President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed nine bills into law supporting veterans care initiatives, including one that would name a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic planned for West Oahu after the late Hawaii Sen. Daniel Akaka.
“Danny was a great friend, he was an Army veteran in World War II and a former chair of the Committee on Veterans Affairs,” Biden said during the signing ceremony. “One of the finest people I ever served with, he really was a man of great honor and integrity.”
The Advanced Leeward Outpatient Healthcare Access Clinic — better known as the ALOHA Clinic — was a pet project of Akaka’s during his time as a U.S. senator. It will be the first new major VA project of its size in Hawaii since the Spark Matsunaga VA Ambulatory Care Clinic opened at Tripler Army Medical Center in 2000.
The VA’s Pacific Island Healthcare System is unique within the agency. Formerly based out of the Prince Kuhio Federal Building and now headquartered at Tripler, it has long been short on facilities of its own, instead relying on partnerships with military installations and various hospitals and community clinics spread across the islands of the Pacific.
The system is responsible for taking care of veterans throughout Hawaii as well as the territories of American Samoa and Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
The ALOHA Clinic is intended to help veterans living on Oahu’s West side get better and faster access
to care and lighten the workload on facilities at Tripler. The hospital, which for years has been one of the only options for veterans across the state, is chronically short of parking and has a high patient load.
Akaka, who worked to expand access to GI Bill benefits, spent years fighting for the project but was never able to secure funding and permits to make the clinic a reality. By the time of his death in 2018, the project had stalled and seemed to be in a state of near-permanent limbo.
But in March 2021, Sen. Mazie Hirono and Rep. Kai Kahele managed to secure authorization for the General Services Administration to grant approval to award a 15-year lease at an annual rent of $5.9 million for the ALOHA Clinic along with authorization of an upfront lump sum payment of
$18 million to facilitate construction of the facility.
The VA finally held an official ceremony groundbreaking for the facility in Kalaeloa in December attended by members of the Akaka family.
Hirono and Kahele were at the White House on Tuesday to witness Biden signing the bill into law.
“Senator Akaka once said that caring for veterans is ‘one of our most sacred obligations as a nation,’ and this clinic will help provide that care for veterans in
Hawaii,” Hirono said in a news release.
Akaka was a family friend of Kahele’s. The freshman congressman carried the senator’s personal Bible to Tuesday’s ceremony; he received the Bible from Akaka’s family before being sworn into office in 2021.
“Today is an important day for Hawaii, our military veterans and the family of the late Senator Daniel Kahikina Akaka,” Kahele said in a news release. “As a dear friend and mentor, Senator Akaka made a significant impact on my life, and I am grateful to participate in this special recognition of his work for our veterans.”
When completed, the new roughly 66,000-square-foot, multispecialty clinic will provide primary care, mental health services, audiology, women’s care, physical therapy, dental services, prosthetics and other specialty care for veterans in the area.
