VA official updates Legionnaires on Denver VA project

Sloan Gibson, the Department of Veterans Affairs deputy secretary, briefed a group of veterans on the construction status of VA’s Denver medical facility, which has been troubled by delays, mismanagement and exorbitant cost overruns.

Two Legionnaires were among the veterans who attended the April 20 meeting, Ralph Bozella and Frank McCurdy. Bozella is chairman of the Legion’s Veterans Affairs & Rehabilitation Commission and McCurdy is a member of the Legion’s National Executive Council.

Gibson said the Denver facility is about 50 percent completed. “VA is trying to stretch out the money,” Bozella said. “Unless Congress provides more funding, it’s going to officially run out in May.” He said VA is currently having trouble hiring subcontractors for the project.

McCurdy said, according to Gibson, VA “may be able to put in some extra money that will drive construction into June.”

The Denver facility’s cost has nearly tripled, from $630 million to $1.73 billion – that means Congress will have to give VA another $830 million to complete construction.

Reps. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., and Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., told the veterans they were going to ask Congress for additional appropriations, and they were also considering the reallocation of some VA funds.

Coffman and Perlmutter made it clear that they would not seek funding that would hurt other VA major construction projects, Bozella said. “And that’s something that came from the Legion, too. We don’t want other places to suffer because they have to make it up here. It isn’t fair for veterans in one state to ask veterans in another state to suffer. We don’t want to be in that position.”

Gibson said he was the “point man” for the Denver project, which is now a collaboration between the owner (VA), the project manager (Army Corps of Engineers) and the contractor (Kiewit-Turner). “If you want to hold anyone accountable for any decisions here, it’s me.”

VA’s former top construction executive in Denver, Glenn Haggstrom, resigned on March 24, one day after he was questioned under oath for an internal inquiry, according to the Associated Press.

Haggstrom’s replacement is Greg Giddens, who served as executive director of VA’s Enterprise Program Management Office. It was created in 2010 to improve overall program management and help with the planning and execution of 16 initiatives; one of them is to optimize the use of VA’s Capital Portfolio by implementing and executing the Strategic Capital Investment Planning (SCIP) process.

Bozella said the $1.73 billion budget includes a $10 million center on the Denver campus for treating patients with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder; it also includes the cost of hiring the Corps of Engineers as project manager.

The first priority in Denver, Bozella emphasized, is "to get the money to complete this project.” The second priority is to get the project done in a timely manner and “the contractor says it can be done by the end of 2017. That’s a reasonable deadline if the funding is there.”