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Sharon Quirk-Silva and some guy giving her an award back in 2013.
The biggest impediment to the Veteran’s Cemetery recently has been that the bill carried by Sharon Quirk-Silva specified that it had to be built in the ARDA site, which would be expensive, unwelcome, and probably defeated in litigation.
ARDA was the official site for a while, so it’s understandable that Sharon didn’t want to step on people’s toes there and force a different choice. But Irvine has now made its own different choice — making the cemetery literally the centerpiece of the Great Park — and Sharon is, accordingly, amending her bill to honor that. Here’s her announcement:
Dear Friends,
Since I was elected to the California State Assembly in 2012, I began working with Veteran groups to bring a Veteran Cemetery to Orange County. With the help of Irvine City Council, and the state, we were able to designate a site that veterans and council members supported, the ARDA Site, 2013.
At that time, Governor Jerry Brown, came out to see the ARDA Site and lend his support. I want to sincerely thank the original council members: Council Members: Larry Agran, Steven Choi, Beth Krom, Larry Lalloway, and Christina Shea for their continued support. Little did we know that six years later we would still be working to find a site, and resume efforts to gain support for this important project.
In 2014, I lost my election and returned to teaching. Assembly Member Tom Daly, worked for two years to keep the veterans cemetery moving forward. He has been a champion for OC Veterans.
No one appreciates his long term support more than I do! So, upon returning to elected office in 2016, I returned to getting a cemetery built. Council Members in Irvine had changed, and a new site was proposed; the Strawberry Site. I had always stated that I would support Irvine leaders and residents in their site choice. Coming from local government as a former council member, I do not want to tell local officials where the site should be.
A new council majority voted for a new site, and I amended my bill to the new Strawberry Site. Governor Brown returned to see the new site. I secured funding in the budget for a cemetery and things were moving ahead.
I wish I could say things moved swiftly, but that was not the case. Former Mayor Larry Agran ran an initiative against the Strawberry Site and voters agreed. That was June 2018.
Now, in 2019, I was surprised that the Strawberry Site was not favored by voters but I was not deterred. I was elected for another term in 2018, as well as Assembly Member Tom Daly, and Senator Tom Umberg (A highly decorated Veteran). All three of us made it a priority to work toward getting a cemetery built at the original ARDA site. We were supported in the 2019 July budget by receiving $20 Million for a Cemetery.
I sincerely thank my Democrat and Republican colleagues for their valued support, by voting for the legislation. I also want to recognize Assembly Members Daly and Senator Umberg for putting veterans first. Their budget requests secured much of the funding. I also apologize to those who have gone step by step with us, and are frustrated by the twists and turns, and delays.
At the same time we were working on our State Cemetery Bill, the Irvine City Council Members have also changed in 2018. With almost a complete new council and Mayor, the cemetery was revisited. Mayor Shea, asked her team to start to analyze a new site, known as the Golf Site. Our bill was moving through the legislative cycle as the Golf Site was moving through the planning commission. I was initially not on board with looking at a new site (Golf Site) and did not agree to amend the bill in a Senate Hearing. However, I promised to work on the bill over the summer recess as I presented the bill to the Veteran’s Committee. With this promise, I received the votes to get the bill out of committee.
That takes us to the last 3 weeks.
Since the committee hearing, several things have occurred to allow me to attain more information regarding the ARDA site:
The Irvine Council voted 4-1 to support the Golf Site.
I visited the Golf Site and believe it will cost much less to build this cemetery, than at the ARDA site.
Many, many established veterans groups support the Golf Site.
The council just voted to rezone the ARDA Site for small retail and some recreation. There will be no houses built and no hotels built at the ARDA site now.
Neighboring schools, and many homeowners have voiced that they are against the ARDA site.
There is an active street, Cadence, that would go right through the cemetery.
The gun salutes for veterans at funerals, could cause stress to school children.
There are many buildings and some historical/culture buildings that would need to be removed on the ARDA site.
The price of the ARDA is not fully funded.
Getting the ARDA site built and open would take much longer than the Golf Site.
With all of this information, I have decided to amend my bill. The new language will state, that the site for the veteran’s cemetery would be the Golf Site. In addition, it will state that Cal Vet, will move forward with a site analysis, as soon as possible.
There are still many uncertain scenarios that can happen:
Former Mayor, Larry Agran has filed an initiative to ask voters to support the ARDA Site as the only site for an Irvine Cemetery. There will be a signature gathering effort. If this initiative is successful, the Golf Site would not be built.
The bill still has to make it out of appropriations with amendments. The Chair of the committee has not indicated support for either site.
The Senate and Assembly would have to vote on the floor to support the bill as amended.
The Governor would have to sign the bill by the end of September.
In the mean time, we have have our veterans, who have served us. Them, and their families, are waiting for a peaceful place to be laid to rest. We know that everyday we are losing our World War II Veterans. In the last six years, I have had many Veterans stop me and say, “Thank you for your work on the cemetery, but hurry up. I may not make it!”
I sincerely want to reference and thank all who have put energy and efforts to get this done. Former Mayor, Larry Agran gave his vote and time to start this effort. I appreciate this and so many others who have worked tirelessly on this effort.
We have no excuses to not get this down now. We have the land, the funds, and the will. I beg all of you that are invested in this Orange County Veteran Cemetery to put aside your differences and get moving on this project. It is the least we can do to show respect for those that have stepped up to serve our country!
God Bless America!
Assembly Member Sharon Quirk-Silva
This is a generous and accurate recounting of the story. Sharon has almost always had this site’s faith and, when not, usually at least had our hope. She’s justified that this week.
One point is that while the Council vote for the Golf Course site was 4-1, the reason for the dissenting vote was Melissa Fox’s belief that this proposed change was really just a feint to prevent the cemetery, which she has long favored, from being built. With this move, it should be clear that it either wasn’t a trick or, if it was, it was unsuccessful. I presume that Melissa will now agree that the plan should go forward as proposed.
Some of us have been waiting most of this decade for this. It’s great to see it nearing fruition. Thanks, Sharon!
UPDATE: Lest there be any doubt about whether I really did receive the email mentioned in the first top-level comment of mine below, here it is:
*Total BS….but what can you do? Tell Arte Moreno to put it in the Parking Lot?
So much baloney….so little time!
Larry Agran’s right-hand propagandist Harvey Liss directed this comment to me today — not long after which the post on Sharon’s page became unavailable (at least to me). As he brilliantly tagged me in his comment, I was able to get a copy of the entire comment — GREAT move there, Harvey! — so I’ll republish and answer it here:
Larry Agran’s 2018 referendum, Measure B, for which Liss was among the chief propagandists, won convincingly on the basis of the slogan “Save the Great Park Veteran’s Cemetery.” (Well, it also won because many people voted the wrong way because voters have a hard time getting that “yes” means to KEEP the Council legislation and “no” means to ELIMINATE it.)
The implication of those signs was that, of the two options being considered for the site at the time, one (the toxic-waste-polluted ARDA site, with many structure to be torn down) was “the Great Park site” and the other — the empty except for agriculture “Strawberry Fields” site along Bake Parkway and the El Toro Y” — was not.
As Liss admits here, ARDA was *not* part of the Great Park. It was adjacent to it. Strawberry Fields was *also* not part of the Great Park — but was also adjacent to it. It was also adjacent to a major freeway area where it would have been visible to and enjoyed by those driving by. So neither had claim to being “the Great Park Veterans Cemetery” — and the slogan used to defeat Measure B was, as many of us said at the time, fraudulent.
Liss wants to know why that’s important. Questioning that speaks for itself.
Any legislation that refers to ARDA being “in the Great Park” is a function of people drafting it having been misled the Agran, Liss, and whoever believed them. Bill Cook of the OCVMP looked at a map and understood the truth well before the vote — as did a court ruling on the matter — so the truth was known to Agran and Liss prior to the campaign, and they just decided to ignore it and to go on deceiving voters.
Now they’re trying to kill of a proposal for a “Great Park Veterans Cemetery” that is truly IN the Great Park — which takes shamelessness to a new height.
So, to answer Harvey’s question “What’s the definition of “in the Great Park?”, which he published on Facebook (or I wouldn’t have gotten an email notice of it) is this:
(1) The “Great Park” is an area that was demarcated by law — I believe that it was a city ordinance written or supported by Larry Agran, and am confident that any departure from that description would be no more than a quibble — which has certain boundaries.
(2) “In,” in this context, means area falling that is not outside of the territory whose shape is delineated by those boundaries.
(3) “the” is the singular determiner: it means that there is only one noun that is being designated the subject, as opposed to any of a group of objects with a noun’s category.
To use it all in a grammatically and factually correct sentence: “the Golf Course site is in the Great Park and the ARDA site is not.”
Liss, very likely before having seen the above comment, sent me the following email:
I’ll address this below.
First, I think that it’s unfortunately that Sharon left the need to delete her original post, the comments to which had become contentious. I trust that it does not mean any modification of her position or plans and that it was not due to any pressure from either side of the controversy.
That the Great Park was originally measured in metes and bounds is irrelevant. Those tools of the surveyor’s trade are designed to demarcate a closed shape, in which any point on the earth’s surface is supposed to be within or outside of. ARDA is/was either within or outside of that shape — and if it were inside of it I suspect that Liss would have said so here.
My recollection of this history — and, again, I was working on this before Agran, Quirk-Silva, or Liss — was that ARDA had been excluded from the Great Park intentionally because the City of Irvine did not want to be responsible for the toxic waste cleanup on that site. This was not a mere “oversight” — it was an intentional decision, one made for good reason.
The relevant city map excludes the Great Park. As I wrote back in 2017, the Council could and probably should have expanded the bounds of the Great Park to include either or both ARDA and Strawberry Fields — and to my knowledge it did not. Under the circumstances of extreme conflict on the issue, we cannot infer that they just forgot to do it.
Liss is right that this would simply be “hairsplitting” except for one thing: Agran’s campaign intentionally bamboozled voters into believing that one proposed site could be considered “the Great Park Cemetery” and one could not. Yet they were equally adjacent and if anything Strawberry Fields, having been the most recent Council choice, was at the time of the 2018 election more entitled to that appellation. Liss thinks that “it doesn’t matter” now — but he certainly seems to think that it mattered then. I suspect that most Irvine voters, looking at the information presented them at the time of Measure B, would justifiably believe that they’d been lied to. (Hey, let’s find out!)
Of course, if Agran’s planned referendum goes through, only one site will be able to legitimately claim that it is “in the Great Park” — and that’s the Golf Course site. That Liss now considers whether a site is actually “in the Great Park” or not — something that the City Attorney obviously researched and got right — is truly scandalous.
This is not “just another talking point” for Five Point supporters, or for anyone. It’s a matter of what is true. Frankly, I’m happy that Five Point is having some of its powers to do what is wishes with ARDA taken away; that strikes me as a win-win for both it and the City. (They can still do plenty there that will increase its allure to its neighbors — shopping, of course, but perhaps something honoring veterans of Asian descent?)
The only non-winners in that case is that whose motivation is simply to see Five Point destroyed as revenge for their having the Master Plan ripped up and the Democratic Council majority deposed. Good municipal policies are intended to nurture the present and future residents of an city or county — not to nurse grudges that have for too long been overfed.