Park, and they have offered to donate as many as the state needs for a cemetery.
The other cemetery sites chosen are in Gallup, Carlsbad and Fort Stanton.
State officials estimated each cemetery will cost about $1.5 million, for a total of $6 million, according to New Mexico Department of Veterans’ Services public information officer Ray Seva.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will pay for all but 10 percent of the cost for the cemeteries, Seva said. The New Mexico Legislature has approved the 10 percent down payment of $600,000 required by the Department of Veterans Affairs, he said, though the state can apply for a special VA cemetery grant to recover that cost.
Martinez told the Chronicle she hopes the state will create additional rural veterans’ cemeteries after the first four are completed.
“These are the first four choices, the first four selection sites, but that doesn’t mean that once these are done and successful that we wouldn’t be able to apply for a couple more,” she said. “We’re going to wait and see if once we’ve done this, whether or not we can go out for another grant for maybe two more cemeteries.”
“This state is just so large, and our rural areas are under-served with cemeteries that honor their veterans,” Martinez added. “And so we really want to be able to have smaller cemeteries, but at the national standard.”
Martinez publicly announced her Strategic Veterans Cemetery Initiative in July. At that time, she said state officials hoped to “provide resting places that meet the highest federal standards” for the many New Mexico veterans who live far away from the federal cemeteries in Santa Fe, Fort Bayard near Silver City and Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas.
The federal cemetery closest to Colfax County is in Santa Fe.