State officials delivered some good news recently about Orange County’s long-awaited first veterans cemetery: construction should cost taxpayers significantly less money than previously expected.
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The 157-acre Southern California State Veterans Cemetery can get through its first phase of construction and burials for $86 million, about $45 million less than initial estimates from a similar study in 2023, according to a new feasibility study commissioned by the California Department of Veterans Affairs, or CalVet.
The cost savings are the result of a “more efficient, less aggressive approach for site grading” in the updated design plan, department officials shared in a May 8 press release.
The plan change would also increase burial capacity by 50% to hold more than 157,000 plots across eight phases of construction. Phase 1, which is currently underway, is expected to .
“This progress shows that years of work by veterans, advocates, and public partners is paying off,” Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, who has long advocated for the proposed cemetery, said in a statement. “This project is moving from vision to reality, and this study gives us the practical information we need to keep that momentum going.”
Quirk-Silva’s office said the feasibility report isn’t publicly available yet and CalVet did not respond to requests for comment.
The updated study was a requirement for CalVet to obtain a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Quirk-Silva said. The federal funding contribution for the cemetery was approved in February and should be dispensed by the end of the fiscal year.
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Veterans have spent more than a decade lobbying for a final resting place for Orange County’s 84,000 veterans, one-third of whom are 75 or older. The project has experienced numerous delays, bouncing between locations in Irvine before it was decided that it would share space with a new public cemetery under development in Gypsum Canyon in Anaheim Hills.
The plan is for the 283-acre Gypsum Canyon site to be split into two burial grounds: the county’s first new public cemetery in nearly 130 years, owned by the Orange County Cemetery District, and the veterans cemetery run by the CalVet. The two cemeteries would accommodate roughly 360,000 burials over the next century, officials said.
The public cemetery is not expected to break ground until 2027 at the earliest.
The 2023 feasibility study for the veterans cemetery estimated that Phase 1 of the project would cost $126 million, less than half of which has been secured.
The first phase consists of developing preliminary drawings and plans for the cemetery, Quirk-Silva said, which can take about 20 months to complete. In the coming weeks, she said, the state budget committee that she chairs will be requesting authorization of up to $10 million to begin the design process.
Quirk-Silva said the county and state have made remarkable progress in pushing the project along, though there’s still “quite a ways to go” before the shovels can hit the ground.
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“We wish it’s 6 months, but we want this to be long-lasting,” she said.