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Officials dedicate new national veterans cemetery

Niagara Gazette - 12/1/2020

Dec. 1--The nation's newest cemetery honoring American's war veterans was formally dedicated during a ceremony on Monday in Pembroke.

Local, state and federal officials took part in the official commemoration of the new Western New York National Cemetery, a 269-acres site on Indian Falls Road in Pembroke which took more than a decade to move from the drawing board to reality.

"Today at long last, veterans across Western New York will have a fitting resting place and eternal place of honor right here in the very community they dedicated their lives to defend and serve," said U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, who attended Monday's dedication ceremony. "Dedicating this hallowed ground today answers the call of veterans who organized over a decade ago for a local National Cemetery."

Schumer was joined on Monday by representatives from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and several Western New York veterans who pushed for the creation of a veterans cemetery in Western New York.

Schumer said the new cemetery will allow more than 77,000 veterans and family members across the region to have proper military burials close to their homes, families and communities they served and defended. The veterans' cemetery will be the first and only of its kind in the Buffalo-Rochester area and Schumer said it will save thousands of military families from having to travel more than 100 miles in some cases to what was previously the closest veterans' cemetery in Bath, New York. Schumer said a four-hour round trip was not often feasible for families of veterans who wanted to visit their loved ones, which is why he and local veterans have worked for over a decade to make a more accessible national cemetery a reality for Western New York.

The concept of a Western New York National Veterans Cemetery dates back to the early 2000s. The effort to create the cemetery was led by Erie County veteran and advocate Dr. Patrick Welch who gathered more than 10,000 signatures that he and other veterans provided to Schumer as they sought support for a national veterans cemetery in this region.

For several years, Schumer said he worked alongside the veteran's community of Western New York to push the U.S. Veterans Affairs Administration to establish the new cemetery. The VA agreed to support the project in 2010.

In 2019, the federal government allocated $10 million that the VA said it would require to complete the cemetery's Phase 1 construction. Last year, the VA acquired two land parcels of 60-acres and 77-acres respectively in Pembroke which is where the new cemetery will be located. In 2016, another $36 million in federal funding was allocated for the construction phase of the cemetery.

"Genesee County's veteran community is extremely proud to be the host-county for the Western New York National Cemetery," said Doug Doktor, chairman of the Genesee County Joint Veterans Council."

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(c)2020 the Niagara Gazette (Niagara Falls, N.Y.)

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