Montana County Interment Allowance for Veterans

This is an old benefit that still operates and that almost nobody claims. Section 10-2-501 requires the board of commissioners of every Montana county to designate a person in the county, preferably a veteran, as veterans' interment supervisor, and requires that supervisor to see that the body or cremated remains of any veteran who was a resident of Montana at the time of death is decently interred. The supervisor is unpaid. The county of residence must pay a sum not exceeding $500 toward the interment expense. A further sum, not exceeding the actual cost up to $100, is payable for shipping and raising a headstone provided under federal law, and the supervisor must help the personal representative or heirs apply for that headstone if asked. Set the figure against reality before relying on it. Section 10-2-501 has not been amended since 2011, and the federal plot allowance and burial allowance have both moved since. Five hundred dollars is a contribution toward a funeral, not the cost of one. It is nonetheless a real payment that the family has to ask for, because the mechanism starts with the county's supervisor rather than with an application form. The dignity rule in subsection (3) is the part of this section with teeth: the interment may not be made in a burial ground or cemetery, or in a portion of one, used exclusively for the interment of pauper dead. Subsection (9) adds that an interment may not be covered by any special or standing contract under which the cost is reduced below the statutory maximum "to the disparagement of proper interment", which stops a county contracting for a cheaper and lesser funeral. Three limits. Section 10-2-506 excludes a veteran who had no legal residence in Montana at the time of death. Subsection (5) makes the benefit unavailable where the personal representative or heirs waive it, so a family that says no cannot come back later. And the definition of veteran is the strict one in 10-2-101, requiring an honorable discharge. Where the death happens away from home the section still works: a veteran who dies while temporarily absent from the state or from their county is covered, and where a veteran dies at a state institution other than a veterans' home, at a federal institution or at a private facility and is not interred in their own county, the institution arranges the interment and the county of residence pays up to $500. For a resident of a Montana veterans' home the county of residence is the county they lived in when they were admitted. A related provision families sometimes need. Section 10-2-111 lets a mortuary hand the unclaimed remains of a veteran to a veterans' service organization for interment, with immunity from simple negligence, after holding the remains at least six months and after notice to the next of kin by mail or, if the address cannot reasonably be ascertained, by publication once a week for three weeks. The notice must say the remains must be claimed within six months. The organization must take all reasonable steps to inter the remains in a veterans' cemetery and may not scatter them.