Officials aim to build larger veterans facility

HARLINGEN - The new U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs and lawmakers lauded the new veterans health care center here Thursday, but said they are redoubling efforts to build an even larger facility for veterans in the Rio Grande Valley.

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, D-Texas, and Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake, who took office in December, toured the South Texas VA Health Care Center and said they were pleased with its new services, including mental health care, CT scans - a special type of X-ray - and podiatry.

The expanded clinic should reduce the need for veterans to travel to the nearest veterans hospital in San Antonio for care, they said.

"We know it was unacceptable for veterans to make a 500-mile trip, five hours each way, to San Antonio for routine checkups," Hutchison said.

Lawmakers and VA officials said, however, that they want to expedite the construction of a larger facility that would offer outpatient surgery, cardiology, neurology and numerous other services, eliminating about 95 percent of veterans' trips to San Antonio.

"We want to get that done as quickly as possible," said Dr. Francisco Cigarroa, president of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. The new VA center is adjacent to UT Health Science Center's Regional Academic Health Center, and the VA is leasing space from the university.

Officials dedicated the new, $10 million VA clinic in December, saying the 34,000-square-foot facility represented only the first phase in a long-term expansion. The final phase would be a 158,000-square-foot outpatient-surgery center, with a target completion date of December 2010. Additional phases aren't yet funded.

That proposed timeline for building the facility might not change, but VA officials said they wanted to bring more services here as soon as possible. That goal likely will be accomplished through contracts with local hospitals, said Timothy Shea, director of South Texas Veterans Health Care System, which oversees Valley facilities.

"Once (veterans) see that they can get inpatient and emergency room care in the Valley as easily as non-veterans, I think that will help," Shea said.

Already, fewer veterans are traveling to San Antonio for care, he said. The addition of a CT scan machine, for example, means about 600 veterans won't need to travel for routine screening, he said.

VA officials also are considering a realignment of its South Texas services, separating Laredo, Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande Valley from San Antonio and into their own veterans' system. That step might help ensure that funding makes its way to the region more efficiently, said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo.

Local veterans said that although they were grateful for the expanded veterans clinic, they still are pushing for a hospital.

"We are focused on seeing a veterans hospital in the Rio Grande Valley," said Felix Rodriguez, commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars' District 18, which oversees posts from Laredo to Brownsville. "We are committed to that still ... but we aren't looking a gift horse in the mouth."

Too many veterans still must wait months, or even years, to be seen by specialists in San Antonio - and then drive for hours to get there, Rodriguez said.

"We just want to make sure our veterans are tended to," he said. "We aren't going to wait for things to happen for us - we will make them happen."