Governor Brown signs Monning bill, authorizes $1 million for veterans cemetery

Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed a bill that will put $1 million in state funds toward developing a veterans cemetery on the old Fort Ord.

SB 232, written by state Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, and co-authored by Assemblyman Mark Stone, D-Monterey Bay, appropriates the $1 million toward non-reimbursable costs of the Central Coast State Veterans Cemetery.

It supplements funds already raised by the community—and provides a much needed boost to the project, which faced a $2.6 million gap between the amount of a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs grant ($6.8 million) and the estimated cost of the cemetery's first phase ($9.4 million).

Waiting for Brown's signature has given Monning a lot of sleepless nights in the past week, he says; the funding gap had to be closed by Oct. 15 or the state risked losing the VA grant altogether. 

"We now have room to breathe," says Monning, who's ending his first term in the senate and got the call from Brown's office at 8am. "It looked good, but you just don't know until it's done. It was a last-minute move at the end of the session."

The $1 million from the state is supposed to trigger the arrival of another $1 million from an as-yet unidentified source. Monning says he expects an announcement in the coming days, but that announcement will come from the donor.

"I'm not calling the shots on that one," Monning says, "but I can reaffirm it was contingent on the governor signing SB 232."

With $2 million hopefully in place, it's been left to other fundraising to close the remaining $600,000 gap. The Fort Ord Reuse Authority last week received a $350,000 low-interest, program-specific loan for the cemetery, and has applied for a $100,000 grant, both from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Cannery Row Co. President Ted Balestreri also made a $150,000 low-interest loan, a move announced by the fundraising team of Carmel Mayor Jason Burnett and Jimmy Panetta, an assistant prosecutor and Navy veteran. 

"But we have to keep the momentum going because the work isn't done," Monning says. "This does give us breathing space to do some methodical outreach to people who can make significant contributions."

The veterans cemetery has been at the center of this election season's ugliest campaign, with backers of Measure K claiming rival Measure M would kill the cemetery outright, a claim that isn't born out by fact. Measure K, meanwhile, has received its major funding from Monterey Downs LLC, a  group trying to develop a horse-racing track, hotels and homes on Fort Ord lands.