Price tag excludes furniture, lab items
AURORA» The Saturday media tour was intended to showcase the work accomplished so far on a new Department of Veterans Affairs hospital.
But on its unfinished operating room floor, a new question arose about the ultimate cost of this project.
Are all the surgical tools and laboratory equipment, the patient monitors, hospital beds and waiting-room chairs included in the new $1.73 billion cost estimate?
Brad McCollam, the VA medical center’s project activation executive, said he didn’t think so.
“The activation piece is a separate piece,” he said. “In total, it’s approximately $340 million.”
He said that amount would include covering staff training, as well as furniture, fixtures and equipment, and the activation phase could take six months after construction is done.
McCollam’s response left Elaine Buehler, a VA regional spokeswoman, scrambling Saturday to find officials in Washington, D.C., who could verify that the $1.73 billion cost estimate excludes hospital equipment.
It does.
“But activation expenses in every project are always separate appropriations requested through the normal budget process,” she replied later. “This project is no different, and some of those expenses have already been appropriated.”
Things such as beds, furniture, fixtures, patient lifts, medical and surgical equipment, and staffing are appropriated over several years and allocated as operational costs, she said.
“The referenced $1.7 billion refers to the overall construction of the facility, which includes the purchase of the land, design, overall construction and administrative costs,” she said.
The Aurora VA hospital has become a subject of repeated controversy in Washington. Members of Congress have tagged the project, which began in 2011 with a $604 million construction budget, with amassing the worst cost overruns in agency history.
As with so many aspects of this project, hard numbers have been hard to come by.
The Aurora campus, being built to replace an aging medical center in Denver, has been described repeatedly as a 1.1 million-squarefoot facility. On Saturday, project executive Kevin Lindsey said it will cover 1.26 million square feet, excluding parking garages for more than 2,000 cars.
That followed a surprise announcement Wednesday at a congressional hearing from House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs chairman Jeff Miller. He said the VA had told him it will need more than half a million additional square feet to meet future demand for service in the Denver area.
But Buehler on Saturday said the VA was referring to expansion needs during the next 20 years, and Lindsey said a proposed psychiatric residential treatment program would occupy a modest 18,000 square feet of building space at the north end of the campus.
Lindsey, an affable tour guide, led reporters and photographers on an 11-stop tour, including a clinic building, the 1,100-foot-long main concourse, a cramped utility floor, diagnostic and treatment buildings, an energy center, and the hospital itself.
“This is a great opportunity for you to see where we are and what we’ve accomplished,” he said.
Construction workers, he said, “are heartened by the work they do every day for veterans.”
Overall, the interior of this hospital facility looks like a skeleton in need of flesh.
Stairways have been built, concrete floors poured and utilities installed. Acres of steel are lining hallways and ceilings. One parking garage may be ready to use this summer.
But everywhere, evidence abounds of work yet to be done. Stacks of drywall and pipes lie on bare floors. Plywood doors remain. An open walkway between buildings looks down on heavy-equipment tracks and human footprints in the mud below.
At various stops, Lindsey pointed out features that may raise construction costs but save money or avert disasters in the long run — the utility room built between floors to enable maintenance without disturbing medical care, emergency electricity generation, water and sewer systems, and the use of natural light and solar energy cells.
The emergency systems, which would allow the hospital to keep operating for several days in the event of a disaster, “are a cost you don’t see in a civilian facility that we are under a federally mandated need to have,” he said.
The fallout from a civil suit filed by contractor Kiewit-Turner also remains a cost factor. It won a ruling that the VA had failed to provide a design that could be built within the budget, temporarily shutting down construction in December.
Kiewit-Turner is now keeping about 650 construction workers on site on an interim contract — barely half the number employed there before the shutdown.