SPANISH FORT, Ala.—Just as America honors its soldiers with memorials and families tie yellow ribbons to trees and send care packages over seas, the South Alabama Veterans Council is working to build a veterans cemetery on U.S. Highway 225 at Saluta Ridge across from Blakely State Park.

Bill Callender of Orange Beach, the cemetery’s committee chairman, said Tuesday at the South Alabama Veteran’s Council meeting that the next step is for Congress to approve the 2010 budget item and for the president to sign it.

“I’ve seen the $809,000 in the federal budget,” he said. “If it’s passed, we’ll have the first installments in there by the end of 2012.”

It has been a long process, Callender said.

Since 1962, the veterans’ memorial cemetery on Virginia Street in Mobile has been closed except to soldiers who died in combat and to those being cremated, he said.

John Tyson, an attorney, began the push for another cemetery to bury veterans and their families, he said. The council looked for land around the Virginia Street location that could be annexed, but wasn’t able to find something suitable to its needs.

Sonny Callahan, former state congressman, helped to get $1.5 million reserved for the cemetery’s construction, with the stipulation that the land be within a 10-mile radius of the Brookley Air Force Base, he said.

“That money is still there,” he said.

When the veterans council found a location in Spanish Fort, it couldn’t afford to buy the land, he said. Barry Booth, a dentist here, bought the 103 acres surrounding the Saluta Ridge Cemetery; Baldwin County Commission bought the land from him specifically for the veterans’ cemetery. The commission donated it to the state for that use—the necessary step for the federal government to consider building the burial grounds. They will develop the site and pay for architect and engineering services.

If the budget item is approved and if all goes according to plan, they will construct the cemetery and pay for maintenance for the first five years, after which it would be maintained by Baldwin County; the site would be owned by the State of Alabama Veterans Department, Callender said.