Published: May 15, 2007 11:15 pm      

No patients at Veterans Nursing Facility

Project more than 90 percent done; two inspections must be completed

FAIRMONT — The dedication of the West Virginia Veterans Nursing Facility in Clarksburg took place last November with Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Congressman Alan Mollohan and Gov. Joe Manchin in attendance, but the home has yet to house any patients.

On Tuesday, the day after the facility next to the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Affairs Medical Center was to open, officials said it could be another 60 days in order to complete final work and get the two inspections needed before the process of accepting patients can begin.

“What’s done regularly is a walk-through, and we have to check list certain types of things,” said Joe Thornton, the deputy secretary for the state Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety in Charleston. “Lately, it’s been a recurrence of issues revolving around bad electrical boards in the nursing call station.”

The $26 million, 90,000-square-foot facility, which eventually will house 120 veterans, is more than 90 percent done, Thornton said. But upon completion, two inspections must be done, and each of those could take up to 30 days to get scheduled and finished.

John Wilkinson, the director of the Office of Health Facility Licensure and Certification, an office within the state Department of Health and Human Resources, which will do the first inspection, said as far as he knows, there have been no unusual delays in getting the veterans nursing home open.

“We have not yet received a request yet for final inspection,” he said. “When we get that, we’ll be going out and taking a look. I believe the facility is taking care of final construction, and they are tying up loose ends on the construction.”

Inspectors from his office have checked in during the construction, which has been going on since the fall of 2003.

“We consulted with them through the process and made some recommendations to them,” Wilkinson said. “That’s pretty typical.”

Once a request is made for final inspection, his office has 30 days to complete that, but it will not necessarily take that long, he said.

“We’ll try to do it as quickly as we can schedule staff,” he said. “We ask them to allow 30 days for any contingencies or unforeseen circumstance we might have, but in terms of scheduling, we always try to do it sooner than the 30 days.”

The nursing facility originally was due to open about a year ago, but neither Thornton nor James Brown II, vice president of G.A. Brown & Son Inc., the Fairmont-based contractors in charge of the project, could give a major reason for the delay.

“It’s just normal construction delays,” Brown said Tuesday. “It’s just a big building. It takes a lot of effort to get it together.”

Brown said he thought the building would be ready within the next week or so to schedule the first of the two final inspections. The second inspection will be done by the federal office of Veterans Health Administration, under the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Thornton said.

Thomas H. McGraw, the executive director of the nursing facility, referred all calls to Larry Linch, director of the state Division of Veterans Affairs, declining to disclose how long he had been on the job inside the facility.

Linch referred calls to Thornton but did agree to answer some specific questions outside of Thornton’s purview concerning who would be staying at the facility. A variety of numbers of how many veterans initially will be housed in the facility upon initial opening have been discussed.

Thornton said the number would be about 15, but Linch said it would be closer to 30 or 40 in the first month or two of operation, filling one wing of the building.

“We’re going slow because we’ve got new people on board,” he said. “It’s a new operation, and we want to make sure everything is functional.”

Veterans who have lived in West Virginia for at least a year will be eligible to live there, he said, and Linch said the first obligation would be to take in veterans currently housed in private facilities with the tab being picked up by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

“In Clarksburg and the surrounding area, there are about 30 who have been identified that would have the first option,” Linch said.

E-mail Mary Wade Burnside at mwburnside@timeswv.com.