Rogan, Schiff Vie to Champion Vets’ Issue

For nearly two years, Northridge teacher Brian Rooney has been working at the painstaking task of compiling a registry of thousands of war memorials across the country.

But now his crusade to get the state and federal governments to keep their own directories of the plaques, flagpoles and other monuments to veterans has become the battleground of a political campaign. Rep. James Rogan (R-Glendale) and his Democratic challenger in the 27th Congressional District, state Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), are now competing over which lawmaker is the bigger champion of veterans.

Rogan will appear today with Rooney and more than a dozen other veterans at a war memorial in McCambridge Park in Burbank. He will tout the House resolution that he introduced this week calling on the National Park Service to create a registry similar to that proposed by Rooney.

“We owe it to our veterans, and to their children, and to our children, to continue to pay tribute to the people who fought to keep this country free,” said Rogan spokesman Jeff Solsby.

Schiff welcomed Rogan’s effort, but said it was modeled on his own state Senate bill to create a registry of veterans memorials in California and post it on the Internet.

Rogan “has ignored the veterans in our district for years, and it takes, unfortunately a state effort to motivate him to do anything on the national level,” Schiff said. “It’s flattering to see my work imitated.”

The Senate passed Schiff’s bill on May 24 by a 39-0 vote, with one senator absent.

A Rogan aide gleefully identified the absent senator:

“I thought you might find it interesting that that bill that Mr. Schiff thought so highly of and introduced, he didn’t even bother to show up to vote for it,” said Rogan chief of staff Dan Revetto. “And I have the proof. I have it in my hand. I’d be more than happy to fax it to you.”

Schiff conceded that his bill passed “at a time when I wasn’t on the floor.”

“I was out of town during the session,” he said.

Asked where, he said he was attending a campaign fund-raiser in Chicago.

To Rooney, who teaches science at Chatsworth High School, the important thing is to honor the memory of soldiers who died “defending Rogan and Schiff’s right to run for office.”

“What I am trying to do is to bend over backwards to not make this a political issue,” he said. “This is a veterans’ issue, and moreover, it’s dead veterans that we’re talking about.”

“My concern is for veterans’ memorials and preserving the memory of great, heroic Americans that no one will ever know, other than their own families.”