Some Cobb veterans showed up in dress uniforms. Others were attired to indicate the details and places of their military service.
On Tuesday a few dozen of them showed up to convince Cobb commissioners to spend an additional $1 million in county funding for a veterans memorial.
But even after their emotional comments, commissioners turned down the request by a 4-1 vote.
Commissioners had an extra $175 million to allocate in current 2022 Cobb SPLOST (Special-Purpose Local-Option Sales Tax) revenues, due to healthy economic activity.
According to SPLOST regulations, only projects on the list that were submitted to voters for the sales tax referendum are eligible for the additional funds.
But while the Cobb Veterans Memorial, which has been in the works for a decade at the behest of county officials, was on the 2022 SPLOST list, it wasn’t on the list of items eligible for the $175 million in additional revenues.
So Commissioner JoAnn Birrell of East Cobb proposed taking $1 million in her contingency account for the development of Ebenezer Downs Park and transfer that amount to the veterans memorial to complete the project.
But she couldn’t get any of her colleagues to go along, and was openly frustrated at the proceedings.
“How can you put a price tag on our veterans?” Birrell asked, near the end of delivering prepared remarks.
Due to construction cost increases, the veterans memorial, which is being proposed for a site at Larry Bell Park in Marietta, was priced at nearly $8 million.
The county had already committed $3 million—$1 million in previous SPLOST allocations and $2 million from Birrell and Chairwoman Lisa Cupid in other discretionary funds.
Another $1 million been raised by the Cobb Veterans Memorial Foundation, a non-profit. The foundation reduced the scope of the memorial to get the cost to just under $5 million, cutting out a POW memorial and honor walls.
Cobb has an estimated 60,000 military veterans, and Birrell asked those in attendance Tuesday to stand, and they did, to applause.
One of them, Skip Bell, a member of the memorial’s board, said that “it’s easy to say you love and support veterans.
“Everybody says that. You are in a position,” he told commissioners, to prove that support.
But that didn’t sway new Commissioner Erick Allen, whose District 2 includes the proposed memorial site.
He noted that other park projects on the list for additional revenues “aren’t getting anything over and above what was on the original list” and pledged to help raise the money from private sources to close that $1 million gap.
He added that the original memorandum of understanding didn’t intend for the memorial to be a county-funded project, and said the elements of the memorial that don’t have funding now could be added later.
“We can break ground today with the funding that has been raised and with the funds that have been committed,” calling his suggestion a compromise.
Allen also said it was “insulting” to hear accusations that his opposition to another $1 million in county funds was likened to “spitting on the veterans coming home from Vietnam.”
But Donna Rowe, the memorial foundation’s board president and a former captain in the U.S. Army nursing corps in Vietnam, recounted that history from her perspective, and rattled off the changing cost estimates and county stipulations for getting the work done.
“We cannot do this in phases,” she said in response to Allen, thanking Birrell and Cupid for their “undying devotion” to getting the memorial built.
After the vote, Marietta resident Donald Barth, a frequent public commenter, said the memorial can be completed without more public funding.
“We are going to have a memorial and we all know it,” he said. “We need people who will move the ball forward.”
That summed up the thoughts of some of the veterans who were hoping for a different vote.
“There are Americans who are going to support this with or without you,” Vietnam veteran T.D. Jorgensen said, thanking Rowe and the others advocating for the memorial.
“God bless you. We need this.”
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Frankly, I wish that those millions that the county was spending to pave over public land for a memorial was going to actual, living veterans who need our help. Have any of these folks on this board ever visited the Georgia Veterans’ Retirement Home in Milledgeville? Or been to the local VA Hospital lately. Both of these institutions are in dire need of assistance and I’d rather donate to them in lieu of an expensive, showy “look how much we appreciate you” centerpiece.