U.S. senators clashed with a top Department of Veterans Affairs official Friday over the costly, half-finished VA hospital in Aurora and demanded a more thorough investigation of what has gone wrong.
After a tour of the Aurora facility in the morning and during an afternoon hearing, members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee pledged to complete the project.
At the same time, they stressed the importance of finding who was responsible for the project’s ballooning cost — it is now estimated at $1.73 billion — and making sure the VA never has a comparable construction disaster.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., called for an independent investigation outside the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which is conducting its own review. He suggested the U.S. Department of Justice.
“The people responsible for the financial catastrophe here need to be held accountable,” he said after a tour. He said the investigation should examine the project’s “disastrous” cost, delays and design changes.
Committee chairman Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., promised the veterans’ hospital will be finished but noted that its new price tag is 427 percent over the VA’s original estimate to Congress.
Gibson grilled
During the hearing at the Aurora Municipal Center, Isakson sharply questioned Sloan Gibson, the VA’s deputy secretary, about the lack of punitive action after four of the agency’s major medical projects ran hundreds of millions of dollars over original estimates.
Gibson said those responsible for two key decisions on the Aurora project are no longer in their jobs but could not name anyone who had been fired.
Isakson pointed out that Glenn Haggstrom, VA’s construction chief, retired with full benefits after being questioned about cost overruns on the Colorado hospital.
Again and again, “we’re told that you can’t fire anybody in the federal government,” Isakson said. “Well, you can fire somebody for cause.”
He also questioned why the VA could not find any money from its growing administrative budget to help pay for the hospital.
“This is not the time,” Gibson replied, saying the agency had scraped together money this year just to provide hepatitis treatment.
The VA has proposed taking some of the $5 billion Congress appropriated last year to improve veteran access to health care for construction in Aurora.
According to Gibson, two early decisions on the Aurora veterans’ hospital “were both critically flawed” — the decision to try a new type of contract integrating the designer and contractor from the outset, and the VA’s choice of a facility design that could not be built for about $600 million.
He told Blumenthal he would support a Justice Department investigation of the Aurora project. But he was vaguer about supplying all the components of the added costs.
He said he would do that “to the extent those amounts can be determined.”
Colorado’s senators — Democrat Michael Bennet and Republican Cory Gardner — had invited the committee members to tour the site and hold a hearing here.
Bennet recalled that a year ago, the VA said the hospital was 46 percent complete — and now calls it half done. “The VA position was based on the fact that 46 percent of the money had been spent,” he said.
He expressed frustration at not knowing the specifics of what caused the cost to rise. “We want to know exactly where the money went,” he said.
Gardner said that “our number-one goal is not to rehash old arguments, it’s to complete the job here,” but also to “make sure that what happened here never happens again.”
The hospital’s cost would provide “a year of care for 200,000 veterans in this country,” he said.
Several members of Colorado’s House delegation also attended.
“Your core responsibility is to deliver benefits, not building construction. You must extricate yourselves from that function,” U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Aurora, told VA officials. “Those involved in this project need to find another line of work.”
Services suffer
Leaders of Colorado veteran groups told the senators that veterans are not getting the best service in Denver while awaiting the new hospital.
“The scheduler can only schedule appointments when there is a room available,” said Steve Rylant, president of the United Veterans Committee of Colorado.
William “Robby” Robinson, chairman of the Colorado Board of Veterans Affairs, speaking on a personal note, said he no longer uses the VA for medical care.
The Denver hospital “is too antiquated and too small,” he said. “It took me seven months to have a simple scope of my ankle.”
The new hospital would replace an aging hospital in Denver that lacks such basic amenities as private rooms and private bathrooms.
But the replacement hospital has been plagued by delays, rising costs and a construction shutdown in December.
The VA originally told Congress it would cost an estimated $328 million. Construction began in December 2011 with a $604 million budget. Last month, after the Army Corps of Engineers stepped in to review the project’s status, the VA gave Congress a stunning new price tag — $1.73 billion.
The VA now needs $830 million from Congress to avoid a second shutdown.
David Olinger: 303-954-1498, dolinger@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dolingerdp
