Threat of rain and future construction of multistory student apartments may dampen celebration of Memorial Day at Fayetteville National Cemetery

The Veterans Administration's annual Memorial Day ceremony is to begin at 10 a.m. Monday at the Fayetteville National Cemetery at 700 Government Avenue south of Martin Luther King Boulevard (former Sixth Street) west of South School Avenue in the Town Branch neighborhood of Fayetteville, Arkansas.
The keynote speaker is to be Vic Walker, a retired Veterans of Foreign Wars commander.
Everyone is welcome.

Please click on image below to ENLARGE 2005 view of the Fayetteville National Cemetery next to the Washington County Auction Barn. The bare ground at right is the former Aspen Ridge site where student apartments for more than 800 students are nearing completion now.
A 500-bedroom student-apartment complex of multistory buildings likely would be under way on Memorial Day 2010 if the Fayetteville Planning Commission on Tuesday night approves rezoning the adjacent property of the Washington County Sale Barn.
The buildings would overshadow the historic cemetery created in 1867 after the Civil War.


Monthly business meetings of the Regional National Cemetery Improvement Corporation are at 10:30 a.m. on the second Saturday of the month at the American Legion Post No. 27, 1195 S.Curtis Avenue, Fayetteville, Arkansas.
The group meets next at 10:30 a.m. June 13. 2009. Visitors are welcome to attend to discuss the proposed Livestock-auction land sale to allow student apartments to be built adjacent to the east side of the national cemetery.
For information, please call President Roger McClain at 479-306-6459 or visit the group's Web site at http://www.geocities.com/regncic/
Fayetteville National Cemetery has conducted close to 8,000 interments of veterans and immediate dependents. The cemetery has laid to rest six soldiers from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

START TODAY to raise money to protect the Fayetteville National Cemetery from being overshadowed by student-apartment complex!
The Morning News had a good but far too short article on the upcoming 5:30 p.m. Tuesday May 26 meeting of the Fayetteville Planning Commission where a public hearing on the future use of the Washington County auction barn property is to be discussed. A developer wants to put more than 500 bedrooms in multistory buildings next to Fayetteville's National Cemetery, where U.S. military veterans have been buried since the end of the Civil War.
The many ways the proposed development and the construction of it would hurt the neighborhood and the watershed of Beaver Lake can't all be listed completely in even many paragraphs. But the incredible insult of even proposing such a project adjacent to a national cemetery for veterans is all that needs to be considered for the city planning commission to reject the proposed rezoning of this land.
A major fund-raising campaign must be started to allow the Regional Cemetery Corporation to buy the sale barn for expansion. It is not too late, but it must begin on Memorial Day 2009.
For more information and a Town Branch neighborhood view of the proposal to build apartments on the sale-barn property next to the cemetery, please scroll down past the flower photos below.