VA building projects riddled with mistakes and cost overruns

AURORA, Colo. There are hospital doors at the half-built Veterans Affairs medical center outside Denver that were supposed to cost $100 each but ended up running $1,400. Theres a $100-million-and-still-rising price tag for an atrium and concourse with curving blond wood walls and towering glass windows. And entire rooms that had to be refashioned because requests for medical equipment changed at the last minute and in other cases the equipment didnt fit. No one had bothered to measure.

Not even completed yet, this $1.7billion facility is already among the most expensive hospitals in the world, and its just one of several VA hospital projects that are greatly over budget and behind schedule, according to the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

Everything that could have gone wrong did. Its just an astounding price tag, said David Wise, who wrote in a GAO report about the Aurora project and VA construction problems in Orlando, Las Vegas and New Orleans.

The hospital construction woes are the latest in a long line of troubles that the Department of Veterans Affairs faces, from accusations of retaliation against whistleblowers to a backlog of compensation benefits to reports that wait-times for appointments in some parts of the country still havent improved. Wait-times range from 30 days to more than six months.

Last May, President Obama accepted the resignation of VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki in the wake of a coverup of months-long hospital wait-times for veterans seeking treatment for everything from cancer to post-traumatic stress disorder. Obama and Robert McDonald, Shinsekis replacement, have vowed to restore trust in the agency.

At a hearing of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs on Wednesday, one of nine held on the Colorado hospital cost overruns and delays, members will discuss whether they should allocate another $830million to finish the project.

The GAO report, written by Wise in 2013, highlighted the failure of VA in Orlando to hire specialists in medical equipment construction who could have ensured that the rooms would accommodate MRI machines and other crucial machines. Multiple revisions to lists of medical equipment meant plans kept changing, to the tune of $14million, according to the GAO report.

Think of it like this youre building a kitchen, Wise said. But you dont check how big your stove or refrigerator is. You measure too late. And nothing fits, so you have to hack up a whole another piece of wall. Thats very expensive and time-consuming.

The combination of extravagant planning divorced from financial reality and bungled execution has bedeviled several recent VA projects, the GAO found.

In Orlando, VA shifted the location of the proposed hospital project three times, inflating the cost by more than $350million and delaying it at least three years.

Originally posted here:
VA building projects riddled with mistakes and cost overruns