The Department of Veterans Affairs wants to build a $125 million, 125,000-square-foot medical center with 1,000 parking spaces in the Ewa area that would take some pressure off Tripler Army Medical Center and provide outpatient primary care and mental health services for veterans as well as treatment for active-duty Army, Navy and Coast Guard and their families.
The VA would occupy 72,000 square feet and the Defense Department 36,000 feet, with the Veterans Benefits Administration and Hawaii Office of Veteran Services filling the rest of the space.
The VA wants a developer to provide financing and bear most of the cost of building the center with the VA and Defense Department renting the space.
BY THE NUMBERS
The Department of Veterans Affairs wants to build a medical center in the Ewa area that also would be used to treat active-duty Army, Navy and Coast Guard members and families.
>> Cost: $125 million with construction anticipated to begin in late 2013 or early 2014
>> Total square feet: 124,699
>> VA use: 72,000 square feet
>> Defense Department use: 36,000 square feet
>> Veterans Benefits Administration and Office of Veteran Services: 16,699 square feet
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Craig Oswald, facilities strategic planner for the VA Pacific Islands Health Care System, was asked whether the climate is there for a developer to step forward.
“We hope so,” he said. “So far, the feedback and some of the conversations we’ve had up to the point of proposing the project kind of indicated that.”
Plans for expanded VA services come as Oahu faces a shortage of hospitals for civilians. In December and January the Hawaii Medical Center-West in Ewa and the East facility in Liliha closed their doors.
Oswald said the shuttered Ewa facility wouldn’t be a good fit for the VA.
There are those “who have asked or said, ‘You know, the VA ought to just buy that place and turn it into a big VA hospital,’ but the VA continues in its direction with Tripler (as a main hospital),” Oswald said. “We don’t want to own our own hospital (in Ewa). Rather, we are going to put an ambulatory care center together and share it with the Army.”
The VA does plan to open a$1.5 million outpatient clinic this summer in 7,000 square feet of rented space at Hawaii Medical Center-West to meet interim needs.
The additions are part of VA’s plan to expand services on Oahu with the Spark M. Matsunaga Medical Center at Tripler “oversubscribed,” treating more than 25,000 veterans annually, the agency said.
Officials also cited a need to provide services closer to where veterans live. The VA standard is that veterans should be able to reach primary care within a 30-minute drive, and the proposed Ewa center would help meet the need, Oswald said.
Between 10,000 and 13,000 enrolled veterans live in Leeward Oahu — including the Ewa plain — Central Oahu and the North Shore, and the new facility “would be a much more convenient place for them to go,” he said.
Additionally, the VA is debuting a mobile vet center to reach outlying communities, and a counseling center will soon open in Kapolei, officials said.
Many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are moving to the more affordable Leeward side, Oswald said.
At a recent Senate hearing, U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka thanked VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, a Kauai native, for including funding in the 2013 budget for the Ewa facility.
According to Akaka’s office, the budget request is for $16.5 million, to be used in the design phase for the new facility, Oswald said.
Dr. James Hastings, director of the VA Pacific Islands Health Care System, said the VA about 10 years ago identified the need for a clinic in the Ewa area, and that need has grown as space to expand at Tripler diminished.
“We were getting too congested up here, and the VA was out of space and Tripler was out of space,” Hastings said.
Oswald said the VA has a 45,000-square-foot space deficiency at Tripler, and “that’s looking just at sort of the workload that we’re trying to accomplish now.”
A total Pacific enrollment of 45,000 veterans, meanwhile, is expected to grow to 52,000 to 53,000 through the next 20 years, Oswald said.
The center, to be operated by the Veterans Health Administration, would provide primary and mental health care as well as general X-ray, laboratory, pharmacy and tele-health, including long-distance diagnostics.
“What we’re trying to do is reserve Tripler hill for referral kinds of requirements that require a lot higher forms of technology like operating rooms and those kinds of things,” Hastings said.
Primary care services for active-duty Army, Navy and Coast Guard members and their families also would be available at the Ewa facility, the VA said.
The Navy has Makalapa Clinic at Pearl Harbor, and “what the Navy was looking at is their beneficiaries that live quite a distance from Makalapa, out in the Leeward area and beyond, those folks would come there (to the Ewa center) in lieu of Makalapa,” Oswald said.
The VA estimates it would need a 10-acre site for the outpatient center, which could be in Ewa, Kapolei or Kalaeloa, Oswald said.
The plan is to select a developer to provide the land and build the building, and the VA and Defense Department would lease the space.
“Usually, what happens is the VA will make some kind of an initial upfront sort of contribution toward the project, but primarily, all of the future cash flows in terms of the rent would be the way that the developer would recover the investment,” Oswald said.
Next year is expected to involve the design phase, with the start of construction hoped for at the end of 2013 or beginning of 2014, with the opening of the new center in fiscal 2015 or 2016, he said.
