The Irvine City Council rejected a proposal to reinstate previous plans to develop a veterans-serving cemetery at the Great Park during a May 27 meeting. The 4-3 decision against the measure marks the latest chapter of a decade-long fight over where to build Orange County’s first veterans cemetery.
The proposed cemetery property at the Amended and Restated Development Agreement (ARDA) site is the former site of Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) El Toro. The air station was commissioned in 1943 and remained in operation as a military airfield until 1999.
According to the Orange County Community Foundation, Orange County is home to 130,000 veterans, making it the fourth-largest veteran population in California.
Irvine Mayor Larry Agran proposed the plan to provide the state with land to build a veterans cemetery in 2014. The city council unanimously approved the plan to support Assembly Bill 1453, a bill that sought to establish a veterans cemetery within Southern California. The council then voted in July 2014 to allocate the ARDA site “as the best possible site for a state veterans cemetery.”
In 2017, the council voted to relocate the cemetery to Strawberry Fields next to the interchange of Interstate 5 and Interstate 405. In 2018, a referendum to relocate the site failed with only 37.4% of the vote, yet Orange County officials have since explored further locations for the veterans cemetery. The Anaheim City Council unanimously voted on July 23, 2024, to build the cemetery in Gypsum Canyon in Anaheim Hills, Calif.
During the city council meeting on May 27, Agran said that his proposal to establish the cemetery at the ARDA site did not conflict with the Gypsum Canyon plan.
“I want to make really clear tonight that I have no quarrel with Gypsum Canyon. I have absolutely no quarrel with it. It’s not a competition in my mind between the two sites,” Agran said at the meeting. “The resolution tonight is about the city of Irvine, on its own, establishing a municipal city veterans memorial park and cemetery.”
Agran voiced frustration with Irvine’s lack of progress on the cemetery development since it was first proposed in 2014.
“It just struck me that — it’s nuts that we can’t get our act together and see to it that [we] have a proper cemetery for veterans,” Agran said.
A total of 129 community members spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting, many of whom were nearby residents in the Great Park neighborhood. Multiple families voiced concerns about the cemetery’s proposed location directly across the street from Irvine Unified School District’s Cadence Park K-8 School, including Navy veteran Robert Schafnitz.
“It simply doesn’t belong next to our homes, our schools or where our children play,” Schafnitz said.
Marine veteran Neil Wood, who served at MCAS El Toro, told the council that the nearby cemetery would have a significant impact on himself and his family.
“I don’t want to be surrounded by a cemetery and my children exposed to graveyards after they’ve already been exposed to multiple deaths from my ten combat deployments of friends and family that we have,” Wood said. “Even though I have served at El Toro as well, I have no desire to be buried there.”
Orange County Board of Supervisors member Donald Wagner raised concerns about the ARDA site being smaller than most veterans cemeteries, holding leftover chemicals from MCAS El Toro and being significantly more expensive to construct than the Gypsum Canyon location.
“ARDA was always a placeholder until a better site could be found. Why? Because ARDA at the time was going to cost upwards of $50 million just to tear down the buildings,” Wagner said. “When the public said no to Strawberry Fields — okay — but they didn’t suddenly make ARDA any better.”
Agran and other supporters of the ARDA plan refuted that the site would cost more than the proposed budget and be more expensive than the Gypsum Canyon site.
“It’s very, very clear that Gypsum Canyon, to make it usable as a veterans memorial park and cemetery, would cost hundreds of millions of dollars,” Agran said.
The Orange County Board of Supervisors has already allocated $20 million for construction at the Gypsum Canyon site, with an additional $25 million in state funding from the 2023 California Budget. The California Department of Veterans Affairs has also submitted an application for federal funding for the Gypsum Canyon cemetery from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
“We must move forward,” Katrina Foley, vice chair of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, said. “We must stop all the bureaucratic obstacles and delays that have cost our veterans anxiety, that have cost our veterans emotional pain.”
Niko Wilson is a News Intern for the spring 2025 quarter. He can be reached at nikow@uci.edu.
Edited by Jaheem Conley.
