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Veterans Advisory Committee Minutes November 30, 2021 Page 7 to come back over the next year to continual training with our staff and continue assessing the grounds and next year they'll do administrative level training to make sure our records are being kept correctly. One of the biggest issues they had, that came out in the report is the bowing of the gravesites and if you look down the row it kind of goes up and down that way, so what we plan to do is work with a consultant to assess that completely and then hire a contractor to fix that completely and level it out. That's all the things we plan to do over the next year. Like I said, Artis and his team will be back training our guys as well as continuing with the assessments. We have not received their final feedback, final report. I know Maurice did speak with them and said, "please do not hold back on this report, if we're messing up on something put it in the report so we know and we know how to address that. We are anxiously awaiting that report, as soon as we get that, we'll pass it on. Chair Doolittle: Thank you very much. Does anybody have any comments on that? Minoru Hanato: I usually go to the veteran's cemetery for everything, and I asked to be at those two days of training, and I was refused because I'm not a county worker. But I just wanted to see what they were going to teach on the ground burial and stuff. I don't know if you guys know but Kona cemetery, I believe is the only cemetery that digs the hole nine feet long, five feet wide and nine feel deep and it's done with a backhoe then you get the truck an everything that goes over to get to the hole. What happens all this time is when they dig the hole, they do the burial, and they dig another hole it caves in. Well, we had meetings from way back to try remedy that but during that meeting, I hate to say it but the County was there, but they didn't represent the County like they should and they didn't try to help us out as to what we was trying to make them do. We were trying to make them make concrete vaults so that they didn't have to drive over the grave and the next grave with the backhoe or the trucks, that's what's been happening even after they built the new section. That's why they're digging every other gravesite and it's really terrible to see especially when the ground is wet to see the tracks of the machines going over all the graves to reach the end grave. I wanted to express my thoughts about that but being that I was told not to appear, I didn't go. But I really want to express my thoughts about how they should be done because it's not being done the way it was supposed to be done, not according to the way the designers in Honolulu Chair Doolittle: Are you saying that they equipment has to drive over the graves to get to the end of the row to dig a new grave? Hanato: Yes, and it's terrible to see a lot of the graves are sunk, it's almost 10 inches lower than the ground level. Chair Doolittle: You're saying that's from the heavy equipment driving over it. Hanato: Yes, that's why I wanted to express my opinion, but they didn't want me to be there.