On Monday, the Melrose Board of Alderman finance committee unanimously recommended the creation of an account that allows our office to accept donations and deposit funds for the upkeep and creation of veteran memorials throughout the city.

Donations for this account will directly fund restoration projects and new monument sites identified by the Melrose Veterans Advisory Board and the Mayor's Office. The first project drawing funds from the account will be the installation of a dedicated monument for Melrose Korean War veterans.

Service and sacrifice during the Korean War is the focus of Fiscal Year 2015. Several projects will highlight this important veteran generation including Operation Remember and Memorial Day 2015. The planned culmination for this year of focus is the design, creation and installation of a beautiful dedication to the Korean War.

Additional projects include the placement of permanent flag holders for the city's major veteran memorials, scheduled maintenance for the existing monuments and the creation of a women's veteran memorial that will serve as the highlight of Veterans Day 2014.

We are excited to announced this development and will work hard to put donated dollars to use in a logical and impactful way. Throughout the summer we will continue to use this space to provide status updates for ongoing projects and release our 10-year monument plan as it becomes available.

The first chance for residents to donate to the fund comes on September 12, 2014 when Melrose Veteran Services will host a charity golf tournament at Mount Hood. At this event, we will unveil the design for the Korean War monument highlighting the service of 9 Melrose KIA and more than 1000 service members deployed.

For more information on the tournament, please visit www.melrosevetgolf.com.

Operation Remember, our year-long tribute to the men and women who served during the Korean War, officially kicks off with a golf tournament and fundraiser at Mount Hood Golf Course on September 12, 2014. We have 144 tee-times and discounted prices for veterans and Korean War Veterans.

The highlight of the tournament will be the unveiling of the design for the Melrose Korean War Monument. This memorial will honor the men who gave their lives during the Korean War and all who served during the "Forgotten War." We plan to install this monument in time for Memorial Day 2015.

You can sign up for the tournament online. Follow the information on this page to reserve your spot.

Tournament Details

Melrose Veteran Services
Melrose Veteran Memorial Restoration Fund
Mount Hood Golf Course, Melrose, MA
September 12, 2014 
7-8 a.m. Registration

All proceeds directly fund the creation of a dedicated Korean War Monument

General Admission
$150 per golfer

Veteran Admission
$125 per golfer
* DD214 required for proof of veteran status

Korean War Veteran Admission
$100 per golfer
* DD214 required for proof of veteran status

Click Here to Register Online

If you prefer to sign up in person, bring check and registration form to:

Melrose Veteran Services
1st Floor City Hall
562 Main Street
Melrose, MA 02176

Make check payable to "City of Melrose"

Our goal is to catalog and display all of the memorials in Melrose, Wakefield and Saugus for our virtual museums. We added four more monuments to the Wakefield Museum to include the World War I, American Legion, VFW and War with Spain monuments today.

The purpose of the museums is to show the true commitments of our three towns when honoring their veterans throughout the generations. This is a long-term project and will take several years to complete as it encompasses hundreds of memorials of all shapes and sizes.

We would like to include the following for each memorial:

1.) Pictures - Images from the present and the past to show aging
2.) Information - Details about them monument for future preservation
3.) Purpose and Donation - Who created the monument and why
4.) Original Documents - Like a physical museum, we want the original documents for posterity

We need your help! If you have pictures, documents, information, leads or time, we could use your assistance in completing this project.

We are proud to report our district performance statistics at the close of Fiscal Year 2014. There are many areas for improvement, but overall the district continues to grow and provide more services and benefits to the more than 5000 veteran who live in Melrose, Wakefield and Saugus.

As a quick primer, Chapter 115 benefits are provided by our municipalities directly to veterans that meet low-income thresholds. This is not a VA benefit! If we process these benefits correctly, the municipality receives 75% of the funds back from the state. We call this our efficiency rating. Chapter 115 benefits come in many forms and assist veterans and their families with rent, medical costs, dental costs and other misc expenditures.

Additionally, we track almost all of the veteran contacts we make daily to include how many veterans we assist with VA or federal claims and how we break up of time - drop ins, phone calls, emails and outreach. We hope you find this information useful and as always, we welcome any suggestions for improvement.

Our district saw a 19% increase in benefits delivered and an 8% increase from Fiscal Year 13. The greatest increase was in Saugus where District VSO Andrew Biggio worked hard to identify veterans in need of employment and health assistance. Melrose saw small growth and Wakefield continues to grow at a steady pace given the investment of hours and resources into that office.

In total, our district spent approximately $902k on low-income veterans in FY2014, attempting to bring all veterans in the district above 200% of the Federal Poverty Level per Chapter 115 guidance.

We continue to refine and improve our tracking systems to display our workload to the public and to attempt to meet our goal of providing answers to questions within 24-hours of inquiry. We track the types of contacts as well in order to project our time requirements for the coming year. Wakefield clients prefer to call, Saugus clients prefer to stop by Town Hall and Melrose clients split contacts between phone calls, drop ins and internet inquiries.

In Melrose we track the types of veteran seeking assistance. Most veteran inquiries come from the Vietnam era (31%), followed by WWII (26%), Korean War (18%), Persian Gulf/Cold War era (15%) and Iraq and Afghanistan era veterans (10%). Tracking inquiries in this way allows us to project assistance moving forward. Although we spend a large percentage of our time focusing on modern outreach platforms (social media etc), we still need an office presence for our older generations who prefer face-to-face contacts.

While we are not the VA, interfacing with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs is a large component of our job, helping veterans and their families apply for disability, pension, education, memorial and other federal benefits. Since we are a full-time staff, taking advantage of federal and state level benefits allows us to draw resources from outside of the community to improve the lives of our veteran populations without sapping local budgets. Due to this, we track our VA assistance in order to measure how we are taking advantages of the multiple avenues of assistance available to veterans and their families. 

This statistic is new for us. Please note we did not start tracking these numbers until late 2013. We will have better, more accurate projects and comparisons at the close of FY2015.

For more information or more detailed statistics, please contact any of our offices or email rmclane@cityofmelrose.org.