Cemeteries Face Fiscal, Space Crises : Anyone honorably discharged is eligible for burial in national plots. But 49 are full, and many are in bad shape.

The National Cemetery System--built to memorialize all honorably discharged men and women who served in the U.S. military in times of armed conflict from the Civil War to the Gulf War--is headed for an overload, experts say.

The NCS estimates that the 8 million surviving World War II veterans are nearing 70 years of age, and today there are only enough graves in the system to accommodate about one-fourth of them. A more immediate crisis confronted the National Cemetery System this year, when years of dwindling federal appropriations left most of the cemeteries in visibly poor shape.

Already, budgetary constraints have stifled expansion of the 113-cemetery system. The opening of the newest addition--San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery in Northern California--was delayed a year because of lack of funds. It is not expected to open before April.

After a series of complaints and several disastrous incidents--such as 800 graves sinking in a California cemetery during heavy rains--Congress appropriated $10 million on top of the $57 million the National Cemetery System requested for fiscal 1992. But many say that the funds are not enough to maintain the existing cemeteries, let alone construct more.

BACKGROUND: In the history of the United States, 38.3 million Americans have served during wartime. Today, 20.5 million are still living.

The burial rate will rise sharply in the next few decades and is expected to peak in 2010 with a predicted 100,000 burials, said Bill Jayne of NCS. Last year the system, under the auspices of the Veterans Administration, buried 62,000 veterans.

Already, 49 of the national cemeteries are full, and 20 more are expected to be full within the next decade. The government has estimated that 11% of all veterans will ask to be buried in a national cemetery.

Over the past five years, appropriations for NCS have increased, except in 1989, when the amount dropped $300,000 to $46.9 million.

But the amount of money never quite caught up with the need, experts say.

While gophers burrowed beneath the grounds of Golden Gate Cemetery in San Francisco, fungus was overtaking the tombstones, giving them an eerie golden glow; lawns were dying at Ft. Snelling cemetery in Minneapolis and Calverton in New York state because of insufficient funds for water and fertilizer. Others were overgrown with weeds.

“It was the same old story,” says Cynthia DF. Nunez, director of Golden Gate. “The government was asking us to do more with less.”

Last March, under the strain of four inches of rain within three days at the 58,000-acre Riverside, Calif., cemetery, 800 graves sank just as the first of Southern California’s Persian Gulf War casualties were being buried.

The chairman of the House Veterans Affairs subcommittee on housing and memorial affairs, Rep. Harley O. Staggers Jr. (D-W.Va.), held hearings a month later on whether the Department of Veterans Affairs should be allowed to continue operating the nation’s cemeteries. The hearings found that lack of money, not incompetence, was responsible for the cemeteries’ decline.

OUTLOOK: Pressure is rising for greater spending on the cemeteries, but it is unclear whether Congress will act, given the fiscal crisis in Washington.

Many say the $67 million Congress set aside for the NCS in the 1992 budget is simply not enough. In the last year, a survey of the 113 cemeteries found that the number of burials had gone up 35%. The maintenance costs increased 19%, while the size of the staff fell 5.4%, the Veterans Affairs subcommittee reported.

“The budget still doesn’t contain adequate funding for cemeteries we already have. We still don’t have money to hire people, pay for water or to plant sod. We’d need about $25 million just to catch up” with the existing cemeteries’ needs, said a subcommittee source who asked not to be identified.

“We’re headed for a crisis, and unless we get a more serious amount of money the National Cemetery System is headed for a tombstone of its own,” said the director of one of the most used cemeteries in the NCS, who also requested anonymity.