BCAT News

The Burlington Veterans Service has finalized a plan to add a sixth flag pole to the veterans section on the Town Common, honoring the Space Force, the latest branch added to the U.S. Military. 

“A service branch has been created in the last couple of years, the Space Force, and the veterans in this community and the veterans organizations have prided ourselves in representing those services,” said Veterans Services Director Chris Hanafin. 

Art Enos, a veteran himself and the Commandant of the Marine Corps League, was the architect and driving force behind the installation of the original veterans section in the early 2010s. He said the costs of installing a new flag pole have skyrocketed since the other poles were put in.

“The flag poles, when I originally put them in, the 30-foot poles for the service agencies cost us $1,375 a piece; now it costs close to $3,000, $3,500,” he said. Besides, the installation includes extending the walkway and the stone wall beside the other five flag poles so they all look uniform. 

Enos said that in all the time he spent scoping out the project, he noticed some of the monuments and headstones in the area are a bit worse for wear, blackened or covered in vegetation. He contacted the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia to learn the proper way to clean the monuments without damaging them. In total, the project, including installing the Space Force flag pole, extending the wall and walkway, adding lighting, installing sprinklers to keep flowers alive in the area, and cleaning monuments in the veterans section, is slated to cost about $30,000, funded by local veterans groups.

Hanafin politely decline an offer from Select Board Member Nick Priest to contribute funding to the project. 

“Us within the veterans community take pride in the fact that we take care of our own,” Hanafin said. “The veterans community takes pride that there hasn’t been a single taxpayer dollar used for any of those monuments, those flagpoles, to include the high school project. It was all funded by veterans, and we’d like to keep it that way.”