Neglect of U.S. Cemeteries to Be Studied : Veterans: Congressman calls the conditions shameful. Government officials blame a lack of funding for problem.

The Golden Gate National Cemetery has struggled for three years to keep gophers at bay. At Ft. Snelling National Cemetery in Minnesota, the headstones have not been cleaned in two years. In New York, gravediggers at Calverton National Cemetery are working with equipment that has not been replaced since 1978.

These, federal officials say, are only a few examples of the neglect that plagues the National Cemetery System, a situation underscored in recent weeks by reports of collapsed graves at the system’s second-busiest burial ground in Riverside.

Calling conditions throughout the system “shameful,” U.S. Rep. Harley Staggers (D-W. Va.), chairman of the veterans affairs subcommittee on housing and memorial affairs, announced Tuesday that he has scheduled hearings April 18 in Washington and May 11 in Los Angeles on whether the Department of Veterans Affairs should be allowed to continue operating the country’s 113 national cemeteries.

Staggers said reports of the damage at Riverside after recent rains have emphasized longstanding deficiencies at veterans cemeteries nationwide. He suggested that the system be taken over by the American Battle Monuments Commission, which maintains U.S. veterans cemeteries overseas.

However, officials at private cemeteries say that the problems will continue as long as the national cemeteries rely on annual appropriations to maintain their grounds. Unlike national cemeteries, private cemeteries put part of the costs of a burial into a trust fund earmarked for maintenance “so that when the time comes, the money is there,” said Jim A. Lahey, a Sacramento consultant and former executive vice president of the Interment Assn. of California.

Nearly 800 graves at the Riverside cemetery--the resting place for thousands of U.S. war veterans and their families--were turned into muddy sinkholes last month after winter storms dropped four inches of rain over the 58,000-acre cemetery in three days. To the dismay of cemetery officials, the damage occurred just as the first of Southern California’s Persian Gulf casualties were being buried. Private cemeteries in the same area reported no such damage.

Local officials attributed the destruction to a combination of poor soil, weather, inefficient irrigation, broken equipment and--most of all--federal budget cuts. Cemetery Director Therese Bush said she had been struggling to keep up with the demand for maintenance at Riverside, but that the federal government had steadily cut her budget from $2.6 million in 1989 to $2.17 million this year.

Calling the sinkage a “natural disaster,” Anthony Principi, deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs, ordered $300,000 in emergency funding culled from the Department of Veterans Affairs budget to repair the graves and vowed to ask Congress for an additional $10 million to head off problems throughout the cemetery system. Repair work began late last month.

But Principi noted--and congressional staffers agree--that the problem reaches much farther than Riverside and stems from more than a decade of inadequate cemetery funding.

Gloria Royce, staff member for the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, said that over the past four years the system’s funding has fallen $38.9 million short of requests. Part of the reason, she said, has been that not even their supervisors at the department knew about the financial problems.

Another reason, said fellow staffer Pete Dougherty, lies within the agency. Because its priorities have been health care and other veterans benefits and because it faced budget cuts of its own, Veterans Affairs has routinely slashed the budget request for the cemetery system, he said. Other budgetary agencies made further cuts.

“We have had to make some very tough decisions in the past few years as a result of budgetary conditions,” Principi said during his visit to Riverside last month. However, Donna St. John, spokeswoman for Veteran Affairs, stressed that the department is concerned with all veterans benefits and considers its cemetery system an important part of the benefit package that should be kept within the agency.

Royce said, maintenance has become more difficult for workers in the cemetery system. Since 1984, interments have increased 36.1% to 64,000 a year, the number of graves to be maintained has jumped 25% to 1.9 million, and three new cemeteries have been added. At the same time, the number of employees has dropped from 820 cemetery workers in 1984 to 776 this year. The system is between $8 million and $15 million behind in its equipment needs.

A recent survey of cemetery directors offered illustrations of the system’s woes, said Royce. In Minneapolis, the director of the Ft. Snelling cemetery reported that in the past three years budget restraints have forced workers to cut 90% of their required fertilization program and 80% of their weed control program. They also have had to eliminate programs to control rodents and clean headstones.

In Calverton, N.Y., cemetery officials reported that their equipment had not been replaced since the cemetery opened in 1978. Meanwhile, Royce said, Golden Gate National Cemetery has fought mightily to keep gophers at bay.

Cynthia Nunez, cemetery director at Golden Gate, said the problem was at its worst in 1989, when “the cemetery looked like a war zone and the contractors were telling us that we had at least 100 gophers per acre.” Since then, she said, it has cost $60,000 a year to keep the gopher population down.

Principi, too, has noted problems with national cemeteries. In San Diego’s drought-parched Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery, “the grass is brown, the weeds are popping up and survivors are complaining all over the place,” he said. Money problems have delayed the long-awaited opening of a new national cemetery in the San Joaquin Valley, he said.

Meanwhile, Riverside director Bush said she welcomes the hearings set to start next week.

“I think all the cemeteries in the system need additional funding,” she said. “We’ve all been working under restrictions.”