MONTICELLO – With a unanimous vote on July 9, the Sullivan County Legislature amended the rules for operation of the Sullivan County Veterans Cemetery (SCVC) in Liberty to give burial eligibility to veterans who own property in Sullivan County.

“The current eligibility criteria,” explained Director of the Veterans Service Agency Stephen Walsh, “requires that a veteran would have to have entered the military while living in Sullivan County or be a current resident to be eligible for burial.”

Walsh continued that there is no provision for veterans who have maintained homes or property that they have continuously paid taxes on while living outside the county.

One such veteran is Thomas Lundrigan, who served from October 1966 to June 1970 and spent one year flying helicopters in the Vietnam War. Though his family paid taxes on and maintained a house and property for 70 years, Lundrigan discovered he would not be eligible to be buried in the SCVC before the passage of the amendment because he spends some of the year in Florida.

At 83 years of age, Lundrigan reflected on his past and his desire to be buried in the SCVC: “I was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens in a pretty rough neighborhood. Summertime kids could get into trouble. Our parents decided to get me and my younger brother out of the city. They bought a house in Youngsville in 1956. I was 14 years old, and for the next four years I worked on a farm—milking cows, riding horses, bailing hay—probably the best four years of my life. I’ve been here since 1956, it will be 70 years this summer. And I decided I’d rather be buried here than anywhere else.”

The resolution to add property owners to the eligibility list came after a meeting on June 17 between Stephen Walsh, Director of the Veterans Service Agency, and District 5 Legislator Cat Scott, where they discussed the possibility of extended terms of eligibility.

“We have a gentleman here with us today, Mr. Tom Lundrigan, who has been a part-time resident of the county since 1956,” said Scott. “He served in the Air Force, but he enrolled in Queens and not in Sullivan [County], and he is a snowbird, like many of our residents are, and he has a Florida driver’s license. So when he came to the Veterans Service Agency looking to see if he was eligible to be buried in the veterans cemetery, he was told he wasn’t.”

Scott said Walsh had to dig through federal, state, and county laws that dictate regulations on burial eligibility. After hearing Lundrigan’s story, Scott and Veterans Committee Chair Luis Alvarez met with County Clerk Russell Reeves to learn more about the regulations governing driver’s licenses. They decided the easiest way to solve Lundrigan’s problem was to change the county’s rules of operation for the SCVC to include veterans who own property in Sullivan County.

Walsh noted that the passage of the resolution on July 9 marks the third time the eligibility criteria has been amended by resolution since it was introduced in 1983.