This evening, April 18, the VA Hospital Site Selection staff held a public hearing at Kammerer middle school to update the selection process, and to hear comments from interested citizens. It was an interesting affair to say the least.
The session was held in the school’s gymnasium and was heavily attended. The crowd was in a rare, if not hostile mood. The presentation included at least as much of the usual bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo and procedure that frustrated people. It did not help that things started very badly from a technical perspective. The VA team’s own wireless microphone had failed, and the school’s public address system produced only unintelligible sound. Things eventually got a little better and extra time was allowed for questions in this 2 1/2 hour session.
I rather expected that the room would be packed with current veterans, but this did not appear to be the case, and only a few spoke. Of course, all who made comments made reference to their own veteran status or that of their family members. Most of us can point to the veterans in our family and we all certainly want our veterans to have access to the quality health care they deserve. With those preliminaries out of the way, the 800-pound gorilla in the room was concern about the impact of increased traffic in an intersection that is already acknowledged as overloaded. There were concerns that the studies by consultants that concluded that any increased traffic could be mitigated and managed may have been based on faulty car-counts. It was easy to make the case that traffic is bad there, and there was no offsetting discussion about how things might be improved. There was an obvious disparity between what various studies and projections said about the traffic situation and the experience on the ground by the residents. Continue reading “Spirited Public Hearing on Brownsboro Road Site for New VA Hospital.”