U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar said military health care faces a 15 percent cut in services if Congress can’t fill a $1 billion shortfall this year and prevent such shortages in years to follow.
A Democratic member of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Salazar told a Hispanic veterans group in Denver on Monday night that filling the health-care gap is his highest priority.
“It’s important for us to walk the talk when it comes to supporting our veterans,” Salazar told members of the Mile High Chapter of the American GI Forum.
The Colorado senator pledged to “speak out as a very loud voice for those who served our nation because they deserve no less.”
Earlier in the day, Salazar told El Paso County leaders to figure out what they need to better prepare for a landslide of new soldiers and their families who will be arriving in the next few months.
Perhaps as many as 20,000 more soldiers could be bound for Fort Carson through a series of maneuvers, including the base realignment and closure that benefited the base in Colorado Springs.
The health care shortfall came about because the current budget was set in 2002, before military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Salazar said he is sponsoring legislation to deal with the shortfalls.
“We have to keep the commitments we’ve made to our military and our veterans,” he said.
Salazar is holding a series of meetings with Fort Carson and Air Force Academy officials, as well as local leaders in advance of the vote on the Defense Department budget, which could come as soon as next week.
The senator asked El Paso County officials for a report on the potential effect of the sudden population growth, so that he and the rest of the state’s congressional delegation can deliver federal programs and dollars to help support the region.
State Republican Party spokeswoman Rachael Sunbarger found little to fault in Salazar’s military barnstorming.
“It sounds like he’s taking a page from the president’s playbook, when it comes to taking care of our veterans and military families,” she said. “The president has taken extraordinary steps to honor our nation’s veterans by providing them with the benefits they deserve.”
She said the Veterans’ Affairs budget has increased 40 percent since 2001, and the Bush administration has requested a 7 percent increase in the 2006 budget.
Colorado Springs became one of the big winners in the base-closures and realignment plan laid out by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in May.
At least 10,000 and as many as 20,000 soldiers will be reassigned to Fort Carson in the coming months, in addition to thousands of servicemen returning from deployments.
The influx will bring tens of thousands of new residents, including up to 15,000 new students to local schools this fall.
Those returning from deployments or retiring from the military also will be flooding into local job markets, official said.
Jobs to support the population was a major topic of Thursday’s meeting in Colorado Springs.
Salazar suggested the Top 20 chief executives in the state lead an effort to make training and hiring veterans a priority. The idea got a warm reception in this military town.
“You’ll find that businesses like to hire veterans because they have the work skills that are often hard to find in the rest of the population,” said Peggy Herbertson, director of the Pikes Peaks Workforce Center in Colorado Springs.
Already, Colorado Springs is home to more than 30,000 uniformed personnel at five installations. Another 69,000 residents are employed in a defense-related job.
Staff writer Joey Bunch can be reached at 303-820-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com.
