By Cecilia Chan | Gilbert Sun News
Truck load after truck load of dirt – about 22,856 cubic yards –were hauled and dumped nearly five years ago on a 7-acre site near Gilbert Civic Center that was to be the home for a proposed veterans memorial park.
Operation Welcome Home touted that a scaled-down version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. and an education and resource center when it unveiled the plans in 2015.
But that project proved to be a pie in the sky when the nonprofit in 2019 announced it couldn’t raise the $3 million needed to build the park and shuttered its operation, prompting Town Council to sever its contract with the group and take back the land it had been leasing for $1 a year.
Gilbert and Operation Welcome Home partnered on the project with the town spending $1.6 million for off-site improvements such as parking lot and bus bay.
