Neighbors of Fort Logan Cemetery in Denver Decry Impact of VA’s Expansion Decision

Five years ago, Henry Navarro, a lifelong Denverite, wanted to leave the city behind and purchase a home in Conifer in the foothills, but his wife was drawn to the Pinehurst Estates neighborhood in southwest Denver.

Navarro, a retired U.S. Army Ranger, warmed up to the house on the edge of Fort Logan National Cemetery, where his grandfather is buried. And every morning, he walks four miles to visit the grave of Ryan Riley, who served with Navarro’s son in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One day, he plans to be buried there, too.

“It was what I considered a perfect place at that point,” Navarro said.

But no longer. He’s among Pinehurst Estates residents who say they were largely left out of the government planning process for a project that will expand the cemetery near their homes and block some views of its bucolic grounds. To their surprise, they noticed construction starting last month — years after planning had started quietly in 2019.

“If I would have known this five years ago … we would have never purchased here,” Navarro said.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs proposed a plan that would impact an estimated 20 acres by building 9,100 burial areas for casketed remains and add more than 19,000 markers for cremated remains as well as 7,500 columbarium niches, which hold burial urns, according to government documents.

The plans include a columbarium wall that’s about 9 feet tall and around a half-mile long, according to the VA’s required environmental assessment for the project. It is set to be built on the cemetery’s south side, which borders 20 houses in Pinehurst Estates.

According to the VA, money for the project was appropriated by Congress in the 2022 fiscal year budget.

The VA says the draft environmental assessment was available for public review in September 2022, but received no comments. And a notice of availability was published in the Denver Herald Dispatch, an online newspaper.

Still, residents remained unaware of the documents.

“It’s very difficult to understand, when the VA has so much land, why they’re insistent that it has to go in one of the few places where they have grass-to-grass neighbors,” resident Carol Andrew said of the planned columbarium wall. “We want what the cemetery wants. We just want it located in a place that makes more sense.”

“There would have been objections”

Navarro first heard about the project in July when a welcome center volunteer told him about the plans to build a columbarium wall. He said he couldn’t find any details about the project on the internet at the time — and his neighbors hadn’t heard about it either.

Then, in mid-November, he received a written notice from Fort Logan in his mailbox about a town hall coming in early December to discuss the expansion project and prephase work that was already underway.

According to the letter shared with The Denver Post, tree removal and columbarium construction was planned from November through May 2026, with no action required by residents.

Last month, “they started tearing up, knocking down 50 trees and just leveling the ground,” Navarro said. “It’s devastating what they’ve done.”

He doesn’t hold any animosity toward the cemetery and its staff, he said, but it’s disconcerting to him that decision-makers at the VA didn’t further involve neighbors.

“If we would have known about it, there would have been objections,” Navarro said. He felt the project “was kept under wraps,” he added.

While VA press secretary Terrence Hayes said the department adhered to the required notification standards for community outreach, “we acknowledge we could have better engaged the local community.”

“VA is aware of concerns expressed by the community adjacent to the cemetery regarding construction plans and are considering them as we evaluate the next steps for this expansion effort,” Hayes added in an emailed statement.

Navarro worries not only about the sight line from his house, but also about the impact on property values and the new columbarium’s creation of a snow barrier.

“You walk into my backyard, and it’s going to be a total mess,” he said.

Navarro would like to see a work order halt, then a meeting to discuss alternatives like a new location for the columbarium.

Cemetery’s director defends project

Once serving as a base camp and Army post, Fort Logan inters more than 150,000 Coloradans today, cemetery director Tony Thomas said.

A small cemetery was initially established by the Army in 1889. The total acreage is now more than 260 acres, with nearly 50 acres bought by the VA from the state for over $10 million in 2019, according to a news release. That new land — intended to expand the cemetery — is adjacent to its southern side.

Thomas said the expansion project’s planning began that year. It will help support the state’s veterans — particularly amid the growing popularity of cremations, which are less expensive than casketed burials, Thomas added.

“Just recently, the contract was awarded and construction started,” he said. But Thomas acknowledged the frustration he’s fielded from neighbors.

“We have a robust veteran community around the cemetery, and they do a great job of supporting us,” Thomas said. “But some of them are upset and frustrated because there was no prior notification or discussions with them before the construction started.”

Thomas said the Dec. 3 town hall was organized to be transparent and collect feedback, including concerns.

Denver City Councilman Kevin Flynn, who represents Pinehurst Estates as part of District 2, said he hadn’t heard details of the project design until residents approached him.

He has a personal connection to the cemetery, which is where his brother-in-law is buried.

“It just occurs to me that there are better locations for the columbaria than against people’s backyard fence,” Flynn said.

On top of that, columbaria already exist on the property — and Flynn would like to see the new addition’s design, which he called “awkwardly different,” match those.

But since the city doesn’t hold jurisdiction over the state or federal governments, council members have little influence.

“It’s true that the cemetery doesn’t have to listen to the residents’ input,” Flynn said. “But that doesn’t mean that it can’t.”

Residents feel disregarded by process

Andrew, the Pinehurst Estates resident, is part of a three-generation military family and still has love for the cemetery.

But “it’s very difficult that the VA has to build this in the one place where it’s going to just destroy our little corner of the world,” Andrew said. She proposes for the new columbarium to be relocated to one of several alternative areas, such as along the cemetery’s north perimeter.

In the VA’s environmental assessment, which analyzes the impacts of the proposed plan, Andrew takes issue with a line under the environmental justice section: “The surrounding area does not include residential areas.”

“That’s quite an astonishing sentence,” Andrew said, “because Fort Logan cemetery on its southern perimeter immediately backs to abutting residential neighbors” — 20 households, including her own.

Later on, the 509-page assessment includes details about those houses and their architectural descriptions in its historic resources survey report. So Andrew is left wondering why she didn’t receive notice sooner — and why she wasn’t given a chance to be part of the process, even if her efforts hadn’t ended up prevailing.

Andrew, who has owned her home for three decades, recalls standing at her kitchen sink on the morning of Nov. 14, watching — confused — as construction workers put up a fence for the project.

Now, instead of seeing flora and “a beautiful national monument with the graves of our heroes,” she said, her home will look out toward a barrier near her back property line. She also worries about the future value of her home.

“We’re just regular people,” she said, her voice strained with emotion. “And for a lot of people, their home is the most important financial asset they own — and protecting the value of that asset is crucial to their ongoing financial security, especially in old age.”

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