Sure, the front-page Wednesday on The Denver Post was shocking: “$1,730,000,000,” it said. “Aurora VA hospital now 5 times its initial estimate.”
But here’s something almost equally stunning: There’s still been no real accountability at the VA over this fiasco.
The director of the Veterans Affairs hospital in Denver was allowed to at the end of last month, no doubt with a generous pension after years of federal employment.
And as Fox31 Denver reported in January, VA executives overall have received “$22 million in bonuses over the last six years.” Glenn Haggstrom, the director of logistics and construction (our emphasis) for the agency while this debacle developed, “took home nearly $64,000 in bonuses since 2007,” the station reported.
“No one so far has been fired for the incredible fiasco at the hospital and that is part of the fundamental problem with the VA’s culture,” a spokesman for Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., says.
Coffman himself told us that although he’d “been fighting the VA for a long time over this project,” even he was “still shocked by the numbers I received yesterday.” He says he even raised the issue of Haggstrom’s apparent incompetence with the deputy secretary this week, to no avail.
On Wednesday, the entire Colorado congressional delegation reaffirmed its support for completing the hospital. Even at its current outsized cost, “Leaving this project unfinished is obviously not a solution,” Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet rightly said.
Coffman has been pushing a bill to strip construction authority from the VA and transfer it to the Army Corps of Engineers. That seems like a reasonable approach given how the VA is clearly out of its league.
Watching its antics, you’d think building a hospital was an arcane art. In fact, as Peter Blake in December for Complete Colorado, Denver’s St. Joseph Hospital started planning for its own new hospital in 2010, and it opened last year “on time and, at $623 million, slightly under budget.”
By contrast, the VA’s on-again, off-again schedule and shifting plans have pushed costs through the roof and completion back to, well, who knows when. The official estimate is now 2017, but don’t believe it until you see it.
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