Excerpt:

ALAMEDA -- The Veterans Affairs Department could take ownership of land at Alameda Point set aside for a veterans health clinic and a columbarium as soon as next summer, a milestone in a project that has been in the works for at least eight years.

No date has been set for the actual groundbreaking, however, despite Congress authorizing about $208 million for the clinic and columbarium, which would be a national cemetery.

"We do not know when construction might begin," Mark Raymond Chandler of the Alameda County Veterans Affairs Commission said. "But it's definitely going to happen. It's just a question of when."