Alachua County commissioners OK a plan to let a veterans' group resize the tiles and monuments in the park to add another 80 years' worth of monuments.

The county's Veterans Memorial Park is a linear monument to American military history, allowing visitors a "walk through time."

But the walk's not long enough, it seems, to allow room for monuments to honor veterans of future wars.

So Alachua County commissioners approved a plan Tuesday to let a veterans' group resize the tiles and monuments in the park to add another 80 years' worth of monuments.

In its current configuration, the park has monuments that begin with the American Revolution and end with Desert Storm, part of the Gulf War. But that's where everything stops.

“Now we’re up to a place where we have a bit of a problem,” John Gebhardt, chair of the Alachua County Veterans Memorial Committee told the County Commission on Tuesday. Lengthening the monument isn’t an option because it’s bordered on one side by a roadway and the community center on the other.

The long, white brick monument constructed in 1992 honors Americans who died for their country in conflicts throughout history. There are nine monuments in total.

The veterans' committee has plans to reconfigure the memorial's design to allow it to include another 80 years.

The project will cost about $180,000, according to Gebhardt. The committee has so far raised about $160,000 for the project.

Right now, visitors walk across bricks through the war progression, with each foot-long brick representing a year.

“We’re going to shorten it to an 8-inch square per year,” said Gebhardt. “That gives us 80 more years of service on the same footprint that we currently have.”

That means gutting all the white bricks now in place and putting in new, smaller bricks, Gebhardt said.

“To pull them (up) we’re going to damage the concrete base, which already has some subsurface problems – cracking and settling issues,” Gebhardt said.

The plan is to permanently relocate the monuments dedicated to each memorial. Then rip up the bricks, replace the entire slab with new concrete, fill it in with the smaller bricks and order new sized-down monuments to fit the new look.

The older monuments will relocate to Forest Meadows Cemetery East, located off Southeast Hawthorne Road, according to Jim Lynch, another member of the Veterans Memorial Committee. The committee decided not to get rid to the old monuments because the names of local people lost in combat during each of those wars is inscribed on each of the corresponding war monuments.

“We’d like to make the dust fly beginning in late August with the hope to dedicate the new memorial on Veterans Day, November 11,” Gebhardt said.

In early April, the park was thrown into the spotlight after a post 9/11 monument was broken, presumably by vandals, prompting thousands of donations from community members.

The veterans committee has held off on replacing the new monument until after the redesign, when a new monument representing combat in the Middle East from Desert Storm through the present will be placed.