Denver VA hospital costs balloon
Well, “balloon” doesn’t accurately describe the explosion of costs at the new Aurora VA hospital. It’s currently estimated that it will cost taxpayers $1.73 billion to build the thing – originally, the bid was at $328 million;
“The VA couldn’t lead starving troops to a chow hall when it comes to managing a construction project,” U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, a Republican from Aurora, said Tuesday. “The VA’s mismanagement of this project is beyond belief and brings into question the competence of their leadership at every level.”
Coffman, a Marine Corps combat veteran, said he has introduced legislation to increase the $880 million cap on the hospital. The bill also would bar the VA from managing the project and allow the Corps of Engineers to finish the hospital.
Yeah, well….
Thanks to David for the link.
Category: Veterans' Affairs Department
Can’t wait to learn how this is Bush’s fault.
Wow, quite the overrun, underestimation, brother-in-law in the concrete business, “oh you wanted windows in that too”, project. Why does the government let the agency, any agency, manage its own construction projects? Why not, have a hands off policy that says, “tell us what you want, we’ll see if we agree, and then WE’LL put out and review bids. We’ll call you just before move in day. Until then, stay the hell out of it”. Run by an agency which does nothing for the government but run construction projects. I know already and I can see it now. It’s a government project and even if run by a separate agency, it is subject to normal bidder cost overrun bullshit. I remember the times our company bid on small, meaning a couple of million dollar projects, for telecommunications. The bid went like this. “Proposal calls for, QTY. 5000, 1 and 5/8″ bolts”. WE KNOW, those bolts must be stainless AND have stainless flat washers, lock washers and nuts to work for the intended purpose. Do we tell them this and add it into our bid cost? NO, says the “professional government bidding consultant we hired from D.C.”. You bid EXACTLY what they ask for, then when it won’t work after you’re awarded the contract without the washers and nuts, you add the much marked up cost to them on a per use purchase order basis. “That’s how it’s done.” he said. I protested, in the LAST contract meeting I attended and said “you know fellas, this is out and out dishonest. They have NO idea what they need for this and WE DO. We SHOULD send back a revised RFP to them showing what they indeed NEED to be asking for and recommend they submit a new RFP to all bidders.” Went over like a fart in church and that ended MY career in telecom marketing. I happily went back to telecom engineering and never looked back at the money or the any of it, not without shaking my head in disgust at the level some marketing reps in some companies… Read more »
Sparks, you seem to be cut from the same cloth as my Grandpa. The best job he ever had in his life (salary, benefits, retirement, company car, and no U-Boats trying to kill him!) was as a rep for a pest control outfit. Their policy was, “Everybody needs the full service, period.” They weren’t happy when he refused to recommend something the client didn’t need.
Why tent the house and fumigate for nonexistent termites when all the problem called for was a little rat poison and extra traps? Because fumigation, etc. cost the client more. And when Grandpa’s supervisor was up his ass for not swindling people into buying expensive services they didn’t need for problems they didn’t have, his answer was, “Sorry, boss. I ain’t a liar.” Thus ended the best job he ever had. He always maintained that it was worth it to be able to look himself in the mirror every morning and face God with a clean conscience when his time came.
The company paid for it later, when Grandpa’s former clients, who knew and trusted him, started calling him up to ask why their new rep was telling them to buy all this extra crap. The company eventually stopped ripping off their customers, but never offered Grandpa’s job back. Forty years later, our entire (very large Irish) family would sooner let the termites rule the world than pay a single penny to that outfit. Luckily for us, they have competitors who never pulled that crap.
The Other Whitey…Bravo Zulu to your Grandpa! Sounds like a great man.
y’know, this may surprise you, but there are ethical salesfolks in the world who don’t lie and cheat – they sell on the basis of their products’ features and advantages, they do contracts and deals above the table, and they deliver what they are supposed to. Shocking as hell, but it’s true.
David…You are 100% correct. I was relating my experience in one region of one company in one industry. Even in those, there were and are, MANY ethical salespeople who work hard, the right way. I unfortunately met few in my own marketing region.
And this is different from any other example of VA administration?. . . . .
B Woodman…Thank you. I took too many words to say just what you did.
Hey – what’s the problem here? It’s a 184 bed hospital, fer Christsake. That works out to only a bit over $9.4 million per bed.
(Yes, that was sarcasm. Bigtime.)
Those matresses better cook you breakfast and give you a blowjob!
Hey, those mattresses need to be able to take care of our female vets as well.
Yes, mattresses with an on-demand “back massaging” feature.
Ducks and runs for cover.
On a happier note..
VA drops ‘net worth’ as eligibility requirement for care
(Military Times) The Veterans Affairs Department no longer will include net worth as a factor in determining whether a veteran is eligible for VA health care.
Can’t say I see precisely why that’s such “good news”.
In my book, the only thing the VA owes vets in the way of medical care is treatment for service-connected conditions. If a medical condition isn’t service-connected I frankly don’t see why the VA is providing medical care for it – unless the individual in question is also rated by the VA as being 100% disabled.
Seems to me this is simply a way to give away more “free stuff” to more people – and thus justify a bigger VA budget. Sorry, but Uncle Sam is flat-ass broke as it is. We can’t afford to keep expanding eligibility for more and more free stuff, no matter how happy it makes someone.
Maybe because when I signed my contract with Uncle Sam he guaranteed me health care for the rest of my life…
It was part of the deal.
And you have a problem with that???
You need to re-read your contract. That language was never actually there – it was always caveated as care to be provided “on a space-available basis”. The supposed guarantee also applied only to retirees and (thru the VA) to those with service-connected medical conditions. My parents found that out to their chagrin as a military retiree family in the 1970s and afterwards – when they were forced first to use CHAMPUS (vice direct military medical care), then were forced off CHAMPUS into Medicare (when they turned 65). It was only after my father’s demise that “TRICARE for Life” became a reality. My dad was indeed old enough that the “free medical care for life” pitch was common when he re-upped; he retired from the military in the mid-1960s. And yes, the promise was caveated exactly as I stated above – e.g., free care “on a space-available basis”. By the mid-1970s, it was quite obvious to anyone paying attention that any supposed “guarantee” of lifetime medical care was not valid; the caveats had been conveniently “glossed over”, using such language as “but you know they’ll always have space”, any time the subject was discussed. But after Vietnam, the “space-available” . . . started to dry up. By the 1980s, it had pretty much disappeared. People who didn’t serve until retirement never even had that much of a guarantee. The only medical guarantee those who left prior to retirement ever had was the promise of VA care for service-connected conditions after discharge. Anything else provided was, bluntly, not due to a guarantee but was due to the VA providing same thru discretionary authority. How many can be treated annually by the VA depends on the amount of $$$ the VA gets – ergo, they use a priority group enrollment system to determine who can and who cannot receive care. http://www.va.gov/healthbenefits/resources/priority_groups.asp I stand by what I said above: the VA indeed owes vets treatment for service-connected conditions, or if they’re permanently and completely disabled due to service-connected causes. For non-service-connected conditions, unless they’re a military retiree I can’t see why anyone should expect… Read more »
Sigh, meet my sister…she has been on VA for years and years. Now they are treating her for ptsd because now (40 years later) she claims she was raped while she was active duty.I think its more like her daughter died in a car crash. Then my SIL gets 50% disability for having sleep apnea which while being a real problem, his entire family has it! Sigh…
Well, at least the Army’s Corps of Engineers will do a darned good job on that new building. ;o)
A client of mine is a subcontractor on this job. There are all sorts of issues at a basic level such as contractors who are not qualified to do the work (because of their lack of size and experience) got the job because of set asides for minorities, women owned companies, etc. While that sounds like sour grapes, it is not because as I said, the client of mine was on the job as well. The actual job was like watching the ol’ Keystone Cops movies. Trucks would get work orders to go to one gate only to be sent to another gate, then to another gate, then to a fourth gate only to be returned to the first gate. Concrete trucks would show up on “emergency” basis only to find that the footings, pilings, floors, etc were not dug, formed or ready to be poured. The paid for concrete was then returned to the plant and dumped. Trucks that were hauling dirt were filled with dirt on the site and the dirt was taken away to a dump site miles away. (Standard procedure.) Only the next day work orders would call for the dirt at the hospital site so the trucks went back to the dump site, got the same dirt they had deposited the day before and returned the dirt to not only the site of the hospital, but the same hole the dirt came from. Don’t get me wrong….. the contractors love these jobs because they sit there, get paid fairly well, and the job stretches out forever. It is almost guaranteed income for them. The fact of the matter is that someone is paying for the incompetence of the construction people and the payer is the American people and the subset of the American Vet. In the end, what will happen is there will be a ribbon cutting ceremony, politicians will smile and give speeches touting the public private partnership that built the hospital and everyone will have a glorious day. Somehow an accounting firm will come along and say that despite all the cost overruns… Read more »
You’d almost think the Federal government was in charge of this shitshow!
Costs can also balloon when said customer issues change order requests for items that weren’t in the original bill of goods. That’s my best guess. As someone had commented on another website, “if they left well enough alone, the project would have finished on time and under budget.”
John,
Certainly the change orders on this job increased the costs. However, before the first wave of change orders came in, the building was already overbudget and the VA had gone back to ask for more money.
The VISN 19 Director, Ralph Gillotti, is incompetent.
I have seen the same thing as GITARCARVER. As a Chief Yeoman (sit down at a desk and do paperwork) I was given the job of getting together specs for a new A/C system. At this time in my life, I knew ZERO about govt spects or A/C systems. But I was the only CPO on staff so it was my turn in the barrel.
The easiest thing for me to do was to let the various contractors tell me what we needed and take the lowest bid. This is the way it was done in the past.
I took my sweet time, read everything I could find (before the internet), got into trouble for dragging my feet and the crew was still sweating thu the summer. After 6 – 8 weeks of nothing getting accomplished, I was relieved by a LCDR (who should have gotten the job in the first place). All he did was take my paperwork, make a few phone calls and the job was started.
My evals reflected my poor judgement while his FITREP was glowing. There went my chances for YNCS (E8) but the wife was ready to retire from my USN service. I guess I was also ready after 22 years of this BS. BZ to everyone on this site.
If they really wanted to improve the care of veterans, they should have built it down by Walsenburg, CO so that the people down there and in New Mexico wouldn’t have to go 200 or 250 miles to get to a medical center.