Priorities like taking care of our veterans or combating homelessness don’t always have to be on the losing end of public policy here in Orange County.
“They deserve the best,” said Orange County Fair Board member Nick Berardino from the second story of a World War II-era barracks called Heroes’ Hall this past week, as he looked out at the final preparations he is overseeing for the unveiling of a new county veterans museum at the fairgrounds this coming Veterans Day in Costa Mesa.
Yet community services – like taking care of our heroes or our homeless – get less and less attention in local public budgets year after year.
We give up on each other way too easily.
Consider the bid for a veterans’ museum in Orange County.
Despite all the U.S. flags and pins our politicians wear, especially on Veterans Day, none of our traditional veterans groups could get our local politicians to move the ball (ie: find the money or the land) this past decade to establish a local museum to tell their story to coming generations.
I’ll never forget seeing the veterans groups, one after another advocating in front of our county Board of Supervisors over the years, pitching one museum project after another, both on the Great Park and the Tustin air base land.
Yet somehow it just never got going.
Their legacy just didn’t pencil out, county supervisors told them, again and again.
Another one that didn’t pencil out was maintaining the veterans’ Walk of Honor in Orange County’s downtown civic center, which county supervisors allowed to descend into disrepair over the past decade as the area became a makeshift homeless camp.
Plaques donated by our local veterans to memorialize the exploits of their fallen comrades became the dirty backdrop to a drama featuring droves of mentally-ill homeless people – many homeless veterans themselves – often times urinating on the wall.