Work starts on new nursing home for veterans in Walla Walla
Seeing work begin on a new $36 million nursing home for veterans was a long-awaited treat for many former service members on Wednesday.
“It’s long overdue for our veterans here in Southeastern Washington,” said Larry Watson of Pasco after a groundbreaking ceremony for the Walla Walla Veterans Home. “The closest nursing home is in Spokane. There’s two on the other side of the mountains. The problem from a family’s perspective is they’ve got a long way to drive in the winter or summer to get back and forth to see their (relative). This one should solve a lot of those problems, and there is a justifiable need for it to be built here.”
Watson, a former state American Legion commander, was one of 150 people who attended the hourlong ceremony.
The 80-bed home will have a unique design for Washington, with eight houses, each with 10 bedrooms, said state Department of Veterans Affairs Director Alfie Alvarado Ramos. It will be owned by the state veterans department but located on the campus of the Walla Walla Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
The project should take about 18 months to complete, though delays are possible if historic artifacts from Fort Walla Walla and the tribes that once lived on the site are found, Alvarado Ramos said.
The nursing home will employ 100 people, along with some temporary on-call jobs for people who fill in when regular workers are away, Alvarado Ramos said.
Each house will have a “great room,” with easy chairs and a dining table, Alvarado Ramos said.
“They are like your own home,” she told the Herald. “You have a bedroom, living room, kitchen where the food is prepared. With this big house concept, we can take care of our veterans in a way like they are in their own home.”
Construction equipment has moved onto the campus, and ground is being leveled. Alvarado Ramos said a water tower will be torn down in the next couple of weeks and replaced by a state-of-the-art water structure.
“As it’s demolished, then we will be able to start doing prep work,” she said. “We’ve done our absolute best to be able to preserve as many trees to be part of the footprint. It just pains me greatly that we do have some trees that will have to come down because they are in the way of the houses.”
Challenges to construction
Wednesday’s ceremony seemed improbable in 2004, when the Walla Walla VA was put on a list of facilities destined for closure, said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. Facility supporters not only were able to fight to keep it open, but they received money for a $71.4 million outpatient clinic that Murray visited during a ribbon-cutting ceremony last year.
Getting the veterans home built was another challenge. It appeared close to construction in 2013 when a tribal blessing ceremony was held at the site, but a VA grant for the project was pulled after a longer-than-expected environmental review. That led to the facility missing a deadline for land to be transferred from the federal to the state government, a requirement for the federal grant.
That almost caused the project to be pushed to the end of the priority list, which would have caused a 10-year delay, Alvarado Ramos said. She credited Murray’s tenacity and focus on results with getting the $23 million in federal funding in 2014.
“This really is pulling a rabbit through the eye of a needle,” she said.
Murray credited community leaders and Eastern Washington veterans with helping her work with several VA secretaries to secure money for the project.
“After so many years, the reason why this long effort is finally coming to fruition is because you all believe the same thing I do — our veterans in Walla Walla deserve the care and support this home will offer — and we owed it to them to get this done,” she said. “It took an amazing level of coordinated effort to make today’s veterans home and the continued existence of this VA campus a reality. … This is a community that has let their veterans know, we’ve got your back.”
Caring for veterans
Murray, a member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said after the ceremony that she is concerned that wait times longer than 30 days for appointments at VA facilities reportedly were up by 50 percent last year. She said she has watched wait times for years.
The VA also faces a budget shortfall of more than $2.5 billion because of increased demand by veterans for health care.
“We’ve had a huge complex challenge because of the high number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are coming home. At the same time, we have a number of veterans from the Vietnam era who are aging into a system and need more care,” Murray told reporters. “So we have got to keep the VA’s feet to the fire. They keep doing small little fixes, sometimes even big fixes. We can’t keep our eye off the end game, which is to make sure that no veteran has to wait for their care. The numbers are rising again. We’re following it closely. We’re demanding that the VA step up and pay attention to what the issues are today and solve this.”
This story was originally published July 1, 2015 at 10:47 PM with the headline "Work starts on new nursing home for veterans in Walla Walla."