Irvine Mayor Larry Agran is once again gunning for a veterans cemetery at the Great Park.

Since 2014, Agran has tried to gather support for the project, even suing the city when he was out of office in 2017 over a decision by the City Council to plan for a veterans cemetery away from the Great Park, which is the site of the former Marine Corps Air Base El Toro.

Reelected multiple times since then, Agran continued his push even as other Irvine councilmembers and elected leaders in all the other Orange County cities gave their public support to a proposed state veterans cemetery in Gypsum Canyon.

Now, Agran is asking the newly expanded City Council to rescind the city’s exclusive support for that site and to support the development of a municipal veterans memorial park, gardens and cemetery at the Great Park by Memorial Day 2028.

He envisions the 125-acre site would contain mostly gardens and meadows, with 20 to 30 acres reserved as a cemetery.

The City Council is expected to discuss his newest proposal on Tuesday, May 27.

“For me this is unfinished business,” he said in a phone interview this week. “The Gypsum Canyon site has all kinds of problems, but I’m not in this to defeat the Gypsum Canyon site.”

A year ago, Agran requested that Irvine spend $60,000 to finance a technical study about the state-funded Gypsum Canyon site, hoping to demonstrate that the project would not be cost-effective.

“If they manage to qualify that site, it’s OK with me,” he said in the interview. “Meanwhile, we’re obligated, I believe, morally as well as legally, to push forward with the veterans cemetery at the Great Park.”

He said that his moral argument rests on promises he believes the city has made to veterans and their families since the city incorporated a proposal for a veterans cemetery in Great Park master plan documents over a decade ago.

“We’ve made many, many promises to widows holding the ashes of their loved ones who served, waiting so that their ashes can be interred at the Great Park,” he said.

It also rests on his conviction that a veterans cemetery should be on the site of the former air base.

“This is the best site for a veterans cemetery in Orange County, period,” he said.

“El Toro was critically important to 60 years of Asian Pacific warfare and peacetime through World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the entirety of the Cold War,” he said. “This is hallowed ground that is the most appropriate final resting place for those who served.”

The legal argument, Agran says, rests on a 2020 Build the Great Park Veterans Cemetery Initiative that he circulated around town and that was signed by nearly 20,000 Irvine residents and then adopted by the City Council.

The initiative established what’s known as the “ARDA site” adjacent to the Great Park, a site rezoned for cemetery uses, caretakers’ quarters, an information center and parks.

The initiative also provided for the inclusion of certain features in the parks, including preservation of the aircraft control tower and the creation of a 2.5-mile perimeter park system with trees, trails and memorial gardens.

Although the city is currently constructing the perimeter park system and has a veterans memorial in it plans, Agran says that’s not enough to comply with the law, according to his interpretation of the 2020 initiative.

He says the city must build the cemetery, although Irvine effectively abandoned its efforts at developing a final resting place for veterans after the council voted to support the Gypsum Canyon site in 2021.

“The zoning law, as provided in the 2020 initiative, is the supreme law of the city,” he said. “That property is zoned exclusively for a veterans memorial park and cemetery.”

Agran said he will not quit his fight for a Great Park veterans cemetery, no matter the result of Tuesday’s City Council vote.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “that law will be implemented no matter how long it takes.”